Vale, Wes Smith ❤️🩹
by itgrrl on Oct.11, 2025, under Blog
my dad died on Thursday night. I posted this tribute to him on Mastodon yesterday and am re-posting it here
#Vale Wes Smith ❤️🩹
my 90 year-old dad died last night after a very long life, a long decline, multiple hospitalisations, and the last couple of months spent in hospital & a repat facility
lots of complex feelings for me, but I’m glad he no longer needs to struggle in difficult circumstances (largely of his own creation, but still ❤️🩹)
when he was young, he travelled the world in the Merchant Navy in the loud, hot bellies of large cargo ships amongst the enormous engines with pistons several times taller than himself. he only spent a short time in each port – a tasting menu, you might say – but he felt that he had seen the entire world by the time he got married
he worked many jobs in his long career, most of them spent bending metal to his will, often shaping machines into new forms to perform tasks for which they were never originally designed. he worked long hours to provide financially for his family – which he saw as his main duty in life – but also because he loved working with machines & solving engineering problems born of metal. grease. electricity.
he was a fitter & turner, a boiler-maker, a repairer & maintainer, a “keeper-runnerer”, a tinkerer. he used tools to design & make other tools to make machines. I’m sure that some of my own interests & skills were influenced by growing up watching him execute his craft, hearing him talk about his work, & being dragged along to yet another industrial robot exhibition 😩😜
he was a life-long learner, and my own love of 🤔 – or at least facility with – computers & electronics & code (oh my!) were things he saw (and understood) and supported. in the late 1970s or very early 1980s he took a programming course (which was the spelling at the time 😜) at the local TAFE, and he took me along – a rare opportunity in that era. my first hands-on experience with code at 11 or 12 years old was in the form of mapping out & writing programmes down by hand on graph paper & then encoding them on a stack of mark sense cards with a B2 pencil to be fed into a card reader (and drawing that all-important diagonal line down the side of the stack with said pencil – #IYKYK 😆)
it wasn’t long until I had begged sufficiently & got my very first computer (that we absolutely couldn’t really afford), a #CoCo – the original #TRS80 #ColorComputer model in “battleship grey” with 16K RAM 😲, later upgraded to a whopping 64K 🤯 🤯
I still have that computer over 40 years later 😊
after he retired, he always had several ambitious plans on the boil (less charitable folks might call them “hare-brained schemes” 🙃), including a petrol-powered all-terrain tracked wheelchair for a friend who wanted to be able to travel off the beaten path under his own (metaphorical) steam. it would have ended up weighing about a tonne & absolutely would never have worked (safely), but he was determined to “help” a friend & excited to work on solving an interesting engineering challenge, once again bending metal and machinery to his purpose du jour
he was happiest noodling in his workshop, oil- & grease-stained hands deep inside a machine, wielding – or welding – a new tool of his own design. I always associated the smell of machines and ozone with his presence. until after he retired I never saw his hands unstained by years of ingrained, immovable grease
in his later years he discovered #3Dprinting and became a journeyman #maker of sorts. he was exceptionally proud (and a bit obnoxious) when he was able to “teach the professionals at #U3A a thing or two” about his new hobby. his idea of a conversation had always been (impatiently) waiting for you to take a breath so he could tell you the next thing he was interested in – usually unconnected to whatever you’d shared 💁♀️
he used a succession of smallish 3D printers to make many, many Japanese-inspired lanterns (into which he stuffed various strings of coloured flashing lights) and Chinese-inspired dragons, amazed & delighted that additive manufacturing was able to create interlocking objects right off the print bed – after having spent a lifetime creating sometimes-intricate interlocking components using tried-and-true subtractive manufacturing processes. he gave most of these prints away to others – whether they wanted them or not 😆
he was a fitter & turner, a boiler-maker, a repairer & maintainer, a “keeper-runnerer”, a tinkerer
and he was my father
#Vale Wes Smith ❤️🩹
1935-2025
#GNUWesSmith
#XClacksOverhead
Space Open Day at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex
by itgrrl on Sep.23, 2013, under Blog
The Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex (CDSCC), located on the rural outskirts of Canberra at Tidbinbilla, is one of only three NASA deep space tracking stations spread around the globe. On Sunday 18th August, as part of National Science Week they held their biennial ‘Space Open Day‘, affording a rare opportunity for visitors to tour areas of the facility that are normally off-limits to the public. My partner and I have recently joined the ranks of volunteers at CDSCC, and Space Open Day was to be our first outing in that role, along with a small team of new and long-time volunteers.
Our hour-long trek to the facility started bright and early (for a Sunday) in order to catch the volunteer briefing before the gates opened at 9am. Briefing done, it was time to head ‘front of house’ to greet the incoming visitors and attend to our rostered duties. Throughout the day, visitors were able to hop on a bus tour of the entire complex, join a guided walking tour of “the big dish” (DSS-43), and complete a self-guided walk to the dish for fantastic photo opportunities. In addition, the Visitor Centre displays, video presentations, and hands-on computer terminals were available as normal.
A CDSCC staff member explains the technology & history
behind DSS-43 to a tour group on Space Open Day
Special talks were conducted throughout the day, with Education & Outreach Manager Glen Nagle first talking about CDSCC’s crucial role in the recent launch and landing of the Mars Science Laboratory, ‘Curiosity’, on Mars. CSIRO held a ‘Tweetup’ for the launch of Curiosity in November 2011, and a followup public event for the audacious landing in August the following year. (While guests were enthralled watching the Curiosity mission unfold, CDSCC staff were hard at work receiving telemetry and tracking data direct from the spacecraft and relaying it to Mission Control at NASA’s JPL in Pasadena, California.) Later in the day, Mike Dinn gave a talk on the Apollo missions. Mike was a technician at Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station during the Apollo era, and it was a real treat for centre visitors to be able to hear about that iconic period of spaceflight from someone who actually worked on the missions.
ArduSat: Kickstarting a new era in space education
by itgrrl on Sep.09, 2013, under Blog
I was awake at stupid o’clock last Sunday morning to watch NASA’s livestream of the launch of the HTV-4 resupply vehicle. At precisely 05:48:46AM AEST, JAXA H-IIB F4 launch vehicle lifted off smoothly en route to resupply the International Space Station (ISS). The 5.4 tonne payload comprised all the usual suspects: water, replacement and upgraded electronics for various ISS systems, spares for major station components, and new equipment and supplies for experiments.
Nestled in amongst the other cargo were four tiny ‘CubeSats’, two of which were funded by a Kickstarter project: ArduSat. These tiny satellites are the first example of crowdfunded space operations, and represent an exciting new development in the recent popularisation of ‘citizen science’.
Commercial satellite launches are immensely expensive, costing hundreds of millions of dollars using current rocket-based technology. The idea behind the ArduSat project is to provide low-cost access to real, orbiting satellites to students and space enthusiasts. By designing payloads small enough to fit into gaps in the main cargo area, innovative satellite operators are able to hitch a ride on commercial space launches at a fraction of the cost. The dramatic cost reduction has finally made it viable to create an orbiting educational platform, a remarkable achievement.
Linux.conf.au 2013: ‘Nerdvana’ in Canberra
by itgrrl on Mar.11, 2013, under Blog
During the last week of January, approximately 700 IT professionals and enthusiastic hobbyists descended on Canberra to jointly create an intensive learning experience. Each year the call goes out across the intertubes to gather together open source geeks for Linux Conference Australia. Linux.conf.au, or simply LCA, is one of the largest open source conferences in the southern hemisphere, and one of the most highly-regarded conferences of its kind in the world. I was excited to attend LCA2013, as it was my first LinuxConf, despite being involved to a modest degree in the Linux and open source community for at least the last 15 years.
Most days, the programme commenced with a keynote address by an IT industry luminary who had made a significant contribution to computer technology and open source. At every keynote address, the lower level of ANU’s Llewellyn Hall was packed with delegates, each toting a selection of wifi- or 3G-enabled devices. While I saw a healthy 55Mbps idle capacity on the Internet link provided by conference organisers (ably assisted by the network engineers at AARNET), once the assembled cohort of digital natives hit the link, all of that that capacity was rapidly utilised. 
The conference was opened on the Monday by Bdale Garbee, recently-retired Open Source & Linux Chief Technologiest at Hewlett-Packard, and a long-time contributor to the Debian Linux distribution. (Read Kelly Burnes’ article about Bdale at LCA2013 over at Australian Science, where you can also watch their video interview.)
Radia Perlman at LCA 2013
by itgrrl on Mar.06, 2013, under Blog
A little before 9am on Tuesday 29th January, I filed into ANU’s Llewellyn Hall along with approximately 700 other Linux.conf.au delegates to listen to the daily keynote speech. I’m now a little embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of Radia Perlman. A little over an hour later, I was a fangirl.
Radia delivered an engaging, funny, and highly-technical keynote address at LCA2013, and the audience of IT professionals and enthusiasts present lapped it up. In it, she placed the technical details of the network protocols she and her colleagues developed in an historical context. She half-jokingly explained that this was the only way in which anyone could hope to understand why the protocols we work with today include ‘features’ in their design that would otherwise seem crazy to an outside observer.
In delivering her keynote, Radia gave us not just the technical detail behind the development of networking protocols, but also wove in details from her creative side, as well as tidbits about her children’s involvement in her technical life. The crowd was delighted as Radia shared with us the poem that she created (an ‘Algorhyme’) shortly after devising the Spanning Tree Protocol in 1985 while at DEC. For as she says, “Every algorithm deserves an algorhyme…” (You can hear Radia reciting her AlgoRhyme in Dan’s video interview with Radia over at Australian Science, and read the text here.) There is also a recording of Radia’s daughter, Dawn Perlner, singing the Algorhyme set to music by Radia’s son, Ray Perlner. Radia also mentioned her son Ray’s involvement in the creation of an AlgoRhyme V2 to mark the creation of her most recent network protocol, TRILL.
