Michael Davies' Blog : linux-australia/lca2008

LCA2008 Days Four and Five

Thursday

The morning started with Stormy Peters' keynote on Would you do it again for free?. It was a thought-provoking keynote on the motivation behind OSS development. Do open-source developers lose motivation once companies pay them? Once they leave that job, do they continue doing open-source development? Stormy suggests they don't lose heart, but suggests that hackers may move to another of their itch projects if they no longer are paid to hack on the original.

Then it was onto Clinton Roy to talk about Antlr. This was useful for the fact that using YACC and Bison can be black magic, so having another tool in the toolbox is great. Would have been better if we'd gone as far as generating a grammer and hooking it up to show the ease of building something real end-to-end. Tutorials are best if they kick-start usage.

After lunch was the usual high-quality Tridge talk on ctdb. Interesting to see the scaling of Samba instances being almost linear after this work, as well as various tridge hack discussions.

Next was Leslie Hawthorn on the Google Summer of Code program. While being an interesting talk in and of itself, what I really liked hearing about were the developers who were bootstrapped by the program continuing into open-source contribution afterwards. This is a wonderful outcome for OSS. Thanks Google!

Next was Michael Smith with Gstreamer followed by Dtrace by Peter Karlsson. This last one was more of a vendor talk, and would have been better if the presenter didn't spend 20 minutes trying to get video output working on a Solaris/MacBookPro combination, followed by failing to get OpenOffice to display his slides full-screen. That and the 15+ typos in the slides didn't reflect well on Sun or on Dtrace. The talk had so much potential, but the most useful part was the questions by SystemTap developers in the audience - hopefully both projects will benefit was better understanding of each other.

Dinner with Mikal and Steve tonight out at some random Italian place - quite nice food to go with the excellent company. Of course, after dinner on Lygon Street there is no better thing to do than to follow up with sorbet from Casa Del Gelato ice-creamery. Walking down Swanston found us Andrew Chalmers with friends Sam(??) and Amanda. Good hilarity followed, along with a kind offer from Sam and Amanda to bed down on their lounge room floor to save me from the backpackers. Some people are just genuinely kind - I'd never met them before, so their offer was very unexpected. Thank you for your offer and all the best for your trip Europe bound soon.

Friday

Wonderful keynote by Anthony Baxter on Python 3. Anthony presents well, and the confirmation of a supported 2.X series during the early days of 3.X deployment was appreciated. Glad to see that the Python project is taking the opportunity to clean up the inevitable cruft that accumulates in the language and reduce it so hopefully it stays small. Of course I'm biased with python being my favourite language right now, but I found this the best of the keynotes this year.

I went to Ralph Giles talk on Ogg Design Internals, followed by Paul McKenney on efforts to put concurrency into C and C++. Paul is a clever cookie, and did a great job of explaining how the C/C++ standards don't guarantee sequential execution as most people subconsciously assume, with the result being pain and suffering where you don't expect. Fortunately Paul has been there at the standards meetings representing our community's interests well.

That brings us to the afternoon with Keith Packard talking on fixing various X limitations. He started the talk with an Intel announcement surrounding their release of full developer documatation for the Intel 965. Wonderful news! Should mean that advancement on that platform should skyrocket even further, and hopefully spur the other graphics chip manufacturers into providing better support for the developers who generate end-user sales! But I'm preaching to the choir now...

Last talk of the conference for me was Eric de Castro Lopo on Library API Design. Another important topic, but I would have loved more depth.

Moving on, we went to lightening talks and conference close. We had the usual bag of both ok and excellent lightening talks - some of the Gaming Miniconf lightening talks could have been repeated to the larger audience to great effect. Bling bling bling. Notable was Pia announcing OLPC Australia, hopefully making a difference here with that excellent project.

Conference close was a time to reflect on all the cool stuff that the week contained, and gave the chance to wrap up all the loose ends. While Open Day follows on Saturday, the official conference close is Friday afternoon. We also got to meet Ben - and found out that the conference is going to Tasmania for the first time! Cool! Less than 400 sleeps to go now :)

Jeff Waugh went on to announce the transfogrimifation of the Rusty Wrench Award into (hopefully I get this right) the Australian Open Source Awards. It'll be great if the whole community get behind this and it becomes something truely representative of our community here in Australia. Website launch occuring soon.

Finally was the Google Conference Party. A traditional bbq stand-around and chew the fat s'more with conference attendees. A good time was had by all - thankyou Google and Leslie Hawthorn for organising it. Finally two old and tired previous conf organisers wandered back to Casa Del Gelato for that last sorbet of the week, contemplating with great expectations what Tasmania will do with linux.conf.au 2009 next year.

And for the absolutely final thought, a big say thank you to Donna and her team for putting on a very solid and fun conference! Thank you LCA2008 organising team! We know it's been hard-work, but we appreciate your sacrifices to serve the Australian Linux, Free and Open-Source Software community!

LCA2008 Day Three

Wednesday

I forgot to mention that I had a great time last night talking to Keith Packard, Jon Corbet and Paul McKenney at the Speakers Dinner. Talking was both technical and social - I really enjoy catching up with these guys whenevr I can get to a conference where they are.

Wednesday morning started with the Bruce Schneier keynote on Reconceptionalising Security - explaining why both the feeling of security and the reality of security are both important. Introduced how the Lemon Market applies not to just used-cars but also to security products and technology in general. Mary has more good stuff to say on his talk.

Actually, before the keynote we had a small issue with chairs not being setup for the keynote. Fortunately the OSS community here in Australia came to the rescue - suddenly 20 people dropped everything to set up 600 chairs in a hurry. Seeing Leon Brooks rolling up his sleaves and just getting the job done was inspiring - thank you Leon.

After that I went to Jon Oxer's tutorial on Second Life and hardware integration for Linux. This was really cool - not just hardware interfacing to Linux over USB, but controlling Second Life objects via the hardware, and then triggering real-life from inside Second Life. A talk to open your eyes to the possibilities. I bought the Arduino kit Jon assembled and plan to play around with that s'more. So far, this has been the conference highlight talk for me. What was fun during the tute was getting this going on Linux running under virtualisation on Mac OS X - just another level of indirection :-)

From then it was off to Jon Corbet's talk on what's happening in the Linux Kernel, and where things are likely to be going. Being primarily user-space oriented, it's great to get this summary at LCA. It's interesting also to see how the linux kernel development process morphs to continue to scale - sociologically very interesting.

Then it was the OLPC report from Jim Getys. This wasn't your usual technical talk, but rather seeing how this technology is making a difference in the lives of the world's most disadvantaged children. I don't think anyone would have left this talk not touched.

From there I sat in on Bdale's talk on Peace, Love and Rockets (link). Bdald was his interesting self - I have no idea how someone so busy can find the time to have such interesting hobbies. He's building his own altimeter because the commercial offerings don't meet his needs - a standard case of scratching an itch. Thanks Bdale for inspiring us to not accept things the way they are.

Wednesday night was the Penguin Dinner. This was at Melbourne Markets and was the most relaxed conference dinner yet. It also was a very cool idea. Spent the night talking to Mikal Still and Steven Hanley - also had a good chat with a husband and wife (whose name I cannot remember) about the conference and where it has been and where it should go. We had a good fun night. I also ate too much sorbet, but am glad I did :-)

LCA2008 Day Two

Tuesday

I started Tuesday by going to the GNOME Miniconf in the morning. We had a talk about Conduit by John Stowers, which showed off the potential of having a generic mechanism to sync devices. It's quite nice to be able to visualise data sources and sinks, and to hook them up visually. I'm hoping that many data connectors get written so that the ease of moving data around between web2.0 applications.

Then it was Martin Sevior talking about bringing Sugar concepts (from OLPC) into the desktop. We ended up spending lots of time talking about collaboration and presence - projects like Telepathy and Empathy - to achieve our dreams. Again very nice stuff with great potential.

In the afternoon I moved over to the Gaming Miniconf, which was a lot of fun. Since OSDC 2006 I've been a big fan of pyget, so sitting in on a tutorial by Alex Holkner and Richard Jones on the topic was something I was very much looking forward to. The tute was writing a cross-platform space invaders-style game in python in less than 40 minutes! Quite amazing what can be achieved in such a short time. It helped that Alex types very fast! :-)

Brett Nash then spoke on using Enlightenment for 2d Games. Then it was back to Richard Jones for an intro to PyWeek. I wish I had the time to commit a week of evenings to try it out.

Keynotes now for your streaming pleasure!

Just a quick public service announcement - if you're not at the best technical conference in the world today, you can watch the action live streamed to your computer. See Steve Walsh's post.

Thanks LCA and AARNET for making this happen!

LCA2008 Days Zero and One

Sunday

Arriving in MEL at around 3pm on Sunday meant that I got to survey the lay of the land ahead of the unofficial conference opening on Monday (otherwise known as Miniconf days). It looks like I wasn't alone, with 80 or so others wandering around the conference venue. Rusty's & Kelly's Newcomers talk on Sunday afternoon was so full that they had to stop people going in.

But now I'm already jumping ahead of myself. I decided this year to stay at the recommended backpackers, which I have to say is interesting. The benefits are that I get a 25 minute walk to the conference venue each day, whereas the problems are that they don't servce breakfast until 8am (too late) and it's a bit too rowdy to get much sleep. Mea culpa.

Back to the conference venue - Rusty led the masses off to the pub, so it was natural to follow. Much socialising continued, including talking quite a bit to Alli, Hugh, George and Tim. I find it really interesting to find out what people have been doing with themselves since the last conference when we chatted.

Monday

Like I said, not much sleep was had, which was a bad thing leading up to my talk on Source Code Integrity and Protection with the sample toy implementation of zign. Fortunately it all went well except for a brown-bag bug that I showed everyone during the demo part of the talk. Still, I got some good feedback from people, so hopefuly the talk achieved it's pupose by making people think about the unspoken assurance of the source code they release.

More catching up with people - Andrew , Grand Pajamaran Donna, Peter, Steve, Stewart, Grant, Eric, Jon and many others. Catching up with the community from all around Australia is one of the big benefits of LCA.

The day was really a jump around the conference as I sat in on various miniconfs - Fedora for Eugene Teo's Writing System Tap Scripts which was excellent and made me realise that a whole class of difficult problems are now potentially solveable, Security for Guy Gershoni's Security Programming in Java and Damien Miller on OpenSSH which did nothing but increase my confidence in OpenSSH's design and team that are supporting it, and Debian for Martin Kraftt's Version Control Systems for Debian packaging. My brain is already full, and its only Monday :-)

The evening was spent out at the University Hotel with Eric, Dennis and Grant chatting about OCaml, writing yet another text editor, multi-national companies that move their software development offshore, Fourier transforms, low pass filters and music genres. Good food and company and a good time out!

It's not MS Comic Sans!

I can't let this accusation by Mary go. My presentation was using Marker Felt, not MS Comic Sans :-)

Sheesh :-)

Planet linux.conf.au 2008 - Feeds welcomed!

LCA2008 Grand Pajamaran Donna Benjamin recently put out a call on [chat/mel8ourne] for LCA2008 attendees to add their feeds to Planet LCA 2008 by emailing planet at spanner linux dot org do au (just remove the spanner from the works).

I'd like to second that call, but also add that if you can provide a RSS/Atom feed that is LCA 2008-specific then please do so, e.g. my regular feed is http://www.michaeldavies.org/weblog/index.rss, but the feed up on plca2008 is http://www.michaeldavies.org/weblog/linux-australia/lca2008/index.rss (that's with pybloxsom, but a similar scheme should be applicable for your blogging system of choice).

Thanks, and see you at linux.conf.au 2008!

24 days until LCA2008

linux.conf.au 2008 is only 24 days away! That's 24 days until the security wisdom of Bruce can be heard in Melbourne, Australia.

But wait, there's more! :-) Have a look at the whole enchilada - another fun-filled, brain-exhausting, week-long party for the Australasian Free and Open-Source Community!

Bring it on.

linux.conf.au 2008 CFP closing soon

Are you planning on submitting a talk or tutorial for linux.conf.au 2008?

Get your submissions in by Friday 20th July.

And for those of you concerned about the video option - please don't worry. It's entirely optional. We are aware that many people don't have the means or expertise to make a video and get it online - but for those who do, for those who want to, go for it!

** please forward this message to friends and colleagues you believe should make a submission to present at linux.conf.au 2008 **

linux.conf.au 2008 Call For Papers (CFP) opens

linux.conf.au 2008 opens up the Call For Papers (CFP). So,

If you are doing something cool in the linux/open-source world,
...and if you can make it to Melbourne, Australia between Jan 28 and Feb 2, 2008
...then submit a proposal, and see if you get accepted as a conference speaker. Trust me, it's a worthwhile thing to do!

As someone who is on the CFP Committee, come on! - submit a paper if you're involved in doing something cool/important/different/zany in the open-source world. We want to see your proposal! :-)

linux.conf.au 2008 Ghosts

This weekend was Ghosts Of Conference Past for linux.conf.au 2008 (otherwise known as http://mel8ourne.org/). Friday night after I flew in I had the chance to catch up with a remote team member for my day job - James Cormack. Over dinner at a nice restaurant with James and Kristy, I was well prepared for the hard slog of Ghosts 2007. Saturday morning was meet up with some of the Linux Australia committee, a couple of ghosts, and some of the Melbourne team met together to debrief LCA2007 and to talk about the wonderful things Melbourne has planned for next year! Ghosts went remarkably well, lots of great discussion - seeing the things that LCA2007 learnt, seeing they things they didn't :-( and hearing about a bunch of stuff that I didn't know happened. Well done Seven, you put on a rockin' conference!

The Mel8 team are well advanced, and certainly look on track to again raise the bar. Donna is going to be a good conference organiser. I always enjoy seeing the transition between Ghosts and the conference proper - the organising team just continue to come up great stuff! Except for the long days (and nights) stuck in a office, ghosts is fun because of the people you get to talk to. BTW, thanks to Red Hat for providing the office facility.

Why is there a photo of Sydney and not Melbourne here? Because for the first time we held ghosts in the city of the last conference, rather than in the city of the next conference. We did this to save on travel costs - so that all of the Seven didn't have to travel.

Ghosts ended with flying out back home on the last flight of the night to Adelaide. Goes without saying I was pretty exhausted.

Ghosts of Conference Past, 2007 - second morning