Shallow Thoughts : : conferences

Where 2.0 2010

Last week I had the opportunity to go to the Where 2.0 conference (thanks, Linux Pro Magazine!) Then, on the weekend, the free WhereCamp followed it up.

I'd been to WhereCamp last year. It was wonderful, geeky, highly technical and greatly inspiring. I thought I was the only person interested in mapping, especially in Python, and after the first couple of sessions I was blown away with how little I knew and what a thriving and expert community there was. I was looking forward to the full experience this year -- I figured Where 2.0 must be similar but even better.

Actually they're completely different events. Where 2.0 was dominated by location-aware startups: people with iPhone games (Foursquare and others in a similar mold), shopping apps (find the closest pizza place to your location!) and so on. The talks were mostly 15 minutes long, so while there were lots of people there with fascinating apps or great stories to tell, there was no time to get detail on anything. I think the real point of Where 2.0 is to get a sketch of who's doing what so you can go collar them in the "hallway track" later and make business deals.

Here are some highlights from Where 2.0. I'll write up WhereCamp separately.

Ignite Where

The Ignite session Tuesday night was great fun, as Ignite sessions almost always are.

The Ignite session was broken in the middle by a half-hour interlude where a bunch of startups gave one-minute presentations on their products, then the audience voted on the best, then an award was given which had already been decided and had nothing to do with the audience vote (we didn't even get to find out which company the audience chose). Big yawner: one minute isn't long enough for anyone to show off a product meaningfully, and I wasn't the only one there who brought reading material to keep them occupied until the second round of Ignite talks started up again.

Best Ignite talks (Ignite Where 2.0 videos here):

• App Stores Suck, Jonathan Stark
• Why Your Data Sucks, Paul Ramsey
• Crowdsourcing the Impossible: Ushahidi-Haiti, Patrick Meier
• Have Chickens, Need Lasers!, Martin Isenburg -- which didn't actually involve lasers as far as I could tell, but it was certainly lively.

Wednesday talks

Patrick Meier gave a longer version of his Ignite talk on Mobilizing Ushahidi-Haiti, full of interesting stories of how OpenStreetMap and other technologies like Twitter came together to help in the Haiti rescue effort.

Clouds, Crowds, and Shrouds: How One Government Agency Seeks to Change the Way It Spatially Enables Its Information, by Terrance Busch of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, was an interesting look into the challenges of setting up a serious mapping effort, then integrating later with commercial and crowdsourced efforts.

In Complexities in Bringing Home Environmental Awareness, Kim Balassiano of the US EPA showed the EPA MyEnvironment page, where you can find information about local environmental issues like toxic waste cleanups. They want users to enter good news too, like composting workshops or community gardens, but so far the data on the map is mostly bad. Still a useful site.

Thursday talks

There were a couple of interesting keynotes on Thursday morning, but work kept me at home. I thought I could catch them on the live video stream, but unfortunately the stream that had worked fine on Wednesday wasn't working on Thursday, so I missed the Mark L. DeMulder's talk on the USGS's National Map efforts. Fortunately, they were at WhereCamp where they gave much more detail. Likewise, I missed the big ESRI announcement that everyone was talking about all afternoon -- they released some web thing, but as far as I can tell they're still totally Windows-centric and thus irrelevant to a Linux and open source user. But I want to go back and view the video anyway.

There was another talk on Thursday which I won't name, but it had a few lessons for speakers:

• Be aware of when you're speaking, so somebody doesn't have to come find you in the audience and say "Hey, you're next. Are you coming?"
• If you're not bringing your own laptop, try to get access to the presentation machine beforehand and test out your presentation.
• Especially if you're planning on showing a video that may require downloading nonstandard software.

Base Map 2.0 was a panel-slash-debate between Steve Coast (OpenStreetMap), Timothy Trainor (U.S. Census Bureau), Peter ter Haar (Ordnance Survey), Di-Ann Eisnor (Platial), and moderated by Ian White of Urban Mapping. It was fabulous. I've never seen such a lively panel: White kept things moving, told jokes, asked provocative and sometimes inflammatory questions and was by far the best panel moderator I've seen. The panelists kept up with him and gave cogent, interesting and illuminating answers. Two big issues were the just-announced release of Ordnance Survey data, and licensing issues causing mismatches between OSM, OS and Census datasets.

Community-based Grassroots Mapping with Balloons and Kites in Lima, Peru by Jeffrey Warren was another fabulous talk. He builds balloons out of garbage bags, soda bottles and a digital camera, goes to poor communities in places like Lima and teaches the community (including the kids) how to map their own communities. This is more than an academic exercise for them, since maps can help them prove title to their land. Check it out at GrassrootsMapping.org and build your own aerial mapping balloon! (He was at WhereCamp, too, where we got to see the equipment up close.)

Visualizing Spatio-temporal War Casualty Data in Google Earth by Sean Askay of Google was just as good. He's built a KML file called Map the Fallen showing US and allied casualties from Iraq: the soldiers' hometowns, place of death, age, gender, and lots of other details about them with links to tribute pages, plus temporal information showing how casualties changed as the war progressed. It's an amazing piece of work, and sobering ... and I was most annoyed to find out that it needs a version of Google Earth that doesn't run on Linux, so I can't run it for myself. Boo!

Overall, a very fun conference, though it left me hungry for detail. Happily, after a day off there was WhereCamp to fill that void.

Tags: mapping, conferences
[ 21:34 Apr 05, 2010    More conferences | permalink to this entry ]

SCALE 8x

I'm finally getting caught up after SCALE 8x, this year's Southern CA Linux Expo.

A few highlights (not even close to a comprehensive list):

Friday:

The UbuCon and Women in Open Source (WIOS) were both great successes, with a great speaker list and good attendance. It was hard to choose between them.

Malakai Wade, Mirano Cafiero, and Saskia Wade, two 12-year-olds and an 8-year-old, presenting on "Ultimate Randomness - Girl voices in open source". Great stuff! They sang, they discussed their favorite apps, they showed an animated video made with open source tools of dolls in a dollhouse. Lots of energy, confidence and fun. Loved it! I hope to see more of these girls.

I liked Nathan Haines demo of "Quickly", an app for rapid development of python-gtk apps. It looks like a great app, especially for beginning programmers, though his demo did also illustrate the problems with complex UIs filled with a zillion similar toolbuttons. (I'm not criticising Nathan; I find UIs like that very difficult to use, especially under pressure like a live demo in front of an audience.)

Happily, the UbuCon and WIOS scheduled their lightning talks at different times (though UbuCon's conflicted with WIOS's "How to give a Lightning Talk" session). So lightning talk junkies enjoyed two hours of talks back to back, plus the chance to give two different talks to different audiences. Hectic but a lot of fun.

Saturday

I was a little disappointed with the Git Tips & Tricks panel; I wanted more git tips and less discussion of projects that happen to use Git. I liked Don Marti's section on IkiWiki; it looks like a great tool and I wish Don had had more time to present.

I liked Emma Jane Hogbin's useful and interesting talk on "Looking Beautiful in Print", full of practical tips for how to design good flyers and brochures using tools like OpenOffice.

Diana Chen, who got introduced to open source only a year ago at SCALE 7x, gets the award for courage: she gave a talk on "Learning python for non-programmers" using a borrowed laptop that I'm not sure she'd even seen before the presentation. Unfortunately, the laptop turned out to be poorly suited to the task (no Python installed? Dvorak keymap?) so Diana struggled to show what she'd planned, but she came through and her demos eventually worked great. I hope she wasn't too discouraged by the difficulties, and keeps presenting -- preferably with more time to practice ahead of time. The room was absolutely packed -- they had to bring in lots more chairs and there were still a lot of people standing. There's obviously a huge amount of interest in beginner programming talks at this conference!

Shawn Powers' talk, "Linux is for Smart People, and You're Not as Dumb as You Think", was as entertaining as the title suggested -- an excellent beginner-track talk that I think everyone enjoyed.

Sunday

I'm not going to review Sunday's program, because I was busy obsessing over my own "Featherweight Linux" talk. I'll just say that SCALE is a great place to give a talk -- the audience was great, with excellent questions and no heckling and, most important, they laughed when I hoped they would. :-)

Exhibitors

I didn't get to spend much time on the show floor, but it looked active and fun.

The Linux Astronomy folks had a fantastic display, with a big table with a simulated Martian landscape and a couple of robotic rovers exploring it and a robotic telescope driven by a milling machine program, as well as computers exhibiting a selection of Linux astronomy, science and math-teaching software.

ZaReason had a booth, and my mom was able to get info on how to get a spare battery for her laptop. (Can I take a moment to say how cool it is to be wandering around a Linux conference with my mom, who's carrying her own Linux netbook?)

An Ubuntu/Canonical table was testing people's laptops for compatibility with the next Ubuntu release. (There may have been other distros tested as well; I wasn't clear on that.)

Engineers Without Borders, Orange County looked really interesting and assured me that not all of them were in Orange County, and there's activity up here in the Bay Area as well. Definitely on my list to learn more.

Linux Pro magazine was giving out copies of Linux Pro and Ubuntu User, both fantastic magazines packed with good articles.

Beginners and Hobbyists

One notable feature of SCALE is the low price. This conference is very affordable, which means there are a lot of hobbyists, beginners and even people just considering trying Linux. They've offered a "Beginner track" for several years, though not all the talks in that track are really accessible to beginners (speakers: here's your chance to propose that great beginner talk the other conferences aren't interested in! Help some new folks!) There's a lot of energy and diversity and a wide range of interests and knowledge -- yet there's still plenty of depth for hardcore Linux geeks.

Overall, a fantastic conference. The SCALE organizers do a great job of organizing everything, and if there were any glitches they weren't evident from the outside.

Tags: conferences, linux
[ 14:34 Feb 24, 2010    More conferences | permalink to this entry ]

Tracking down performance hogs

It's been a day -- or week, month -- of performance monitoring.

I'm posting this while sitting in an excellent OSCON tutorial on Linux System and Network Performance Monitoring, by Darren Hoch. It's full of great information and I'm sure his web site is equally useful.

And it's a great extension to topic that's been occupying me over the past few months: performance tracking to slim down software that might be slowing a Linux system down. That's the topic of one of my two OSCON talks this Wednesday: "Featherweight Linux: How to turn a netbook or older laptop into a Ferrari." Although I don't go into anywhere near the detail Darren does, a lot of the principles are the same, and I know I'll find a use for a lot of his techniques. The talk also includes a free bonus tourist tip for San Jose visitors.

Today's Linux Planet article is related to my Featherweight talk: What's Bogging Down Your Linux PC? Tracking Down Resource Hogs. Usually they publish my articles on Thursdays, but I asked for an early release since it's related to tomorrow's talk.

For anyone at OSCON in San Jose, I hope you can come to Featherweight late Wednesday afternoon, or to my other talk, Wednesday just after lunch, "Bug Fixing for Everyone (even non-programmers!)" where I'll go over the steps programmers use while fixing bugs, and show that anyone can fix simple bugs even without any prior knowledge of programming.

Tags: linux, performance, conferences, oscon09
[ 10:58 Jul 21, 2009    More conferences | permalink to this entry ]

LCA 2009: Friday, the last day

The conference is over! Amazing how quickly a week passes.

Simon Phipps warmed us up with a very good keynote, full of inside jokes and knowledgeable quips indicating he knows the community even if he is a Sun guy.

Matthew Wilcox had some good tips on improving performance on solid state disks that I know will keep Dave busy for a while (I got him a small laptop SSD for his birthday and he's been enjoying it quite a bit -- it's hugely less power intensive and much faster for most operations than the regular disk it replaced). Apparently a lot of his advice will only work on snazzy high-end IBM SSDs, not the cheap ones like netbooks have or like Dave has, but some of them may be helpful anyway. Dave is trying the suggestion of using no I/O scheduler, echo "noop" > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler -- apparently there's a lot of crap the scheduler has to traverse that isn't noticable when the drive is seeking all the time, but on an SSD that doesn't need to seek, it can make a big difference. Also, apparently ext4 or btrfs (still under development) have some enhancements that help with SSD performance.

I went to Paul Fenwick's talk (Awesome Things You've Missed in Perl) even though I'm not a Perl hacker ... I know by now that Paul will always have something fun, and indeed he did, including a live demo of a bot that plays Minesweeper. The "awesome things" were indeed pretty cool, and I even found myself tempted to check out Perl again, especially for the new smart regular expression and grammar syntax (you can name parts of regular expressions then define grammars based on them -- very nice!)

Matthew Garrett had entertaining stories on power management, though not a lot of practical advice. Summary: power management sucks, maybe it'll get better some day; users shouldn't be forced to predict their use patterns in order to optimize power usage; video wastes a ton of power, like higher-than-necessary refresh rates when the user is merely viewing static images on an LCD that doesn't need much refreshing.

Then it was lunchtime -- time for the Great Shaving, where Linus shaved Bdale's beard as part of the enormous charity deal (something between $35,000 and $40,000 -- the count still isn't finished yet) toward saving the Tasmanian Devil. Bdale shared some of the emails from his wife (with her permission) and they were pretty funny, as was

"Geek My Ride" (Jonathan Oxer and Jared Herbohn or "Flame") had an entertaining presentation full of successful and impressive demos (we didn't see the actual cars -- those will be at Open Day tomorrow, apparently). I didn't see the whole presentation because I was fiddling around with an idea for a lightning talk, but I saw enough to get the idea.

Kevin Pulo's "Fun with LD_PRELOAD" was indeed fun. He had quite a few examples of existing LD_PRELOAD hacks as well as a detailed example of how to make a custom preloaded library. It's quite a bit more elaborate than I realized, but certainly do-able and something I've been meaning to experiment with for quite a while.

Then, sadly, it was time for the closing ceremonies, including lightning talks (I worked up the nerve and participated, though my laptop didn't behave and wouldn't talk to the projector -- weird how xrandr sometimes works and sometimes doesn't). And then the closing announcements: next year's LCA will be in Wellington, NZ. The Great Shaving had made the Hobart afternoon news, and someone brought in a tape of it. The funniest thing was that they focused on Bdale and the donation but never mentioned the guy who was doing the shaving (some unassuming guy named Linus).

Tags: lca2009, linux.conf.au
[ 03:35 Jan 23, 2009    More conferences/lca2009 | permalink to this entry ]

LCA 2009: Thursday

The highlight of Thursday morning was a filler: one of the speakers had to cancel, so Paul Fenwick filled in with a combination of two short talks: "The Art of Klingon Programming" and "What's new in Perl 5.10?" I'm not a Perl programmer (at least not when I have a choice) but his talks were entertaining and even educational. What struck me most was that showmanship and humor don't have to detract from technical content. I'd had a discussion the previous day about the balance of offering lots of technical content versus entertaining the audience and not overwhelming them. Most technical talks are either dry, content heavy and so jam packed with information that you can't possibly remember everything, or lighter weight and glitzy but with not much real technical content and a "watered down" feeling. Paul's Klingon talk was one of the most content-full presentations I've seen at a conference, with lots of code examples, yet it kept the audence laughing, listening and grokking (to mix SF metaphors) all the way through. Showmanship can make it easier, not harder, to remember technical content.

In the afternoon, I'd been very much looking forward to the Arduino tutorial (Jonathan Oxer and Hugh Blemings) but it was a bit of a disappointment. The acoustics of the room and the handheld microphone, combined with the interactive nature of the presentation, meant that I could barely understand a word High Blemings said, and only some of what Jon Oxer said. (I've heard Jon Oxer talk before and never had trouble, so I primarily blame the room.)

Partway through, I skipped out to go check Donna Benjamin's "The Joy of Inkscape." It had been moved from its original lecture hall to a much smaller room with tables. The smaller room was Standing Room Only, a raucous and enthusiastic bunch who (the sitting ones, at least) were nearly all tapping away on laptops exploring either the demo Donna was showing or other Inkscape projects.

It was clearly a hugely successful and fun tutorial and I wanted to stay, but I couldn't find a place to sit where I could both see the screen and hear Donna, so I made my way back to Arduino. The second half, when they demoed various interesting sensors and a few unusual Arduino applications, was better than the first. But talking to folks later, a number of us were surprised because we expected a more interactive tutorial (the prep had encouraged us to bring or buy Arduino hardware).

The hot talk of the day was one I missed, after the tea break. I went to a talk on Spring, a robotics library (Clinton Roy), which was interesting enough and certainly popular (lots of people sitting by the door because all the seats were full) but afterward all I heard was people enthusing about Jeff Arnold's amazing Ksplice talk. He demonstrated a system of updating kernels in place, with no reboot required. People couldn't say enough about the talk, and I'm looking forward to downloading the video and seeing what I missed.

Tags: lca2009, linux.conf.au, speaking, arduino
[ 13:41 Jan 22, 2009    More conferences/lca2009 | permalink to this entry ]

LCA 2009: Wednesday

Wednesday started with a keynote by Tom Limoncelli that was, frankly, disappointing. A lot of it was specific to enterprise sysadmins (including a set of "homework" for all the new directives you're going to implement in your IT department) and the rest was, well, nothing special.

The first regular talk I heard was Keith Packard, describing advances in X (and related graphical desktop software) over the past year. Surprisingly, there actually have been a lot of advances. Chief among them is GEM, a system for sharing data efficiently between X and the kernel to avoid all the horribly inefficient copying that's always happened in the past. It all sounded very promising except that if I understand him correctly, none of this works on graphics cards, only on integrated Intel graphics. A nice step, but until it works everywhere I'm not sure it's really a solution.

But Keith was overshadowed by his coworker, Carl Worth, who spoke next, giving a lively and interesting discussion of the architecture of graphics on Linux, including the many ways control might flow depending on which libraries are in use and the capabilities of the graphics card/chipset are. Better, he enumerated the many ways of tracing the execution of the various graphics layers -- gtk, cairo, X, mesa etc. -- and I'm looking forward to downloading his slides to get the list of debugging commands. This may also be the first talk I've seen to use GIMP as a presentation system. (He only used it for one slide, where he drew and labelled new codepaths people have proposed to get around graphics bottlenecks.

My tutorial (on Firefox/Mozilla hacking) was after lunch. I was fairly happy with it. The audience had a lot of questions, the slides I had hoped were funny got laughs, and the time worked out -- I had to rush through the last handful of slides because of the amount of audience questions and discussion, which is much better than ending early because no one was interested.

Jonathan Corbet's talk on the Linux Development Process mostly fairly basic details I already knew (what the difference kernel trees mean, how subsystem maintainers act as gatekeepers, why it's better to maintain code in the mainline kernel tree than separate code) but his talks always have nuggets of interest and relevant stories, with Linus sitting in the audience to add another perspective. The talk ended with some good advice on how to get started in kernel development: review code, and (in a quote from Andrew Morton) "try to make the kernel work well on every machine you have access to."

Wednesday night's Penguin Dinner was spectacular. The dinner was fairly spectacular itself (a huge and varied buffet), but the really impressive part was after dinner. We saw a short presentation on the plight of the Tasmanian devil (the largest marsupial carnivore after the extinction of the Tasmanian "tiger", or thylacine, in the early 1900s). The devil is threatened due to a transmissible cancer that causes horrible facial tumors which are invariably fatal. Then the charity auction began, led by Rusty Russell. At auction was one item: a large format numbered print of a beautiful, award winning waterfall photograph by Karen Garbee. Bidding was spirited and rose very quickly into the thousands of dollars, at which point things got complicated, with coalitions of multiple people bidding, other people offering matching offers under certain conditions, other items (such as a GEEK license plate registered in Queensland) being added to the photograph. In the end the winning bid was $10,500 (which amounts to something over $36,000 when various matching funds are included) on condition that Linus shave Bdale's beard.

Poor Bdale! The beard suits him and he's had it since 1982. But it will come back, and the Tasmanian devils won't if the cancer drives them to extinction.

Tags: linuc.conf.au, lca2009
[ 14:32 Jan 21, 2009    More conferences/lca2009 | permalink to this entry ]

LCA 2009 Tuesday

I missed a lot of the miniconf talks on Tuesday because I wanted to make some last-minute changes to my talk. But I do want to comment on one: Simon Greener's talk on "A Review of Australian Geodata Providers." Of course, I'm not in Australia, but it was quite interesting to hear how similar Australia's problematic geodata siguation is to the situation in the US. His presentation was entertaining, animated and I learned some interesting facts about GPS and geodata in general.

And Dave and I got another good astronomy opportunity with the dark skies at Peppermint Bay at the Speakers' Dinner. Despite occasional intrusive clouds we managed to get a great view of the Large Magellanic Cloud and a decent view of the small one, as well as eta Carinae and the star clouds between Crux and Carina. Pity I'd forgotten to bring my thumpin' travel optics that I'd been using the previous evening: a 6x20 monocular.

Tags: lca2009, linux.conf.au, astronomy, mapping
[ 16:15 Jan 20, 2009    More conferences/lca2009 | permalink to this entry ]

LCA 2009 Monday

On day one of LCA 2009, I divided my time between the LinuxChix and Kernel miniconfs.

In the morning, Paul McKenney, in "Why is parallel Programming Hard?", discussed some of the background of parallel programming research, then gave an entertaining demonstration of instruction overhead using a roll of toilet paper. Each square represented one clock cycle -- he estimated there were a few hundred clock cycles in the full roll -- and he had audience members unroll the roll carefully, passing it from one person to the next. It took a long time.

Over at the LinuxChix miniconf, Jacinta Richardson gave a wonderfully entertaining (and useful) talk "On Speaking". She explained how to hack audience members' brains, particularly the corpus callosum and the hippcampus, by using emotion, visual images and suspenseful stories to give your audience whole-brain entertainment.

After Jacinta's talk we spent some time going around the room introducing ourselves, and speakers got a chance to plug their upcoming talks.

I skipped the panel on Geek Parenting (not being a parent) to go back to the kernel miniconf's "Problem Solving Hour". Questions involved network performance, solid state disk performance, how to debug crashes, tracing (the moderator commented that if you're thinking of getting involved in the kernel effort but aren't quite sure what to do, there's a huge need for better tracing and performance analysis tools), solid-state disks (someone plugged the talk on that subject on Friday) and similar interesting topics.

I asked about an overheating problem I've been having with my laptop. I mentioned that even in single-user mode, the CPU temperature keeps going up, so I was pretty sure it was a kernel and not userspace issue. Matthew Garrett said that a lot of drivers are optimized for a normal use case -- meaning X -- and may work very poorly in text mode. You can have something that's overheating in single-user mode, then you start X and a bunch of power management systems kick in and the temperature actually goes down. So how do you figure out what's causing a temperature problem? Open up the laptop when it's hot, poke around then figure out what's hot. Then debug that component.

Lunch was a lovely BBQ provided by Google.

After lunch, Matthew Garrett, in "How I learned to stop worrying and love ACPI", was entertaining, as all his talks are. I'm not sure I actually learned much in the way of practical advice for helping ACPI work better on my machines, but at least I learned lots of new ways in which ACPI sucks more than I ever realized.

Then it was back to LinuxChix for a workshop on getting schoolgirls more interested in IT. We saw short presentations from the four workshop leaders, then split into groups -- our group went outside and sat in the hazy sunshine and talked about how to get girls, teachers, parents and school IT staff on board.

After tea, all the LinuxChix groups reported back on the discussions and there was a full-room discussion on how to get involved with educational programs like that. Then we ended with lightning talks; I got roped into giving one, so I didn't take notes on the rest, but they were all fun and interesting.

Then in the evening, after dinner, we found a spot somewhat sheltered from the lights of the hotel for some quick astronomy before bed. The sky was hazy and picking up lots of sky glow from a light beam shining from the hotel, but fortunately the sky around the Southern Cross was clear. We found both the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, as well as Eta Carina and some other clusters around the Southern Cross. A lovely view, unmatched by anything I saw from around Sydney or Melbourne. Tasmania definitely wins for stargazing!

Tags: lca2009, linux.conf.au, astronomy
[ 04:17 Jan 19, 2009    More conferences/lca2009 | permalink to this entry ]