Shallow Thoughts

Back from OSCON

No postings for a while -- I was too tied up with getting ready for OSCON, and now that it's over, too tied up with catching up with stuff that gotten behind.

A few notes about OSCON:

It was a good conference -- lots of good speakers, interesting topics and interesting people. Best talks: anything by Paul Fenwick, anything by Damian Conway.

The Arduino tutorial was fun too. It's a little embedded processor with a breadboard and sockets to control arbitrary electronic devices, all programmed over a USB plug using a Java app. I'm not a hardware person at all (what do those resistor color codes mean again?) but even I, even after coming in late, managed to catch up and build the basic circuits they demonstrated, including programming them with my laptop. Very cool! I'm looking forward to playing more with the Arduino when I get a spare few moments.

The conference's wi-fi network was slow and sometimes flaky (what else is new?) but they had a nice touch I haven't seen at any other conference: Wired connections, lots of them, on tables and sofas scattered around the lounge area (and more in rooms like the speakers' lounge). The wired net was very fast and very reliable. I'm always surprised I don't see more wired connections at hotels and conferences, and it sure came in handy at OSCON.

The AV staff was great, very professional and helpful. I was speaking first thing Monday morning (ulp!) so I wanted to check the room Sunday night and make sure my laptop could talk to the projector and so forth. Everything worked fine.

Portland is a nice place to hold a convention -- the light rail is great, the convention center is very accessible, and street parking isn't bad either if you have a car there.

Dave went with me, so it made more sense for us to drive. The drive was interesting because the central valley was so thick with smoke from all the fires (including the terrible Paradise fire that burned for so long, plus a new one that had just started up near Yosemite) that we couldn't see Mt Shasta when driving right by it. It didn't get any better until just outside of Sacramento. It must have been tough for Sacramento valley residents, living in that for weeks! I hope they've gotten cleared out now.

I finally saw that Redding Sundial bridge I've been hearing so much about. We got there just before sunset, so we didn't get to check the sundial, but we did get an impressive deep red smoky sun vanishing into the gloom. Photos here.

End of my little blog-break, and time to get back to scrambling to get caught up on writing and prep for the GetSET Javascript class for high school girls. Every year we try to make it more relevant and less boring, with more thinking and playing and less rote typing. I think we're making progress, but we'll see how it goes next week.

Tags: oscon08, conferences, linux, travel, portland, hardware
[ 22:00 Aug 04, 2008    More conferences | permalink to this entry ]

Random LCA Comments

Here I am in LA at the start pf SCALE, still catching up on blogging LCA and the Australia trip.

I didn't write about the Lightning Talks session just before the closing ceremonies. I love lightning talks -- to make a point in three minutes you really have to condense your talk to the single most important point.

Alas, I didn't come up with a topic in time, so I didn't give a lightning talk myself. But there were some excellent talks! Some of them included:

• a live demo going "from database to web app in 45 seconds" by someone listed only as "Flame";
• Paul Wayper describing some of the pitfalls of trying to fit a real wood veneer onto a laptop;
• a discussion of a PHP code quality analysis tool;
• A talk entitled "Getting Laid", by Jeff Waugh, which turned out to be a more general discussion of open source involvement;
• Pia Waugh describing her plans for OLPC Australia, to distribute XO laptops to needy children;
• I (Still) Hate Threads, in which Rusty Russell explained why threads are often less efficient than a separate process; and finally:
• "Fixing the Web", in which Paul Fenwick demonstrated the Greasemonkey extension to Firefox, and how you can use it to turn a cluttered, impossible myspace page into a nice neat login page.

Paul's demo concluded to overwhelming applause, and there wasn't much question as to who had won the lightning talks session. I believe Paul won an Asus Eee (nice prize!) (Oops, Paul tells me after reading this that it was nothing quite that cool, but he did get a very nice book voucher), and deserved it for a very polished and funny talk. You can watch the video of Paul's Lightning talk on youtube.

Other observations from the week of LCA 2008:

Linus was around and listening to kernel talks, but not presenting. Rusty's "LCA for Newbies" presentation on Sunday night included a bullet point on "Don't fanboy the speakers" presumably applies, and everybody behaved themselves pretty well (myself included).

I stayed in Trinity College. We didn't have wi-fi in the dorm rooms like last year, only in the common room; but actually it was just as well to have a good reason to hang out in the common room and talk to people. The bathrooms were co-ed, but the doors closed so there was enough privacy.

But the weirdest thing about Trinity was the corridor and outside doors. Every corridor had doors at both ends, usually locked doors that required a card key from one direction, and the push of a button from the other direction. Sometimes an alarm went off if you didn't wait quite long enough between pressing the button and opening the door (fortunately, pressing the button again cancelled the alarm). It was very strange to walk down the building corridor continually pushing buttons and then carding back in; I have to wonder whether the high security was worth it. The outside gates were worse: to get out to the street you need a card key, there's no button press allowed. (Fortunately on the weekend most of us checked out, they left one of the outer gates open so we could leave even after we'd returned the card key.)

There were tons of Asus Eees around. Turns out other Linux geeks find that little laptop just as interesting as I did! Everybody seems quite happy with them, and I mostly saw them being used as real laptops ... in contrast to the many OLPCs, which were numerous but mostly being used as toys to network with other OLPCs. I saw more and more of them as the week progressed -- turns out a lot of people were heading over to a nearby computer store to buy one, either because of hardware problems with their normal laptop, or just for a toy.

(In contrast, here at the first day of SCALE I haven't seen a single Eee yet, nor any other small laptops besides my own Vaio.)

I talked to someone who'd tried one with a projector, one of my main concerns with the very low resolution Eee. He said it drove the projector just fine ... but only at the Eee's native resolution of 800x480. Hard to imagine giving a GIMP talk (or, indeed, any sort of technical talk) like that. Bummer!

I also got a good look at one of the modern Toshiba Librettos (a year-old model). Lovely machine, smaller but thicker than the Eee, but much more capable (also much more expensive). The keyboard was noticably smaller than my Vaio or the Eee, but quite well designed and apparently it's no problem typing full speed on it once you adjust to the size.

Other interesting small laptops I noticed were a couple of Vaios (the 10-inch models descended from my SR17), a couple of Toshibas and Lenovos, and a couple of rare birds like Val's uber-cool grey-market Panasonic.

Also highly popular were Macs. Some were running Linux, but a surprising number were running OS X; I wasn't able to get an estimate of percentages.

Tags: lca2008, conferences
[ 12:49 Feb 08, 2008    More conferences/lca2008 | permalink to this entry ]

The Final Day

How can it be the last day of LCA? Wait! I'm not ready for it to end yet!

Well, at least Friday was a pretty full day, starting with the keynote, Anthony Baxter's "One Snake Enter, Two Snakes Leave" covered the two upcoming Python releases: 2.X (a minor stability/feature release) and 3.0 ("the release which will break all your code").

I hadn't seen him give a technical talk before, only the talk he'd given on flashy talks last year at the LCA Speakers' Dinner, and I was curious about how well his style worked for a real talk. Very well, as it turns out -- he was entertaining, clear and still plenty technical. The video of the keynote is well worth checking for anyone who programs in Python and needs to know about the upcoming changes.

Next up was Ralph Giles' "Seeking is Hard", an explanation of the Ogg container format (as he recovered from running across campus to find a needed video adaptor to get his Mac to talk to the projector). I got a little lost in the discussion early on distinguishing packets from pages (someone asked what the motivation was for each, and that would have helped me too).

But the core of his presentation -- why seeking is hard (for a media format that has to encompass video as well as audio) -- was clear and interesting. Seeking means finding a file location corresponding to a specific time offset; Ralph discussed the difference between seeking to a file position directly proportional to the time (which works only in uncompressed formats no one uses any more), using a seek table (a good optimization, but they're often wrong so you can't count on them) and the real solution, putting timestamps in each page. He covered problems like keyframes (a video frame from which a set of subsequent frames are calculated, so you can't seek and then start playing right away; you have to search backward to the last keyframe) and multiple tracks (you have to seek in each track to get them all in sync before starting to play).

Quite interesting, and I understand video formats a little more than I did before (which was "not at all").

Of course, you have to laugh at the title of Matthew Garrett's talk: "Suspend to Disk: Why it doesn't work, can't work and never worked in the first place (and what to do about it)." And we kept laughing throughout the talk. Who knew that kernel swsusp was such a funny topic? But the talk was informative and detailed as well as funny ... a strong contender for best talk I saw at the conference.

After lunch, Keith Packard of Intel told of "Pain and Redemption on the Linux Desktop." At the beginning of his talk, Keith announced Intel's release of a Programmers Reference Manual for their graphics chipsets -- some 1700 pages of detail used in their current driver, all released under a Creative Commons license (no derivative works). Horray, Intel!

The meat of the talk was a discussion of problems with the current X model, and fixes for them, including lots of information about who was working on what. Sort of a "state of the server address".

Tags: lca2008, conferences
[ 23:44 Jan 31, 2008    More conferences/lca2008 | permalink to this entry ]

LCA Thursday

Thursday's keynote was Stormy Peters' "Would you do it again for free?" She talked about motivation: what motivates open source developers, and does paying them reduce the motivation to work for free? She reviewed lots of motivation studies (like the Israeli day-care experiment) and discussed the implications for open source contributors.

(During the Q&A period, she recognized one of the questioners and said "Oh, you're going to tell me how many 'um's I had." Indeed she did have a few, though not many for an hour-long keynote. But it made me wonder if she's in Toastmasters.)

Moving on to the tutorial slots ... Dangit, I got the time wrong on Wednesday and missed Rusty Russell's prep session for his Thursday morning hands-on tutorial on kernel hacking with lguest. He'd made it very clear that no one should come without being fully prepped, and indeed, I had severe doubts about my poor old Vaio's ability to survive a 2-hour session of kernel compiling -- certainly the battery I'd brought couldn't last that long without an external power source.

And my second choice, Malcom Tredinnick's tutorial on website performance, was packed to the rafters and not letting anyone else in. So I took the opportunity to catch up on some email and do some shopping.

I got back in time for Peter Hutterer's interesting talk, "Redefining Input in X". Finally, an explanation of what that confusing "core" terminology means in the xorg.conf file when fiddling with graphics tablets. Basically, X has two different sets of input events: core pointer, and XI (X input). But GIMP is the only Linux app that registers for XI events -- everything else only gets core events. So to deal with this, when X sees an event from an XI device, it also generates a core pointer event.

His real subject was a new model which would allow X to have multiple pointers and keyboards at once. X would have "master" (virtual) devices with which "slave" (physical) devices can be associated. It makes the event setup more, not less, complicated: for each physical input event, you generate not two but three events: an XI event from the slave, an XI event from the master and a core event. Maybe there's no way around that. His demo, showing two mice and two keyboards active at the same time, was quite fun to watch.

Skipping forward to the final talk of the day, it was a tough choice between Vic Olliver's talk on his "RepRap" 3-D printer, and Elizabeth Garbee's "Introduction to Open Source Animation". I finally chose the animation talk, because I know the Vic would have the RepRap at Open Day on Saturday.

Elizabeth is 15 and can already hold her own as a clear and confident speaker. She covered the pros and cons of a wide range of options for making animations with open source software, ending with a recommendation for her favorite, synfig. Hurray for smart up-and-coming Linux-using Chix!

Tags: lca2008, conferences
[ 17:52 Jan 31, 2008    More conferences/lca2008 | permalink to this entry ]

W-Day

Wednesday was W-Day -- the day I was giving my tutorial on GIMP Scripting, first thing after the keynote. (Cue portentous music.)

But first, the keynote: the day opened with a highly anticipated appearance by Bruce Schneier. He discussed the illusion of security versus the reality, and how to bring the two closer together. Most of his points were familiar to anyone familiar with his writing, but he's still an excellent and polished presenter. Worth noting: no slides, just Bruce. Worked great.

After the keynote I skipped the morning tea and headed over to the lecture room to make sure I had enough time for setup. (You never know when a particular projector and laptop will develop a dislike for each other, though I'm happy to say I've been pretty lucky with my Vaio.)

The talk went well. I had been worried about the code-heavy topic being too dry, so after watching Jacinta's coding talk on Tuesday I'd made an effort to find more graphics and add more variety to the slides. I think it worked -- I got laughs where I hoped for them, and people were certainly following closely, as they were quick to point out when I made typos or other errors in the live coding section. A great audience -- I hope I lived up to their expectations.

In the afternoon, Dirk Horndel's "Make hardware vendors love open source" was right on target and very well presented. (Again, no slides, and as with the keynote, there was no need for them.) Dirk offered plenty of food for thought, even for those of us who don't often interact directly with hardware vendors.

Following afternoon tea, I squeezed into Bdale Garbee's standing-room-only "Peace, Love and Rockets" presentation. He has a little board bristling with sensors (a pressure sensor for altitude, a three-axis accelerometer and I forget what else) that includes a processor and enough RAM to record a rocket's flight profile. It's all designed under the Open Hardware License and driven by GPL software, of course. Very cool!

Tags: lca2008, conferences
[ 15:27 Jan 31, 2008    More conferences/lca2008 | permalink to this entry ]

LCA Miniconfs

Monday I wandered among several different miniconfs. In the morning I checked in at the Debian and Wireless miniconfs, but found nothing inspiring there (unfortunately I missed the wireless mapping talk, which sounded like it might have been interesting). But I ended up spending the afternoon in the security miniconf, ending with a massive keysigning. Unfortunately, the room had no document projector, and the attempts at using a mac with a camera to project people's IDs made several people uncomfortable since the mac offered no way to project an image without also saving it. So we ended up with two long lines out in the hallway, checking IDs one-on-one.

I spent Tuesday morning in the LinuxChix miniconf.

Pia Waugh got us off to a rousing start with an energetic and cogent discussion of women in open source. There are more of us than most people realize I was glad to hear that I'm not the only one who questions the numbers in the oft-quoted FLOSSPOLS study -- the one that claimed that the percentage of women in open source was vastly less than in proprietary software. (My own problem with the study is that they compared numbers from two completely different surveys.) Pia began by challenging everyone in the audience to write a list of ten women we know who inspire or impress us. By the end of the talk, I hope even the people who couldn't think of ten have a better idea of who we are and what we do.

Then Joh Clarke kept the audience laughing with true stories of sysadmin mishaps and words of wisdom to avoid making the same mistakes.

Jacinta Richardson spoke next -- she raced through an informative and entertaining discussion of code optimization and algorithm complexity. From watching her I learned as much about how to put together a good presentation on code as I did about code optimization -- she kept a potentially dry subject lively by alternating between funny pictures and source code listings. It inspired me to go find some images to spice up my tutorial, scheduled for the following day.

Brenda Wallace finished up the morning session with a talk about memcache, a useful daemon which can speed access to commonly used database queries, generated web pages or other CPU-intensive functions.

One thing that struck me about the chix miniconf was how well I understood everyone's speech. I'd noticed in several of Monday's presentations that I was having some trouble understanding several of the speakers, particularly one in the wireless miniconf who mumbled. I thought the aussie accent was giving me trouble. But Pia's and Jacinta's talks dispelled any such notion. Pia talks about twice as fast as any other speaker I've heard, and Jacinta had a lot of information to get across in a short time, yet I had no problem understanding anything they said. It's not the accent ... just inexperienced speakers who weren't enunciating clearly. (In the main conference, where all the speakers are quite experienced, I found I didn't have trouble understanding anyone.)

Tags: lca2008, conferences
[ 20:50 Jan 30, 2008    More conferences/lca2008 | permalink to this entry ]

Linuxworld 2007

Last week was the annual trek to Linuxworld.

There wasn't much of interest on the exhibit floor. Lots of small companies doing virtualization or sysadmin tools. The usual assortment of publishers. A few big companies, but fewer than in past years. Not much swag. Dave commented that there was a much higher "bunny quotient" this year than last (lots of perky booth bunnies, very few knowledgeable people working the floor). The ratio of Linux to Windows in the big-company booths was much lower than last year, especially at AMD and HP, who both had far more Windows machines visible than Linux ones.

The most interesting new hardware was the Palm Foleo. It looks like a very thin 10-inch screen laptop, much like my own Vaio only much thinner and lighter, with a full QWERTY keyboard with a good feel to it. The booth staff weren't very technical, but apparently it sports a 300MHz Intel processor, built-in wi-fi and bluetooth, a resolution a hair under 1024x768 (I didn't write down the exact numbers and their literature doesn't say), a claimed battery life of 5 hours, and runs a Linux from Wind River. The booth rep I talked to said it would run regular Linux apps once they were recompiled for the processor, but he didn't seem very technical and I doubt it runs X, so I'm not sure I believe that. For a claimed price of around $400 it looks potentially quite interesting.

Their glossy handout says it has VGA out and can display PowerPoint presentations, which was interesting since the only powerpoint reader I know of on Linux is OpenOffice and I don't see that running on 300MHz (considering how slow it is on my P3 700). Apparently they're using Documents To Go from DataVis, a PalmOS app.

Aside from that there wasn't much of interest going on. They split up the "Dot Org Pavilion" this year so not all the community groups were in the same place, which was a bummer -- usually that's where all the interesting booths are (local LUGs, FSF, EFF, Debian, Ubuntu and groups like that: no Mozilla booth this time around). But this year the dotorgs were too spread out to offer a good hangout spot. It didn't look like there was much of interest at the conference either: this year they gave us Exhibit Hall pass attendees a free ticket to attend one of the paid talks, and I couldn't find one on the day we attended that looked interesting enough to bother.

However, that changed at the end of the day with the BOF sessions. The Intel Powertop BOF was an easy choice -- I've been curious about Powertop ever since it was announced, and was eager to hear more about it from one of the developers. The BOF didn't disappoint, though the room did: they didn't even provide a projector (!), so we all had to cluster around the presenter's laptop when he wanted to show something. Too bad! but it didn't keep the BOF from being full of interesting information. I'll split that off into a separate article.

Tags: linux, conferences, linuxworld
[ 11:34 Aug 11, 2007    More conferences | permalink to this entry ]

linux.conf.au 2007

Australia! I spent the last week in Sydney as a speaker for linux.conf.au 2007. My first time overseas, and first time in way too long at a technical Linux conference.

I had lots of plans to write about it as it was happening. Jot down events of the day, impressions of the talks, etc. In retrospect I have no idea how anyone manages to do that. There's just so much stuff going on at LCA that I was busy the whole time. Blogging or sleep ... that might be a hard choice for some people, but I like sleep. Sleep is good. Sleep lets me have a lot more fun at the talks and the social events afterward.

First, about technical conferences. With the emphasis on technical. In California we have a bunch of conferences like Linux World Expo and the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference, where a few geeks-turned-PR-people make whizzy presentations to marketing and CIO sorts. Ick. Sometimes there are a few presentations that are actually technical, but not many. And oh, did I mention the multi-kilobuck reg fees?

Linux.conf.au isn't like that at all. It's all geeks, all the time. Not everyone is a programmer (though the majority are), but of the hundreds of people I talked to during the week of the conference I didn't meet a single person who wasn't deeply and passionately involved with Linux in some way. You could pick any person at random, start a conversation and immediately be deep in conversation about interesting details of some aspect of Linux you hadn't thought much about before.

Picking people at random and talking to them? What sort of a geek would do that? Well, the cool thing is that in an environment like LCA, the shyest geek can still network pretty well. If you can't make small talk or force a fake smile, you can jump to the meaty stuff right away and start trading notes on filesystems or network configuration or IRQs or python GUI toolkits. I was almost late to the post-conference LinuxChix meetup because it turned out the person sitting next to me at breakfast was a udev expert who knew how to get my memory stick reader recognized (more on that in a separate article).

Not that you'd really need to talk to random people if you didn't want to. One of the many highlights of the conference was the chance to meet people from all over the world whom I'd only met before on IRC or mailing lists. I already "knew" lots of people there, even if I'd never seen their faces before.

There were tons of talks, with four or five tracks going at all times, and all on good topics. It was quite common to want to go to two or three or even more simultaneous presentations. Fortunately nearly everything was video taped, so with any luck we'll be able to catch up on sessions that we missed (and folks who couldn't afford the trip can benefit from all the great talks). The videos are still being uploaded and aren't all there yet, but they've done an amazing job getting as many transcoded and uploaded as they have so far, and I'm sure the rest won't be too far behind. (Some of them are on the mirror but not yet linked from the Schedule page.)

How do they get all those great talks? I must say, LCA treats its speakers well. In addition to the super-secret "Speakers Adventure", which we were assured was worth getting up at 6am for (it was), they gave us a dinner cruise on scenic Sydney harbor, which included an after-dinner talk on how to give better talks (focused on flash rather than content). I didn't agree with all his points, but that's okay, the point is to get people thinking. I bet every one of us (certainly everyone I talked to) went back and revised our talks at least a little bit based on the presentation.

I hope my GIMP tutorial and my miniconf bugfixing talk lived up to the organizing committee's expectations -- it's intimidating sharing a schedule with so many smart people who are also good speakers!

The first two days of the conference were taken up by "miniconfs". I originally had my eyes on several of the miniconfs, on topics such as Kernel, Education and Research, though I knew I'd start the day at the LinuxChix miniconf. As it turned out, that miniconf was so excellent that I spent the whole day there. It included a mixture of technical and social issues: talks on women in FOSS (Sulamita), my talk on "Bug Fixing for Non Programmers", "Demystifying PCI" (Kristin), a set of terrific "Lightning Talks" under five minutes, and eventually concluded with talks on networking in the social sense (Jacinta) and negotiating wages (Val). After Jacinta's and Val's talks we broke up into small groups and headed for the lawn outside for some very productive discussions of networking and negotiation, which were so interesting we kept the discussions going all afternoon.

The LinuxChix miniconf was Standing Room Only all day, with plenty of men listening in. It was quite a rush to see so many technical women all together, giving talks and discussing details of Linux and FOSS.

Another miniconf-like activity was Open Day, on Thursday afternoon, when the conference invited people from the area (particularly teachers and students) to wander through displays on all sorts of FOSS topics. There were booths from most of the major distros handing out CDs or inviting people to do network installs, a booth showing the One Laptop Per Child project, booths showing games and interesting projects such as amateur rocket and satellite projects or the open source Segway clone, a Linuxchix booth, and booths from a few companies such as Google. Open Day was jam packed, people seemed to be having fun and they gave away a few amazing prizes, like Vaio laptops (donated by IBM) which came in an amazingly small box. I was itching to see what was in those little boxes (we never get the cool small laptops in the US, where the national philosophy is "Bigger is Better") but alas, I wasn't one of the lucky winners.

A couple of other notable talks I went to: Making Things Move: Finding Inappropriate Uses for Scripting Languages by Jonathan Oxer, which included live demos of hooking up radio switches and controlling them from the commandline (with a little simple C glue); and "burning cpu and battery on the gnome desktop" by Ryan Lortie, who not only gave an excellent and entertaining list of programs and services which use up system resources inefficiently by polling, opening too many files or other evils (several other speakers offered similar lists), but also gave concrete advice for finding such programs and fixing them. I'm looking forward to seeing his slides uploaded (I'll link them here when I find them).

Tags: linux, conferences, lca2007
[ 22:30 Jan 27, 2007    More conferences | permalink to this entry ]