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 ]

Powertop BOF at Linuxworld 2007

The best thing at Linuxworld was the Powertop BOF, despite the fact that it ended up stuck in a room with no projector. The presenter, Arjan van de Ven, coped well with the setback and managed just fine.

The main goal of Powertop is to find applications that are polling or otherwise waking the CPU unnecessarily, draining power when they don't need to. Most of the BOF focused on "stupid stuff": programs that wake up too often for no reason. Some examples he gave (many of these will be fixed in upcoming versions of the software):

• gnome-screensaver checked every 2 sec to see if the mouse moved (rather than using the X notification for mouse move);
• gnome volume checked 10 times a second whether the volume has changed;
• gnome-clock woke up once a second to see if the minute had rolled over, rather than checking once a minute;
• firefox in an ssl layer polled 10 times a second in case there was a notification;
• the gnome file monitor woke up 40 times a second to check a queue even if there was nothing in the queue;
• evolution woke up 10 times a second;
• the fedora desktop checked 10 times a second for a smartcard;
• gksu used a 10000x/sec loop (he figures someone mistook milliseconds/microseconds: this alone used up 45 min on one battery test run)
• Adobe's closed-source flash browser plugin woke up 2.5 times a second, and acroread had similar problems (this has been reported to Adobe but it's not clear if a fix is coming any time soon).

And that's all just the desktop stuff, without getting into other polling culprits like hal and the kernel's USB system. The kernel itself is often a significant culprit: until recently, kernels woke up once a millisecond whether they needed to or not. With the recent "tickless" option that appeared in the most recent kernel, 2.6.22, the CPU won't wake up unless it needs to.

A KDE user asked if the KDE desktop was similarly bad. The answer was yes, with a caveat: Arjan said he gave a presentation a while back to a group of KDE developers, and halfway through, one of the developers interrupted him when he pointed out a problem to say "That's not true any more -- I just checked in a fix while you were talking." It's nice to hear that at least some developers care about this stuff! Arjan said most developers responded very well to patches he'd contributed to fix the polling issues.

(Of course, those of us who use lightweight window managers like openbox or fvwm have already cut out most of these gnome and kde power-suckers. The browser issues were the only ones that applied to me, and I certainly do notice firefox' polling: when the laptop gets slow, firefox is almost always the culprit, and killing it usually brings performance back.)

As for hardware, he mentioned that some linux LCD drivers don't really dim the backlight when you reduce brightness -- they just make all the pixels darker. (I've been making a point of dimming my screen when running off batteries; time to use that Kill-A-Watt and find out if it actually matters!) Wireless cards like the ipw100 use a lot of power even when not transmitting -- sometimes even more than when they're transmitting -- so turning them off can be a big help. Using a USB mouse can cut as much as half an hour off a battery. The 2.6.23 kernel has lots of new USB power saving code, which should help. Many devices have activity every millisecond, so there's lots of room to improve.

Another issue is that even if you get rid of the 10x/sec misbehavers, some applications really do need to wake up every second or so. That's not so bad by itself, but if you have lots of daemons all waking up at different times, you end up with a CPU that never gets to sleep.

The solution is to synchronize them by rounding the wakeup times to the nearest second, so that they all wake up at about the same time, and the CPU can deal with them all then go back to sleep. But there's a trick: each machine has to round to a different value. You don't want every networking application on every machine across the internet all waking up at once -- that's a good way to flood your network servers. Arjan's phrase: "You don't want to round the entire internet" [to the same value].

The solution is a new routine in glib: timeout_add_seconds. It takes a hash of the hostname (and maybe other values) and uses that to decide where to round timeouts for the current machine. If you write programs that wake up on a regular basis, check it out. In the kernel, round_jiffies does something similar.

After all the theory, we were treated to a demo of powertop in action. Not surprisingly, it looks a bit like top. High on the screen is summary information telling you how much time your CPU is spending in the various sleep states. Getting into the deeper sleep states is generally best, but it's not quite that simple: if you're only getting there for short periods, it takes longer and uses more power to get back to a running state than it would from higher sleep states.

Below that is the list of culprits: who is waking your CPU up most often? This updates every few seconds, much like the top program. Some of it's clear (names of programs or library routines); other lines are more obscure if you're not a kernel hacker, but I'm sure they can all be tracked down.

At the bottom of the screen is a geat feature: a short hint telling you how you could eliminate the current top offender (e.g. kill the process that's polling). Not only that, but in many cases powertop will do it for you at the touch of a key. Very nice! You can try disabling things and see right away whether it helped.

Arjan stepped through killing several processes and showing the power saving benefits of each one. (I couldn't help but notice, when he was done, that the remaining top offender, right above nautilus, was gnome-power-manager. Oh, the irony!)

It's all very nifty and I'm looking forward to trying it myself. Unfortunately, I can't do that on the laptop where I really care about battery life. Powertop requires a kernel API that went in with the "tickless" option, meaning it's in 2.6.22 (and I believe it's available as a patch for 2.6.21). My laptop is stuck back on 2.6.18 because of an IRQ handling bug (bug 7264). Powertop also requires ACPI, which I have to disable because of an infinite loop in kacpid (bug 8274, Ubuntu bug 75174). It's frustrating to have great performance tools like powertop available, yet not be able to use them because of kernel regressions. But at least I can experiment with it on my desktop machine.

Tags: linux, conferences, linuxworld, laptops, gnome
[ 13:06 Aug 12, 2007    More linux | 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 ]

A Week of Linux Get-Togethers

It's been a week jam-packed with Linuxy stuff.

Wednesday I made my annual one-day trip to Linuxworld in San Francisco. There wasn't much of great interest at the conference this year: the usual collection of corporate booths (minus Redhat, notably absent this year), virtualization as a hot keyword (but perhaps less than the last two years) and a fair selection of sysadmin tools, not much desktop Linux (two laptop vendors), and a somewhat light "Dot Org" area compared to the last few years.

I was happy to notice that most of the big corporate booths were running Linux on a majority of show machines, a nice contrast from earlier years. (Dell was the exception, with more Windows than Linux, but even they weren't all Windows.)

Linuxworld supposedly offers a wireless network but I never managed to get it to work, either in the exhibit hall or in the building where the BOFs were held.

Wednesday afternoon's BOF list didn't offer much that immediately grabbed me, but in the end I chose one on introducing desktop Linux to corporate environments. Run by a couple of IBM Linux advocates, the BOF turned out to be interesting and well presented, offering lots of sensible advice (base your arguments to management on business advantages, like money saved or increased ability to get the job done, not on promises of cool features; don't aim for a wholesale switch to Linux, merely for a policy which allows employees to choose; argue for standards-based corporate infrastructure since that allows for more choice and avoids lock-in). There was plenty of discussion between the audience and the folks leading the BOF, and I think most attendees got something out of it.

More interesting than Linuxworld was Friday's Ubucon, a free Ubuntu conference held at Google (and spilling over into Saturday morning). Despite a lack of advertising, the Ubucon was very well attended. There were two tracks, ostensibly "beginner" and "expert", but even aside from my own GIMP talk being a "beginner" topic, I ended up hanging out in the "beginner" room for the whole day, for topics like "Power Management", "How to Get Involved", and "What Do Non Geeks Need?" (the last topic dovetailing into the concluding session Linux corporate desktops).

All of the sessions were quite interactive with lots of discussion and questions from the audience. Everyone looked like they were having a good time, and I'm sure several of us are motivated to get more deeply involved with Ubuntu.

Ubucon was a great example of a low-key, fun, somewhat technical conference on a shoestring budget and I'd love to see more conferences like this in the bay area.

Finally, the week wrapped up with the annual Linux Picnic in Sunnyvale, a Silicon Valley tradition for many years and always a good time. There were some organizational glitches this year ... but it's hard to complain much about a free geek picnic in perfect weather complete with t-shirts, an installfest, a raffle and even (by mid-afternoon) a wireless network. Fun stuff!

Tags: linux, conferences, linuxworld, ubucon, ubuntu
[ 19:52 Aug 19, 2006    More conferences | permalink to this entry ]

Linuxworld San Francisco, 2005

There's really not much to say about Linuxworld this year. It was smaller than last year (they moved it across the street to the "little" Moscone hall) and the mood seemed a bit subdued.

SWAG was way down: to get anything remotely cool you generally had to register to watch a presentation that gave you a chance to get something to wear that would enter you for a chance to win something cool later. Or similar indirections. You had to be pretty desperate. But maybe people were, since I saw lines at some of the booths.

I did my annual sweep of the big booths to see who was running Linux on their show machines. This year was the first time that all the major booths used predominately Linux (except on machines running fullscreen presentation software, where it's impossible to tell). It was a huge change from past shows -- I stopped keeping tabs after a while. I saw only one or two confirmed Windows machines each at most of the big booths, like Intel, AMD, IBM, Sun, and even HP. They seemed fairly evenly divided between SuSE and Redhat.

At the AMD booth, lots of machines sported cardboard signs saying "Powered by Redhat" or "Powered by SuSE". One of the "Powered by Redhat" machines clearly had a Start menu, so I had to ask. The AMD rep gave me a song and dance about virtualization technologies, pointing out that although the machine was running Windows, it displayed both Redhat and SuSE windows which he said were running on the same machine. Okay, that's a perfectly good reason to be running Windows at a Linux convention. No points off there. I suspect most of the booths showing Windows had similar excuses.

"Virtualization is the wave of the future! Everybody here is displaying virtualization technologies," the AMD rep told me. Indeed, virtualization was everywhere. I don't know that I'm convinced it's the wave of the future, but there was no question that it was the wave of the present at this year's Linuxworld.

Sweeping the hall, I passed by the Adobe booth, where someone was giving a presentation to an audience of maybe ten people. The projector showed a window which showed ... nothing. A blank window border with nothing inside. "Now, it's connecting to San Jose", explained the presenter with apparent pride, "to get permission to display the document." I kept walking . It hadn't finished connecting yet by the time I was out of earshot. Perhaps the audience was somehow persuaded by this demo to buy Adobe software. I guess you never know what people will like.

A bit past Adobe was the weirdest booth of the exhibit hall: SolovatSoft, offering offshore software development at rates starting at $18/hour. Honest, this was an actual booth at Linuxworld. I should have taken my camera.

Gone were most of the nifty embedded Linux displays of yesteryear. I saw only two: one (Applieddata.net, I think) which I've seen there before, showing an array of fun-looking custom embedded platforms of all sizes, and another showing Linux on various cellphones and similar consumer devices. Only one laptop maker (Emperor) made it there, and none of the smaller-than-laptop manufacturers -- I was hoping Nokia, Sharp, Psion or some other maker of nifty Linux PDAs might be there.

The "Dot Org Pavilion", the place where free software groups like Debian, Mozilla, the FSF, and the EFF have their booths, was on a completely separate floor, and would have been easy to miss if you didn't look at the maps in the convention guide. But it wasn't all bad: someone on a LUG mailing list pointed out that this put them in a nice quiet area away from the raucous advertising of the big commercial booths in the main hall, so you could actually have a conversation with the booth folks. Also, the dot-orgs got a nice view out the second-floor windows compared to the cavernous indoor commercial hall.

I only went to one keynote, "The Explosive Growth of Linux and Open Source: What Does It All Mean?" The description made it look like a panel discussion, but it was really just five prepared speeches: three suits repeating buzzwords (Dave and I amused ourselves counting the uses of the word "exciting", and with Toastmasters reflexes I couldn't help counting the "ah"s) and two more interesting talks (well, okay, Eben Moglen was also wearing a suit but at least he didn't spend his whole talk telling us about the exciting opportunities ahead for company X).

I would have liked to have heard Mike Shaver's keynote on web technologies, but it wasn't worth going back to San Francisco for a second day just for that.

In the end, the real highlight of the day was hooking up with Sonja at the Novell/SuSE booth for a nice lunch. Hooray for conferences that give you an excuse to meet friends from far away! Catching up with some of the Mozilla crowd was good, too. That made the trip worth it even if the exhibit hall didn't offer much.

Tags: linux, conferences, linuxworld
[ 21:25 Aug 11, 2005    More conferences | permalink to this entry ]

James Todd, Sun, and Linux

A Sun employee named James Todd has been posting paeans to Sun and their Linux support on the svlug list (the thread). I don't intend to follow up to that thread, because I expect after 18 messages in four days (including 9 from jwtodd spanning over 800 lines) I expect most folks on the list would prefer to move on to other topics.

James attacks me repeatedly for my earlier blog entry wherein I say that the machines I saw in the Sun booth were all running Windows. He says he worked in the booth, and there were no Windows machines there.

If that's true, then that's terrific! I'm very happy to hear that all the machines I saw with "Start" menus and Redmond-looking icons and themes were actually just a theme Sun puts on their Linux (or Solaris?) desktop boxes. I don't know why Sun feels it necessary to make Linux look just like Windows -- maybe that's part of their theory that you don't need to know what OS you're on (which is really quite a good idea for corporate installations, and reportedly is working quite well internally at Sun). Perhaps they further assume that if they make the non-Windows installations look like Windows, people will be more accepting of the idea. I'm not sure this part is a good idea -- wouldn't it be better if the theme sent the message "Sun" rather than "Windows", so customers don't get the idea that they can just zip off to Dell or somewhere and buy cheaper machines that will do the same thing? Wouldn't it be better marketing at a show like Linux World to show off a theme that didn't look like Windows?

But that's all marketing. If the machines were in fact running Linux and Solaris, I'm happy to hear that I was wrong. Time will tell whether the Windows-like theme is the choice, and whether Sun sticks with Linux in the long run. Of course I hope they do, and that they succeed in selling linux boxes to corporate customers, and that the recent settlement agreement with Microsoft does not herald a withdrawal from open source, as it has with some other companies.

(Whether Sun has helped open source is not at issue, and never was part of this debate, as far as I know. They've already contributed quite a bit, with the Open Office project, and with contributions to Gnome and Mozilla accessibility and internationalization.)

Tags: linux, conferences, linuxworld, marketing
[ 13:29 Aug 10, 2004    More linux | permalink to this entry ]

Picnix 13

Hey, cool! The Linux Picnix 13 T-shirts came in a women's version! Looked like they had a bunch -- I hope they don't end up with too many extras and regret making them, 'cause they're very nice and I'd love to see this catch on. (It's black, so maybe not too useful outdoors, but it looks great.) (Followup: actually it's very thin fabric and even outdoors it's okay.) The picnic was fun, too, and well organized. Oracle sponsored the food. Thanks to Google, Oracle, and the Linux Picnix crew (Bill Kendrick, Bill Ward and whoever else helped out).

Tags: linux, conferences, chix
[ 23:05 Aug 07, 2004    More linux | permalink to this entry ]

Linux World Expo 2004

I just got back from Linuxworld.

The exhibit floor isn't very different from last year. A few more desktop booths, a few fewer embedded and small (e.g. PDA) booths, still dominated by server oriented exhibits -- clustering, network monitoring and similar sysadmin tools. The "Dot Org Pavilion" was quite a bit bigger than last year (which I like, since that's where most of the interest is for me).

The most interesting corporate booth was Psion, which was showing a small device midway between a large PDA (like their old Revo) and a small subnotebook (like my Vaio SR). It has a keyboard that looks smaller than my Vaio's, but which types very well, surprisingly comparable to the Sony. It uses CF as its main disk, but also has a SD/MMC slot, and PCMCIA and USB (no actual hard drive). And a touchscreen. They claim 8 hours battery life. They told Dave that it might sell for around $1000-1500 (too much, probably because of the touchscreen).

They've been trying to sell the hardware as a WinCE box to corporate buyers and vertical markets, and I guess it isn't doing well, so they put linux on it (a Debian variant) and brought two of them to the show to gauge interest. It looked like they weren't expecting any interest at all: their booth was spare, with a table with two of the devices on it, one guy who seemed to know something and two women who just stood around and didn't seem inclined to talk to anyone or answer questions. No fliers, no sign, no nuthin. There were people crowded around the booth (not thickly, but a few) both times I passed. Perhaps they'll decide there's enough interest to go ahead.

The linuxastronomy.com guy was there again (with a friend) showing off a live homebuilt seismometer, recording on the show floor. Very cool. Someone who came to visit the booth showed his latest hack, a knoppix that boots from an NTFS partition (so it's fast and doesn't require a CD). I suggested he show it to the open source in education guy in the booth next door, since I'd just been commiserating with him about how hard it is to get people at schools (or any Windows users, really) to try something like Knoppix.

The Mozilla booth was doing great and always had a crowd around it. Apparently they sold out of the plush firefox toys immediately, surprising everyone since they hadn't been selling on the web site. The Debian and local LUG (shared between LUGoD, SVLUG, PenLUG and BayLUG) booths were both doing well, and the Gentoo booth always had a few visitors typing on the demo machines. The Fedora staffer looked lonely; hardly anyone seemed interested in the Fedora booth.

I did my usual quick survey of which of the big booths were running linux in their booth. Oracle and Redhat were clear winners, with no definite Windows boxes (a few in each case which were running full screen presentation software so I couldn't tell what the OS was). Sun was the worst, with only one Linux box I saw, and the rest all Windows: no Solaris that I saw. AMD leaned toward Linux (maybe 60%), Veritas leaned the other way (60% Windows) and IBM was about 50-50 (no better than last year).

The "Golden Penguin Bowl" was strange. It's a trivia contest between two teams of luminaries; but in this case, one team (the Nerds) was three big-name Linux luminaries, and the other team (the Geeks) was all Apple or BSD people with no connection to Linux at all. Dave kept wondering, "And his connection to Linux is ...?" About half the questions dealt with sci-fi rather than computers, and the Geeks had a strong lead there, but the Nerds cleaned up on the computer questions and ended up with the prize. Timothy D. Witham (of OSDL) was particularly impressive with his knowledge of obscure CPUs, and got several major ovations from the audience after correcting the judges.

Then it was BOF time, and I chose the Zeroconf BOF. I'd done a little research into Zeroconf a month ago for a possible article, but hadn't been able to get it to work, and ran into a snag that the sourceforge page on zcip says it's been removed because of Apple asserting intellectual property rights over the protocol. I hoped that the BOF would shed some light on what I was missing.

Boy, was that wrong! The BOF was a long advertisement for Apple, run by an Apple employee, Stuart Cheshire, and an Apple user (and former employee? I wasn't clear). It consisted of a powerpoint presentation followed by numerous demos of two Mac laptops talking to each other, or a Mac laptop talking to some obscure-but-nifty piece of hardware that implements rendezvous (or whatever Apple is calling it now). After about an hour of this I finally asked where linux fit in, and the answer boiled down to, "Gee, linux doesn't really do zeroconf very well and we wish it did, we're hoping someone writes it."

He mentioned zcip as one of the options, so I made the mistake of asking about the message on sourceforge about Apple's patents, and got a long lecture on how beneficent apple was and how they'd never sue anyone other than in self defense, and anyone who says otherwise is probably trying to push an anti-patent political agenda, but poor apple has to have patents to protect itself from mean companies. And besides, he thinks the patent expired a couple of weeks ago, but it was a good patent, which may seem obvious now but probably wasn't back when it was issued.

Hoping to get back on track after unintentionally derailling the conversation, I asked what Linux users should use given that his first suggestion, zcip, was unavailable. He mentioned HOWL, by Scott Herscher (who was there at the session), which implements all three parts of zeroconf. Googling later at home, I found it at Porchdog software. It's apparently a mixture of BSD licensed code and Apple licensed code. But it doesn't seem to require signing the Apple developer agreement to download it. I haven't tried it yet.

He said that the zcip part of zeroconf would be much better implemented in the kernel, where it would be only about twelve lines of additional code. (He seemed to be talking about the "choose a random number, check for traffic, and back off if it's occupied" portion. Isn't there more to zcip than that? Or is the rest already there in the kernel?) He wondered why no one was adding it. Dave asked, "So, why don't you do it? C'mon, just twelve lines!" Stuart was not amused, and said that while writing the twelve lines wasn't a problem, setting up the build environment for the kernel takes a lot of time, far more than he had available.

Speaking of that Apple license and agreement, Stuart says that there's nothing prohibiting Apple licensed code like zeroconf from being distributed in any linux distro, and he seemed surprised and perturbed that no distro was shipping it (of course, the fact that it just released a couple weeks ago might have something to do with that. :-)

Other bits I wasn't previously clear on: a machine can have a link local address and a regular IP address concurrently, on the same ethernet card. I'm not clear how this shows up in ifconfig (if it does). Link local addressing is not required for the other two parts of zeroconf: MDNS and service discovery should work even over normal IP addresses.

Some of the docs on the web about zeroconf say that MS is backing a service discovery protocol called SLP, rather than the DNS-SD protocol used by Apple, and that most people think SLP scales much better than DNS-SD. As presented at the BOF, both Apple and MS support Rendezvous as it exists now (but then why point out that Apple's Rendezvous is now available for Windows? If Windows already does it, why would anyone need to register with Apple and download different software? I wasn't clear on that) and UPNP, backed by MS, is losing ground and probably won't win in the long run. Perhaps UPNP is a renaming of SLP. I declined to ask about the scaling issues, having already unwittingly caused enough trouble asking about patents.

Great quote from Stuart, possibly sufficient to justify sitting through an hour and a half of Apple advertising: he was talking about somebody having trouble with a networked printer which it turned out had been configured to have a non-default IP, then returned to Fry's, and added "Fry's is the Silicon Valley Hardware Lending Library."

Incidentally, the BOF area was supposed to have wi-fi, with an essid that was given on the signs, but I got "access point out of range". I guess I really should try one of the other drivers, linux-wlan or hostap. Dancer says hostap is easier to set up, and apparently it uses the normal wireless-tools, unlike linux-wlan which uses its own set of tools. I don't need hostap mode, but if it's a good driver for normal client use then I guess that's what matters. Though the Apple people didn't see a network either, but maybe that's because they didn't know about the essid.

Tags: linux, conferences, linuxworld
[ 22:36 Aug 03, 2004    More conferences | permalink to this entry ]