LCA Thursday (Shallow Thoughts)

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!