lca2020 ReWatch 2020-02-02

As I was an organiser of the conference this year, I didn’t get to see many talks, fortunately many of the talks were recorded, so i get to watch the conference well after the fact.

Conference Opening

That white balance on the lectern slides is indeed bad, I really should get around to adding this as a suggestion on the logos documentation. (With some help, I put up all the lectern covers, it was therapeutic and rush free).

I actually think there was a lot of information in this introduction. Perhaps too much?

OpenZFS and Linux

A nice update on where zfs is these days.

Dev/Ops relationships, status: It’s Complicated

A bit of  a war story about production systems, leading to a moment of empathy.

Samba 2020: Why are we still in the 1980s for authentication?

There are a lot of old security standards that are showing there age, there are a lot of modern security standards, but which to choose?

Tyranny of the Clock

A very interesting problem solving adventure, with a few nuggets of interesting information about tools and techniques.

Configuration Is (riskier than?) Code

Because configuration files are parsed by a program, and the program changes how it runs depending on the contents of that configuration file, every program that parses configuration files is basically an interpreter, and thus every configuration file is basically a program. So, configuation is code, and we should be treating configuration like we do code, e.g. revision control, commenting, testing, review.

Easy Geo-Redundant Handover + Failover with MARS + systemd

Using a local process organiser to handle a cluster, interesting, not something I’d really promote. Not the best video cutting in this video, lots of time with the speaker pointing to his slides offscreen.

 

Access and Memory: Open GLAM and Open Source

Over the years of my involvement with library projects, like Coder Dojo, programming workshops and such, I’ve struggled to nail down the intersection between libraries and open source. At this years linux.conf.au in Sydney (my seventeenth!) I’m helping to put together a miniconf to answer this question: Open GLAM. If you do work in the intersection of galleries, libraries, archives, musuems and open source, we’d love to hear from you.

Camp JS

Camp JS was a weekend conference held at Koonjewarre down at Springbrook.

The area the accommodation in was lovely, if the weather had been better I would have definitely done a little bush walking. The accommodation itself was pretty basic, but along with your own sleeping bag and pillow was reasonable for a weekend, but would start getting a bit painful for longer stays. The food on offer was very good for the most part, except for one meal, but that turned out to be a backup meal.

The conference did have planned workshops all weekend, and some of these were very good. However the main point of the conference was not attending the workshops, it was interacting with other developers, both on a technical and social level.

On the upside were some impressive international guests and sponsors. On the downside for me were the smokers who always smoked just outside whatever building I was in. On the interesting side was the open bar, free beer and wine for all, at any time, without any problems whatsoever; something to think about given lca’s recent moves to restrict alcohol access.

linux.conf.au 2011 braindump

I finished up at work last Friday, then headed down to TAM over the weekend, then at YOW back in Brisbane, both very worthwhile conferences to attend.

My current plan is to work on linux.conf.au for the next six weeks or so; there’s plenty to do. As an experiment, I’m also trying to give up caffeine..

The Cake

All the important pieces are in place: speakers, venue and accommodation. I got to be on the papers committee this year, and I’m really happy with the quality of presentations we’ve accepted. The venue, QUT Gardens Point, is right in the heart of the city, next to the lovely city gardens. Due to QUT starting off life as a technical college it has no on-campus accommodation, but we’ve managed to secure some new student-style accommodation just across the river.

The Icing

The keynotes we’ve been able to attract are pretty stunning, we’ve got some really useful tutorials as well. All of the social events are organised in the main. We’ve got fifteen miniconfs this year, with an awful lot of content.

Open Day

My main responsibility is the Open Day, plans are coming together well, though I’m still behind the eight ball a bit and have a few groups to get back to. We’re hoping to announce a new addition to the Open Day soon, some public lectures.

Posters

We’re accepting posters this year, you can think of posters as a visual lightning talk. Posters can be on any Open Source project, they can be technical in nature, or can be art in their own right. We’re going to be accepting posters right up until the conference starts.

Communications

I’ve been doing interviews, spamming mailing lists, handing out business cards and attending conferences in order to spread the word about lca being in Brisbane, but I get the strong feeling lots of people still don’t know about it. Any suggestions on how to get the word out there would be appreciated.

linux.conf.au 2011: The importance of a floating position

When I put my hand up to help with linux.conf.au 2011 I realised how much work it was going to be. I’d (just barely) helped with the previous lca in Brisbane, and shared a workplace with the chief stress bunny (Raymond Smith) so got to see a lot of the really tedious, difficult stuff that just needs to happen.

I’m not very good at that sort of stuff, I’m much better with short sharp tasks that need to happen yesterday. I’ve put my hand up to run the Open Day as my main task, but I also let it be known I was happy to jump into the breach when needed. So far that’s happened a few times, and I’m happy I didn’t take on too much stuff and have some floating time available to me. I think it’s really important for an all volunteer group to have a few people with spare cycles.

A new website with content is soon to go live, the call for papers is almost ready to go, and we’re starting to sniff around for volunteers.

PyCon AU 2010

Tonight I booked flights and accommodation for PyCon Au 2010. I’m going to be presenting a forty five minute presentation on PyProcessing, the Python port of Processing which is designed to make it easy to get into graphical oriented programming.

I’m staying at the lovely Pensione hotel, which is only a few hundred metres from the venue.

$95 Arduino workshop at The Edge, bookings close Sunday

A couple of friends of mine from NICTA are running an Ardunio sensing workshop over the first and second of May, I’ll be helping out.

For full details see the main post.

Ignite Brisbane

Ignite talks are similar in style to Pecha Kucha presentations but even shorter at fifteen seconds for each of twenty automatically progressed slides.

I recently had a chance to talk about the Open Source Ethos at Brisbane’s first Ignite event.

We had every different talk style imaginable, from infinitely nested bullet pointed lists to single-word-per-slide to stock photos. I liked Hannah Suarez but my favourite talk was Guy Yug‘s talk about setting up Mana Bar.

I wasn’t really happy with a lot of my slides, but I was happy with how they were organised – a simple timeline of open source achievements. I had to submit the slides a couple of weeks in advance of giving the presentation, removing the temptation of changing the slides greatly eased coming up with the captions. I’m not sure what really prompted me to do it, but I changed the opening line of the talk in my head just minutes prior to going on stage, channelling Rusty a bit maybe. I wasn’t at all nervous; until I got up on stage and started fumbling with the mics.

Oh, although the movie up above appears to show me completely out of sync with my slides, I was actually pretty close most of the time. I practised by the obvious way, staring directly at my slides on my computer till I got the timing right. On the night there was no presenter facing monitor, so I ended up turning around to look at the screen to get in sync, which was distracting. I’m happy with how I went though, read that as I managed to get through all my lines without falling in a big heap :)

Gimp workshop at The Edge

A free Gimp workshop is being held at
The Edge.

When: Wednesday 7 April and Wednesday 5 May 2010, from 4pm to 6pm.

Humbug meta

One complaint I often hear about Humbug is how difficult it is to attend our weekend meetings due to our Saturday timetable.

In an attempt to make Humbug a little more accessible I’ve got some week-night room bookings at Brisbane’s Central Library, from six to eight pm.

I’m calling these meetings Humbug^meta for the time being.

These meetings are much shorter than the regular Humbug meetings, so I expect they’ll be different in style.

Plans are very fluid at the moment, possible things to do are:

• talks
• workshops
• computer help
• presentation practices

As Humbug likes to see itself as an umbrella group, these bookings are available for use by any tech / design / edu group if they need a space for whatever reason. I’m particularly hopeful that groups will use the space for speakers that have a wider audience than their own group.

Wifi should be available to those with a library account.

The actual dates I’ve got booked are:

• March 24
• April 29
• May 14
• June 21
• July 22
• August 25
• September 22
• October 28
• November 25
• December 22

I’ll be shutting up a little early this Wednesday to attend Pecha Kucha.