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.

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.

Linux.Conf.Au 2010 in Wellington

Last week I was in Wellington attending Linux.Conf.Au. It was an extremely well run conference, and as has been the case for many years, the highlight of my past twelve months.

I started out by cleverly flying to Auckland and taking the
Overlander train to Wellington, sidestepping the weather that diverted many flights.

The first day was spent in the Ardunio miniconf, soldering the finishing components onto my pebble board (arduino I/O break out shield, kinda). Was exposed to the Aiko library, which essentially provides a mainloop and event callbacks, which very much fits with my view of the world. Managed to burn my hands a couple of times, distraction is a killer. The organisers felt sorry for me and I won an Arduino starters kit, with lots of little odd components. I promptly gave away the actual Arduino as I already have a couple of them.

My favourite talk was on adding GCC Plugins, then the GCC update, then the Linux kernel performance event API.

There were a *tonne* of good talks besides these, and many I couldn’t attend due to lack of personal spatial redundancy.

Yes, like previous years, I intend to do a debrief, at least at Humbug and at work. I’m going to try something different this year and hire out a speaking room at the library as well.

The big news for me personally is that we were finally allowed to tell the world that next years Linux.Conf.Au will be held in Brisbane. I’ve taken on the role of Open Day organiser.

We’re running a competition through our website, followtheflow.org, to solicit ideas to augment the conference. We have a range of free registrations for the most creative ideas that we can actually execute.