Stationary Traveller

I went to Jonathan Corbet's yearly update of the status of the Linux kernel. He talked about the various big changes that went into the kernel over the last year as well as the development processes. The Linux kernel is probably one of the largest open source projects, and very healthy - there are a lot of individuals and companies contributing to it. With this size
comes a few interesting challenges coping with the flow of changes into Linus' tree. Their current processes seem to deal with this quite well, and don't seem to need a lot of major changes at the moment.

His talk also included the obligatory list of features that landed in the last year. The only one that really matters to me is the Nouveau driver, which I'm looking forward to trying out.

The second talk I went to in the morning was Selena Deckelmann's overview of the Open Source database landscape. She mentioned there's new projects started daily, but it was still a bit disappointing not to see TDB up there.

After lunch Rob gave a talk about Subunit, introducing to the ideas behind the Subunit protocol as well as presenting an overview of the tools that are available for it and the projects that have Subunitized as of yet. It's exciting to see the Subunit universe slowly growing, I wasn't aware of some of the projects that are using it. The recently announced
testrepository also looks interesting, even though it is still very rudimentary at the moment.

In the evening Tridge, Rusty, Andrew, Jeremy,AJ and I participated in the hackoff as the "Samba Team".

The hackoff was a lot of fun, and consisted of 6 problems, each of which involved somehow decoding the data file for the problem and extracting a short token from it in one way or another, which was required to retrieve the next problem. We managed to solve 4 problems in the hour that the organizers had allocated, and ended first because we were a bit quicker in solving the 4th problem than the runner-ups. No doubt the fact that we were the largest team had something to do with this.

I hung out with some of the awesome Git and Github developers in the Malthouse in the evening, and talked about Dulwich, Bazaar and Launchpad ("No *really*, I am not aware of any plans to add Git support to Launchpad.").