Stationary Traveller - uk

SambaXP and other travel

nospam@example.com (Jelmer Vernooij) — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:03:04 +0200

It's been a busy two weeks. Wilco and I drove up to Göttingen on Sunday two weeks ago to spend some days hacking and meeting up with the other developers before the start of SambaXP. It was really nice to see everybody again after more than 7 months.

SambaXP was a bit different this year. There were three tracks during the second part of the conference this year, one more than previously and of course, there were several engineers from Microsoft attending this time! Some of the interesting talks this year included Julien's update on OpenChange, Tridge's talk on PFIF, the talk from the likewise folks and of course the talk from Microsofts' Wolfgang Grieskamp on SMB2. We also had some other informal discussions with the Microsoft folks about specific topics - very useful!

There are some photos up on the SambaXP homepage. And just to be ahead of the comments: yes, I know I need a haircut.

I did some initial work on several bits and pieces of code that I hope to expand over the next few months. Volker has started working on ncacn_ip_tcp support and I have been working on making the Samba 3 DCE/RPC library compatible with Samba 4. This should allow OpenChange to use Samba 3 in the future.

Guenther, Wilco and I made some initial progress on the policy library, allowing client-side manipulation of (group) policies in Samba. I worked with Simo on trying to get rid of an evil hack in Samba4's event subsystem.

David Holder blogged about some of the IPv6 development that we did during the conference: http://www.ipv6consultancy.com/ipv6blog/?p=34

And lots of other things I can't remember at the moment...

After the conference Andrew, Wilco and I drove back to the Netherlands and I played tour guide for a bit showing Andrew around the country during the afternoon and hacking Samba together in the morning. Later this week we took the train to Brussels, Eurostar to London and visited Sam's company
in the UK Midlands for a couple of days.

And in the midst of all this, it seems Ubuntu Hardy was released. Congratulations to all those involved!

cp: Brandi Carlile - Turpentine

LUG Radio Live

nospam@example.com (Jelmer Vernooij) — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 14:58:09 +0200

Just got back to the hotel after LUG Radio Live and the afterparty event. I guess the best way to describe LUG Radio live is as a your average geek conference but with a bit of a rock concert flavor: lots of cheering on, groupies, swearing, simple humor and metal music being played in between between sessions.

The talks were very good; in particular I liked Nat Friedman's talk about, among other things, the way the Oxford English Dictionary was developed (although he still doesn't seem to understand what is so bad about the MS-Novell deal) and Aaron Seigo's talk on KDE 4 (made my fingers itchy and want to contribute..). The short talk Szilveszter and I gave on bzr-gtk went ok, but was probably not all that entertaining right after Malcolm's talk on zombies and Ubuntu.

The major thing I disliked is the fact that the wireless was very crappy. I got it to work on two occassions, just long enough to read a few emails. It took a while to get used to the weird accent with which they speak English around here and I seem to've picked up a few swearwords that I now have to unlearn again. Doh.

All in all really worth the trip from Amsterdam and definitely something to keep in mind for next year!

Erik and I decided to stay an extra day to see a bit of Wolverhampton and Birmingham, but it turns out that there really isn't that much
worthwile to see around here.

London

nospam@example.com (Jelmer Vernooij) — Sat, 19 May 2007 16:56:19 +0200

I'm currently doing a bit of sightseeing in London, after attending the
Bazaar sprint at the Canonical office. It was a good sprint, and a bit
different from the previous ones in that there was only a limit amount of
actual coding involved. The view from the Canonical office is magnificent, so we were even able to do some sightseeing while working; (-:

Bazaars' focus has previously mainly been on correctness and features. The
first has always been one of our strengths, and we're in pretty good shape
regarding the second. Performance has been one of the main complaints from
users about Bazaar and so we've recently tried to get better in that area.

Since 0.12, we have already tried to optimise some of the common code paths and
some people have been working on a high performance smart server (to speed up
remote operations).

During the first two-and-a-half days of the sprint, we have analysed 20
of the most common use cases with Bazaar and determined what complexity they
should ideally require to be able to work. After this analysis, we looked at
ways to change our data structures to reach these goals.

I've been mainly a spectator during the latter parts of these discussion, but
they were interesting to follow.

One of the things I worked on were support for true push in bzr-svn. This was
one of the bugs that bit a lot of users of bzr-svn. The upcoming bzr-svn 0.4
now supports true push as well as commits in heavyweight checkouts. I hope to
release 0.4 after adding nested tree and ignores support so that I don't
have to upgrade the mappings again.

Ah well, time for some more sightseeing and getting back to the reason I'm working on all this: Samba!

UK Summer

nospam@example.com (Jelmer Vernooij) — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:22:57 +0200

Great Brittain appears to be the place to be this summer;a lot of the annual conferences are held in various cities around the UK this year: DebConf (Edinborough, 17-23 June), GUADEC (Birmingham, 15-21 July), Akademy (Glasgow, 30 June-7 July) and last but not least Bazaar (London, 14-20 May).

I'll be attending at least the Bazaar sprint and LUG Radio Live, but I also hope to drop by GUADEC if I can find the time.

Bazaar Sprint

nospam@example.com (Jelmer Vernooij) — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 01:06:00 +0200

It's been a fun week. I visited the Bazaar sprint in London with LarstIQ and enjoyed meeting up with the core developers. Especially the pair-programming and test driven development was very interesting; the number of lines of code I wrote was fewer than usual, but I never spent so little time on debugging. Among the things I worked on were Commit Builder with Robert and some more work on bzr-svn.

The Arrow Rock festival yesterday was great. I was a little skeptical about Porcupine Tree's live performance, but I was very pleasantly surprised. Roger Waters' show was shorter than announced (3 hours) but very good nonetheless. Queensryche was the only disappointment - they played only a few old songs and their sound was noisy (at least from where I was standing).