Stationary Traveller - conferences

Linux.Conf.Au 2010 - Day 3 - Wednesday

nospam@example.com (Jelmer Vernooij) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:06:17 +0000

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.").

Linux.Conf.Au 2010 - Day 2 - Tuesday

nospam@example.com (Jelmer Vernooij) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:44:24 +0000

On Tuesday we had the "Launchpad" mini-conf, which featured talks from various Launchpad developers about different parts of Launchpad as well as from community members about their use of Launchpad. It wasn't necessarily about hosting projects on Launchpad, but rather about how various projects could benefit from Launchpad.

I popped out of Launchpad track for a bit to attend Andrews talk about the current status of Samba 4. He did a nice job of summarizing the events in the last year, the most of import one of course being the support for DC synchronization. I'm proud we've finally managed to pull this off - and hopefully we'll actually have a beta out next year. We have been saying "maybe next year" for almost 4 years now when people asked us for estimates of a release date.

In the afternoon I gave the talk about Launchpad code imports and code reviews that I had prepared with Aaron earlier. We had planned to give the talk together, but I unexpectedly ended up giving it by myself because of some confusion about the schedule.

Linux.Conf.Au 2010 - Day 1

nospam@example.com (Jelmer Vernooij) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:15:45 +0000

Linux.Conf.Au has a reputation for being one of the best FLOSS conferences in the world, and it more than met my (high) expectations. The last one I attended was also in New-Zealand, but further south - in Dunedin.

Day 1 - Monday

As usual there were miniconfs the first two days before the actual conference. On the first day I attended some of the talks in the Open Languages track.

mwhudson gave a talk about pypy - Python implemented in Python. He discussed the reasons for doing what they do and the progress they've made so far. Like so many of the custom Python implementations, one of the main thing that's holding them back is the lack of support for the extensions written in C for CPython.

Rusty gave a quick tutorial to talloc/ after lunch ("it's a shame K&R didn't think of this!") and explained why it's so great.

In the afternoon I caught some of the talks in the distro summit track. Both of the talks that I attended happened to be Ubuntu-related - first Dustin gave a quick introduction to the components of Launchpad, followed by a talk from Lucas about the
relationship between Ubuntu and Debian. There was a discussion afterwards about
interoperability between the various hosting sites and bug trackers. Several audience members questioned the relevance of Debian and suggested everything should just switch to Launchpad, but this seemed to be founded in ignorance. (none were actually Launchpad developers, contrary to the impression Martin seems to have).

FOSDEM 2009

nospam@example.com (Jelmer Vernooij) — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 03:08:00 +0000

Back from another awesome FOSDEM weekend. Finding good food in the Brussels city center is still as hard as it ever was, but at least the beer was good. Only attended two talks, but met lots of nice people.

Ubucon.de

nospam@example.com (Jelmer Vernooij) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 11:36:30 +0000

I just got back home after spending the weekend in Goettingen at Ubucon.de. The conference was very nice and well organized. Since the talks were mainly user-oriented, I didn't attend a lot of them but spent most time working with the other Samba developers on Franky and (trying to) talk to other people. That last bit was a harder than I thought since my German seems to be a bit rusty when it comes to speaking; listening is usually fine.

We made a lot of progress on the merged build; we're getting close to having about half the code shared between Samba 3 and Samba 4.

cp: Van der Graaf Generator - The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other

SambaXP and other travel

nospam@example.com (Jelmer Vernooij) — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:03:04 +0000

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

The OV Chipcard trouble

nospam@example.com (Jelmer Vernooij) — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:37:00 +0000

There were several interesting talks at 24C3 last week, including one about the analysis of the MIFARE classic chip by Philips (their chip division is now a separate company called NXP). The presenters did talk about the fact that the chip was highly insecure, but mentioned that it was an old series so there were probably not that many systems around anymore that were using it.

So, I was very surprised when several Dutch media (for example Volkskrant, Webwereld), mentioned this week that the chip to be used by the Dutch public transport system "had been cracked": turns out it's based on the MIFARE classic. I wonder how much extra delays this is going to cause for the chipcard-based ticketing for the public transport here...

CCC was great, and certainly an event I'd like to attend again next year.

Back from Ca

nospam@example.com (Jelmer Vernooij) — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 20:23:26 +0000

Just got back from my annual trip to California, visiting the Samba team get-together. It was very nice to see everybody again , even though it was a bit short this time. :-(

Canada

I made a short detour before flying into SFO to attend the first few days of the printing summit in Montreal and do some sightseeing. There wasn't really a lot I could contribute - I've never touched drivers or more than the basic printing API's -, but it was good to meet up with people and see what is going on in printing. Mike Sweet (author of CUPS), who was my mentor in the Google Summer of Code last year, was also there and it was nice to finally meet him in person.

California

We used to go to the SNIA CIFS event, but this year we (well, Jeremy and Leslie from Google) organized a somewhat more informal event of our own, all hosted at the Google campus in Mountain View. It was a big success, so hopefully we can repeat it next year (-:

A bunch of us that has been involved in the Summer of Code did a podcast, hosted by the famous (at least to fellow SoC students/mentors) Leslie Hawthorn. It was good fun (-:

Sightseeing Vilnius

nospam@example.com (Jelmer Vernooij) — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 11:49:04 +0000

After spending the last couple of days at Europython and the related sprints, we did some sightseeing here in Vilnius. I was expecting to see a lot of eastblock influences, but except for a few statues it doesn't appear to be all that different anymore from western European countries, at least on the surface. Strange how things can change in just 18 years.