Diary for hypatia

Older diary entries for hypatia (starting at number 59):

21 Jan 2004 (updated 30 Jan 2004)  »

See also my l.c.a. photos, other l.c.a. photos and other l.c.a. blogs.

This is the belated final l.c.a. entry. I wrote it several days back and since I no longer have my own computer, it took several days to resize, reorient and caption all the photos.

linux.conf.au Presentation Day 2 continued

After lunch I went to jdub's GNOME strategy talk, which was good. I would have liked to have seen more screenshots, but that's just a personal thing -- I want to see more of what I can expect from GNOME 2.x -- but he actually wasn't given a screenshot style talk. It wasn't a talk about "things in the GNOME desktop", it was a talk about upcoming release strategy.

I skipped Andrew Tridgell's junkcode talk in favour of behoffski's grep talk. The grep talk was really badly attended, and we could hear faint joy from tridge's talk next door. It also lacked oodles of finite state machines, which was a shame.

linux.conf.au Conference Dinner

I didn't really anticipate the speed with which tables would be taken, I also didn't feel any need to figure out in advance who I'd be sharing a table with. This was a mistake. For the record: tables were taken swiftly. spiv and I were lucky to grab a table with Bradley, later to be joined by James, thom, Gus, Stewart and Drew. We were right up the front, close enough to see Rusty's flame show (featuring the "so have you ever kissed a girl?" reply to davem, which doesn't seem to be archived anywere on the web. [Edit: That was before Rusty uploaded the text of the flames]).

The staff seemed to me to be on anti-madness patrol, keeping our water glasses filled up all the time, and not leaving bottles on tables. Most people found the dinner really un-crazy, but I'm assured that somewhere up the back there were a few people who had to be carried out.

Rusty conducted a couple of auctions: first the l.c.a. signed T-Shirt. Bidders were goaded by several tables throwing in extra money if the bidding reached a certain amount. Several project incentives were offered too: Linus offered an Australian animal for the next kernel release, jdub offered (I think) a choice of name for the GNOME 2.6 desktop release. The Debian project is yet to release, so last year's purchaser still has that one.

The second auction was for the opportunity to sink Linus. The ozlabs guys put together $1500, but the community started assembling notes, and made it to $2700. This made things a bit difficult: Rusty described it as "some kind of raffle." mrd was chosen to sink Linus by popular acclaimation.

jdub assembled a group of people to go and grab gelato. It was quite nice gelato, and the walk gave me a chance to meet mbp, which was excellent (although he thinks we've met before).

I was back in my room around 1 -- it was pretty cold out there, and I wasn't really interested in making the trek to north Adelaide that night.

linux.conf.au Presentation Day 3

spiv and I were up in time to check out and to make it to hp's keynote. I really liked this keynote, I thought it was one of the best talks of the conference. hp ran through the reasons to aim for a Linux desktop, challenges to the Linux desktop and strength's of the Linux desktop. In his view, Open Source is the single strongest unchallengable, unduplicatable advantage.

I went to Janis Johnson's regressions talk before lunch, which I quite liked, although I think again it would have been better if it had pushed through the introductory stuff faster, and had some case studies. This was, to me, the biggest disappointment in most of the talks I attended: perhaps I'm idealising tridge's 2001 "hacking the TiVo" keynote in 2001.

The dunking followed at lunch. It was fun for a while -- most people ended up having to run up and push the button to dunk their target: mrd must have been lucky (or a good shot) to sink Linus on his first ball, which was good considering that with an extra donation that shot was costing over $5000. thom got the opportunity to sink rasmus and I think managed to do it without pressing the target with a hand. The most amusing effort was that of tridge and jallison, who struggled to sit on the dunking seat together, tridge nearly slipping in a number of times. A few non-speakers were offered up for their sins: gman and daniels. After a while, the dunking got less exciting unless you had a debt of honour involving the person on the seat, and people drifted away. There were meant to be water pistol fights as well, but it was a cold day and I don't think it seemed appealing.

After lunch, tridge's talk was repeated in the best of series. It was indeed a good talk, but the audience was pretty flat compared to the last one. thom kept nodding off. The talk seems to be partly evangelical (keep your junk code, put it on the web) but would have worked just as well without an actual message. tridge's talks are generally "look! look! hacking is fun!" talks anyway. See them if you feel a bit jaded and need a good kick.

The energy was definitely leeching away after the dunking, and everyone was very sleepy by the time of mrd's conference close and the handover to the Canberra team.

Most people stuck around until Sunday I think, but spiv and I went off to gelato with keithp and people he'd managed to drag along for icecream before we headed to the airport. The plane to Sydney was a bit of a SLUG-express but I was getting far too sleepy to talk to anyone by then.

19 Jan 2004  »

Home

Got home to discover that one of my power supply or my motherboard are seriously failing. I have one last l.c.a. entry all written and waiting for my photos before I send it in.

In the meantime...

I restarted my old buglinks.org project. It's intended now to be a blog-ish set of links to bug hunting teams, bug hunting tips and bug hunting resources -- and possibly also bug fixing stuff. I'm hoping to find material soon that is more specific than the general "how to report a bug" tips soon.

15 Jan 2004  »

linux.conf.au Presentation Day 1 continued

I forgot to re-write the bit about maddog's talk yesterday after Mozilla crashed with all diary entries aboard. maddog's talk was the first keynote. It wasn't all that applicable to me personally -- I don't write software, either proprietary or free, for end users, and nor have I ever been employed as a software engineer in a large company. maddog's intended audience seemed to be people who struggled to find their place as a techie in a welter of managers, employers, shareholders, customers and users. He had a cute ploy towards the end: pointing out to people that most free software applications are secretly written for obsessed auto-didactic fourteen year olds with their own Linux distribution and are in fact used by maddog's parents, who like to get their computer support at their church, in their retirement village, or from their children.

In the afternoon of the conference, I went to Patryk Zadarnowski's TeX talk, which was a basic illustration of the programming language features of TeX. The most complex piece of code used as an example was about seven lines or so of TeX: the definition of a linked list. It would be lovely to have complete "syntax highlighting" TeX macros for programming languages than Haskell and I might put playing around with TeX somewhere on my long list of things I should maybe learn how to do (it includes, for example, programming in Lisp, and learning to sail).

After Patryk's talk, I saw Sean Burford talk about Reverse Engineering Linux x86 Binaries. I had been expecting something fairly difficult -- I go to talks like that to find out how much I don't know, and so, since I've heard of most of the tools he worked through (strace, gdb...) I didn't get what I expected from the talk.

The talks concluded with the Works In Progress talks. The WIP talks were 3 minute sessions open to anyone who'd managed to prepare a poster for them, and were given over the course of an hour. Although forbidding props was probably necessary given the time allocated, it was sort of disappointing, because the majority of talks could really have done with an accompanying screenshot or mockup.

Finally, the Linux Australia AGM was held. I've never been to a meeting that formal in my life, and it was of necessity somewhat dreary. It ran for nearly three hours -- I'm pleased that the amendments to the Constitution allowing online AGMs were passed.

spiv and I wanted a quietish night in preparation for the conference dinner (I drink heavily really rarely, but I'm also crap at dealing with sleep deprivation, so I still need to save up energy for an event like that). We had pizza at thaytan's and Jaime's hotel with daniels, one of his friends, bdale and keithp, before heading off (really briefly) to a bar/cafe with some Linux Australia folks and (I think) the odd kernel hacker after running into jdub.

I've been able to mention eating with various free software 'celebrities' (and mainly not talking much with them) primarily because of my SLUG friends. Even though I appreciate that the (Western, English-speaking) free software communities are smallish, it seems flatter than I expected. This is probably illusionary -- if I didn't know anyone in the Australian free software community, I wouldn't meet any of the international hackers either, and my conference social experience would be much more like it was in 2001 (nearly zero, except that I went on the pub crawl the final night).

linux.conf.au Presentation Day 2

Noone else seems to have thought a quiet Thursday night was worth the sacrifice -- lots of cranky sleepy people this morning. There were still lots of people at bdale's keynote talk. This keynote had some similar themes to maddog's as regards the 'typical' user of free software end user projects, but was talking about larger deployments: LinEx and Guada LinEx. Community based free software deployments sound really exciting -- it would be a cool thing to work on.

I went to jamesh's talk as well. I didn't find this talk particularly exciting, but I think that was just a mismatch between my interests and the subject of the talk. If I'm at this conference next year, I'll probably attend mainly advocacy talks or talks about really insane or theoretically involved subjects -- I don't do much finite state machine programming or lexical analysis, but then I don't come to this particular conference to find out much about things I already do. It's the insane stuff I'd never even contemplate that is interesting.

14 Jan 2004  »

linux.conf.au Tutorial Day continued

I tagged along to lunch with jdub, hp, jamesh, spiv and James. James's crazy WINE hacking ideas aren't proving easy to sell to anyone, he's not sure whether to continue or not.

I didn't go to any afternoon tutorials. I went over to Glenelg, which turns out to be a poor use of time if you aren't prepared to either shop or swim. I would prefer to swim than shop, but I hadn't brought any swimming gear with me. The landscape is spoilt by an ugly mountain of concrete which partially contains some water slides. I'd like to go on them, but everyone has looked at me like I'm crazy.

I then went out to dinner with many of the same people I'd been at the pub with the previous night. This time they'd chosen a pub convienently close to the college accomodation and some blocks from the pub that we are staying in. robertc claimed not to be a full time Arch advocate, but failed miserably. Once again the conference ate some potential pub go-ers, the professional networking session spitting out conrad, ozone and Silvia as spiv and I headed home.

linux.conf.au Presentation Day 1

I attended Jeremy Malcolm's Could SCO v IBM Happen to You? talk.

Malcolm is a good speaker, and the talk was well organised and presented. My main problem with it was that a lot of the material would be relatively familiar to your average armchair Free Software lawyer. I'm by no means anything more than a straggler in this field but the distinction between what copyrights protect and what patents protect is fairly clear to me. Hence, the most interesting parts of the talk were those that covered material I wasn't very familiar with.

Most of the discussion of doing both free software work and proprietary work that I've seen has been focussed on observing the terms of contracts between an employer and employee, as well as understanding the intellectual property assignment that is part of work for hire. I've never seen trade secrets law discussed specifically before. Malcolm didn't talk about trade secrets law in depth, but that was one heads-up from the talk.

His discussion of controlling intellectual property issues in your own projects was fairly brief but suggested that you needed to make it clear to individual developers that they were responsible for making sure that they were not contributing doubtful intellectual property (although in practice getting them to accept liability would not be feasible as it would scare of all or most contributors).

His final interesting point was that you should seriously consider using a licence that doesn't totally ignore the possibility that patent-infringing code may appear in your product, or that claims of infringement might be made, and recommended the Mozilla Public Licence specifically because of the patent clauses.

One of the problems of talks given by a member of a community that is viewed warily by hackers at this sort of conference is that they come to be viewed as an avatar for that community. There were a few questions from the audience that suggested they were viewing Malcolm as a stand-in for the legal community and the courts system, but even these questions were asked in a fair good spirit.

13 Jan 2004 (updated 13 Jan 2004)  »

See also other l.c.a. blogs.

linux.conf.au Miniconfs Day 1 continued

I didn't go to any further talks in the afternoon of Day 1. spiv and I had lunch with horms, Silvia and ozone. Once the wired networking came up in the afternoon we headed down to check half a day's worth of accumulated mail, and then I caught up with some work via a convienient copy of StarOffice.

The Audio miniconf was meant to conclude with a jam session at a pub on the other side of Adelaide's CBD. Adelaide's CBD is nicely laid out in a grid, but it just isn't that simple: the east-west streets change names halfway along.

The jam was missing some cabling for a long time, and while we waited the kitchen stopped serving food because they'd had too many orders. jdub found that ordering every variety of Kettle Chips in the store wasn't a good substitute for the excellent porterhouse steak spiv had had, so spiv, jdub, James, mikal, gman, thom and at least one other person and I headed off for Chinese, taking in a nice tour of the resturants in the south of Adelaide's CBD on the way.

linux.conf.au Miniconfs Day 2

spiv only did the programme for his miniconf the other day, but nevertheless I was convinced it started at 10, he was convinced it started at 9:30 and it was actually scheduled to start at 9. We arrived late to find that malcolm had stepped in to give his talk an hour earlier than scheduled.

spiv's own talk began with us spending a solid fifteen minutes trying to get my Libretto laptop to talk to the projector. This was the beginning of lots of projector hassles -- every subsequent speaker, including Malcolm the second time around, had trouble with the projector. spiv ended up giving his Twisted talk on Erik's iMac, using MagicPoint tunneled over SSH from the Libretto.

Chris Foote gave a CherryPy talk, and we had a two hour lunch in the hope of intersecting with a Python/GNOME talk by jamesh over at the GNOME miniconf, but that didn't happen.

Numbers were lower after lunch (possibly because that was about the third change to the program) which was a shame because Malcolm gave a talk on the ancient art of Python judo -- that is, inspiring the audience to a bunch of guesses about which of a bunch of algorithmically equivalent methods of doing a particular list/dictionary constructions were fastest. It turns out, for example, that in Python 2.2,

d = {}
for i in xrange(len(X)):
    d[X[i]] = Y[i]

is a faster way than:

d = dict(zip(X, Y))

to turn two lists into a dictionary hashing the values of one list, X, to the values of the other, Y.

spiv had a faster solution than any of the given ones:

d = {}
map(d.__setitem__, X, Y)

The miniconf concluded with lathiat's IPv6 talk, which was essentially an overview of the socket API with some discussion of the (small) changes needed to ensure basic IPv6 functionality.

In the evening, a bunch of people mysteriously vanished to the super secret speaker's dinner, so spiv, James, Erik, robertc. thom, jaq, myself and several others congregated in the beer garden of the pub spiv and I are staying in. This was fantastic, as when I got tired at 11, I just walked up a flight of stairs and went to bed.

linux.conf.au Tutorial Day

spiv and I made it to the welcome in plenty of time to find out about all sorts of things. Matt won the national Regional Delegate Prize, which turned out to be the TShirt Sun had bid a lot for at last year's conference dinner, with lots of kernel hacker signatures on it. The dunking of the speakers and assorted celebrities was heavily advertised -- the right to dunk Linus is going to auction.

I went to the first half of Keith Packard's cairo tutorial this morning. It was excellent -- Keith turned out to be an excellent speaker. I didn't resolve the resemblence to Paul Livingstone's "Flacco" character until morning tea -- I'm still not sure whether it goes deeper than a physical resemblence. spiv said not, but I thought there were some vocal mannerisms in common. That aside, the cairo introduction is the type of thing I came to l.c.a. to see: exciting introductions to stuff I know almost nothing about.

I didn't go to the second half of the tutorial, although the algorithmic pieces might have been interesting, electing to write this before the backlog of "things to write about" grew too long. Firebird nicely crashed halfway through, so I'm only going to continue this when I can save it to a text file and upload it at the end of the entry.

11 Jan 2004 (updated 21 Jan 2004)  »

I'm going to write about the linux.conf.au conference here, mainly summarising talks. Next time, go yourselves!

linux.conf.au Miniconfs Day 1

I left Sydney with spiv at 7:00am this morning after having to throw out a pair of nail clippers and a pair of scissors I've been carrying around for at least a year (being one of those people who always has everything in their handbag finally came back to bite me). Was delivered in Adelaide at 8:30am local time, 9:00 Sydney time. I've only once been further away from home (New Zealand 1998), and feel very very strange because of course, there's absolutely no culture shock at all. Adelaide reminds me of Christchurch, but warmer and with Australian accents. Borders even sells the Sydney Morning Herald.

The conference proper starts on Wednesday, today was the first day of the miniconfs. I attended the first two talks in the Audio miniconf program.

Mark Greenaway repeated his SLUG talk on audio, which I missed the first time. Apparently the set of demos that didn't work this time didn't intersect at all with the set of demos that didn't work last time. He briefly showed off jack, ardour, sweep, hydrogen, qcontrol, freqtweak and alsamodularsynth. Mark is a good speaker -- I was his housemate for one and a half years and completely missed seeing him do any speaking in that time.

Peter Chubb talked about typesetting musical notation (and checking your typesetting via MIDI) using LilyPond, which I cannot convince myself to stop thinking of as "lilypad".

The immense level of organisation required for this conference only really hit me when I reached the registration desk . Every attendee has their name tag in a little plastic wallet hung from their neck with cords labelled "linux.conf.au 2004". The wallet contains a mini-progamme, a second nametag to go in the conference bag's name placeholder, tickets to the dinner for those who ordered them, and a voucher for icecreams. Several days of solid work probably went into that alone.

All has run smoothly so far except for the wired network for attendees (wireless was a-go-go) which didn't come up until this afternoon. But it was up in time for spiv to start on his Python miniconf talk.

spiv and I have elected to share a double room in a pub rather than stay in the college -- it's a nice room, but we're yet to see how noisy it will be.

30 Dec 2003  »

Life

After eighteen years in various schooling systems, 2004 will be the first year since I was 4 that I am not going to be a student.

I'm taking a job as a research assistant -- thus breaking from the tertiary education system not at all -- from mid-January until August. It will be my longest full-time work stint ever. Then I'll break it for a few months to go around the world, and then who knows?

Contributions

When I was learning BASIC (I was 8), I ran right into a wall when it came to thinking of stuff to program. I taught myself conditionals, loops and the basics of arrays out of a helpful little book that came with the computer, but when it came to making the leap into my own projects I was always stuck for ideas.

Obviously, not being 8 and also not being completely technically isolated has improved things somewhat, but there are still only two types of programming projects I really do: web projects and projects associated with a job or school project. Presumably the scale of the latter will only continue increasing, but I get the impression that I'm not likely to be a big contributor to Free Software in the "cool and exciting new stuff" category, at least, not in the immediate future.

In the last few weeks I've become the documentation editor for the Twisted project. So far this has meant very little, but apparently it means effectively that when it comes to documentation, it's my vision.

This is a little disconcerting, since I don't know the codebase outside the Twisted Web system at all, and I know only pieces of that. It is resulting in me producing documentation at the rate of about a paragraph every few hours, in which pace there needs to be a fair improvement before I will produce respectable amounts of documentation and of edited documentation. It is, however, a task (unlike software ideas and software design) where I have reasonable confidence that I can ascend the learning curve fairly quickly.

15 Nov 2003  »

Just passing by...

This year I:

This year I failed to:

Very poor form, three out of ten.

8 Jul 2003  »

Battle of the Pizzas, preliminary round

In the spirit of the original Free Your Pizza these are the toppings that did battle tonight:

Pizza #1, in the red corner: spanish onion, sweet potato, lamb, fetta cheese; and

Pizza #2, in the "everything goes" corner: salami, capsicum (red and green), bacon, Rogan Josh lamb, mango chutney.

The base was controlled: both pizzas had a base made of white flour, with basil and carraway seeds (spiv's sister has determined that this adds Latvian flavour). Both pizzas were topped with grated cheese and cooked in a pan brushed with olive oil.

Notes: carraway seeds and basil are both a bit strong for a pizza base. Use wholemeal flour next time. Also, I always put too little flour in dough.

Life

I call it "university".

I'm trying to divide my project into small enough bits that I can procrastinate and still be working on my project!

Code

Poked at Woven last night, and it looked like a cool and efficient way to pump content out cleanly in the minimum lines of code. Pity my host doesn't run Twisted Web (word up to the Northern Hemisphere: hosting at home is not economic in .au). So all I need to do is coerce it to write out static pages...

12 Jun 2003  »

Automating your advogato posts

... or "jdub has done it, so should you"...

hereticmessiah and others: use cmiller's advodiary script to help you automate advogato postings.

I don't have any content anywhere else to source advogato entries from (no .plan, no log, my other diary is somewhat baroque and quite non-advogato) or I would also jump on this bandwagon.

Life

Silently dropped off a bunch of mailing lists for the duration of Crunch Time I (the Coursework Descends). I can't even claim community involvement this month. I'm currently taking half an hour off between the two assignments that are due today.

50 older entries...

[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects ]