| linux.conf.au 2007 |
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linux.conf.au is one of the world's best Open Source and Free Software developer community conferences! A purely volunteer effort, it is hosted in a different Australasian city each year, and attracts some of the best minds in the world of Open Source and Free Software. CASE President Darrell Burkey attended the conference this year to see the newest opportunities that Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) can offer to members. linux.conf.au 2007 was held at the Kensington campus of the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Darrell posted a daily blog of his experiences at the conference. Some of his notes are a bit technical but there are interesting stories included for everyone including his report of meeting the top penguin himself! * All of the presentations at LCA 2007 were video recorded. As they become available you will find links to them in the programme schedule.
Funny quotes overheard at LCA 2007: "The enemy of Open Source Software is graduation." "Emacs is a great operating system that just needs an editor."
Monday 15 January 2007 The conference welcome was amazing. There are over 800 people here including more than 200 from overseas. There are so many presentations to choose from that it will be very difficult to decide which to attend. Major sponsors of the conference are HP and IBM. Thanks to a donation by AARNET the conference has a nice fat pipe for the wi-fi network that has been set up using 51 Linksys wireless access points. This year one of the highlights of the conference is that one out of ten attendees is female. 'Mini-Confs' are the real substance of the convention. They are
11.00 AM Show and Tell: The Pedagogical Arguments for Free and Open Source Software by Donna Benjamin Sorry, no notes are available for this presentation 11.50 PM Stuart gave an overview of how and why they decided to install a computer lab based on open source software and what the results were. The project was basically run by the students themselves and it was interesting to hear how many parents were already involved with FOSS software already. Here's a link to an article in a recent editon of LinuxWorld:
2.00 PM I found this talk a bit disorganised and I don't think the presenter was prepared. Still, it was valuable as there was a fair amount of interaction from participants that was interesting.
Break Time
Apparently the day before the platform on the scooter had broken so he had done an emergency repair involving some metal reinforcements, screws and a lot of glue! Now that I have seen one up close it makes much more sense to me how the work. Really very clever. I'll try and get a few photos later on either during his presentation on Wednesday or at the open day Thursday afternoon.
The hardware certainly is impressive including the mesh networking given that it is a router and client. This goes a long way to solving the 'last mile' issue as the laptop can contact another laptop over a kilometer away. This is accomplished by a separate CPU with about 96k of memory that uses very little power and runs even if the laptop is not in use. It will run for about four days in this mode. The little rabbit ears on the top are the antennas for this function. Hardware aside, Chris stated that the only innovative aspect of the project was to 'provide laptops to impoverished children in India'. That's it and they are staying very focused on it. But for me the innovation was the approach to the interface which came directly from educational needs. Better yet, it's finally something different from Windows! About time, is all I can say.
I've included a sixty second 10Mb quicktime movie (requires Apple Quicktime installed on your computer to view) if you would like to hear part of Chris' presentation. He's been passing around a couple of OLPC machine's and I managed to touch the one shown which was fun. And just like the mesh networking will provide in the future, I felt connected in some small way to a project bound to have serious ramifications in how we approach the issue of equitable access to information technology for those living with disadvantage.
11.00am Navigating the Open Source Softwae Content Management Systems World Julie Kowakowski – HP, Colorado division
CMS Defined Creation for maintenance, submission (user to user collaboration) Course Management Systems – Online learning – Noodle (teacher to student based)
Criteria for defining CMS This talk focused on Web Content Management – Wiki is subset
Criteria for evaluation of CMS – Looking at the following three popular OSS packages: Plone Mambo-Joomla Drupal
Julia showed a matrix of features/functionality. Much the same as the online matrix comparison at: http://www.cmsmatrix.org followed by demonstrations of each package. There weren't any surprises here for me. I've been working with Joomla now for about two weeks. My goal in using it was to create a more flexible site for CASE where we could include more information regarding the ongoing activities about the group. Presently this information is not getting to our members and we need a way that non-technical staff can produce content for the web site.
I decided not to read the manual when I started. This served to demonstrate how intuitive the process is but truth is I'm both busy and lazy just as many others would be. Bad news though, read the manual is my advice. I've found Joomla very difficult to configure and work with. I'm confident that once the structure is complete and the functionality properly defined that it will do the job well. However, I'll need to do a lot of work first to accomplish this.
Hopefully, this work will pay off in a way that we can offer such sites to our members and the expertise to properly advise members and maintain sites for those who are using Content Management Systems.
http://www.opensourcecms.com for downloads of current versions.
A participant mentioned that Joomla 1.5 has an admin plugin available to run mulit instances on a site. This is going to interest Jill and I in our adventures at the ANU.
11.50 AM Teaching to Learning Empowering the Learner to Think, Analyse and Engage Richard Weiderman from Ubuntu (or more accurately the company producing it)
Richard opened with a very detailed, fast paced presentation regarding how teaching has changed to a more learning based pedagological approach where students drive the process of learning rather than just be 'taught' by a teacher.
Open source comes in to play with such venues as Wikipedia where information is provided. Collaboration is encouraged both as an activity and a skill Development of Teamwork and Leadership – Volunteer collaboration encourages this by empowering the students rather than holding authority over them. Potential – Can be reached via motivation. Open source provides this through it's ethical stance and supportive environment.
How can we extend Open Source ethos into education and engage students and teachers in areas other than software development?
Edubuntu – an education platform allowing the educator to spend more time teaching and less time dealing with the back end. Specific to classroom use. Pre-primay, primary and junior level. Gnome or KDE desktop Can use Linux Terminal Servers
Demonstration of Edubuntu. Easy installation of applications from education specific repository. Automatically refreshed when required.
2.14 PM Now I'm at a presentation running in the Education stream about a New Zealand produced open source project named Mahara. Penny Leach is presenting Mahara: putting thought into ePortfolios.
That title is a bit misleading as this software creates communities of users and educational resources. Rather than describe it here I'll just link to her slides and the project as it's quite comprehensive. It's a bit like Moodle which is also an open source collaborative learning platform.
http://eduforge.org/projects/mahara
Break Time
Mystery Noises I just had to find out what was going on above my room being the curious type of person I am and wanting to ensure there would be no repeat performance. So I found Peter and asked him why in the world they would do a renovation above another room so later at night. He looked very puzzled and said he knew nothing about this and that my comments had him a bit worried.
Walking down to the Google party I passed Mr Segway-like scooter pushing his toy up the hill. I asked him why he wasn't riding it and he told me that the batteries were flat. Fair enough I thought and off I went to the party.
Mystery Solved I had no idea where this party was except knowing that it wasn't anywhere near where the lecture theaters were. However, it's not hard to spot a nerd so I just waddled on down the hill assuming I'd eventually find someone. Sure enough I ran it to a few of the conference organisers and began walking with them.
7.30pm - Google Party Tonight I attended the Google sausage sizzle where I met a lot of interesting people including:
A Russian programmer living in Finland who works for Nokia and did some of the programming for the flash memory of a Nokia PDA like device that looked a lot like the new Apple devices being released in the US right now. He is here with five coleages from Nokia.
Linus Torvalds himself was there (author of the powerful open source Linux operating system that CASE uses for member servers). He was playing pool for a while but I missed him. I sure hope that I can catch up with him later. I really want to meet him while he is here.
Hewlett Packard has quite a few people here from Colorado in the US which were interesting to meet.
I had a bit of time to speak with Chris Blizzard of Mozilla Corp.
Actually met several people from my own workplace who I have never met in person including Bob Edwards.
And of course Google gave us all T-shirts. They were printed with "Linux - Sucking less for 15 years now".
They also picked up the bar tab which came to over $8,000.
Wednesday 17 January, 2007 At conferenes you met a lot of people during the breaks and while waiting for presentations to start. Today I introduced myself to the person sitting next to me and asked where he was from. Slovakia he said apologising for his poor English, which I thought was excellent. Everyone I've met from overseas is very impressed with both the conference and Sydney. I'm really enjoying finding out about where they are from and hearing what they have to say about Australia.
I had the opportunity to speak with Dr Tanenbaum along with other attendees after his presentation. I asked him if he had ever expressed his views to Bill Gates as I have never understood why Microsoft doesn't start fresh with their operating system given that everyone knows how unstable it is due to incredible bloat. He answered that he had never met Bill Gates but once came within a few feet of him before Bill's minders stepped in front of him.
Speaking with Linus Torvalds - Author of the Linux Operation System If you had the chance to ask one of your favourite super geeks a few questions, what would they be? Well, after thanking him for his efforts and contributions to the OSS world and what they have done for groups like members of CASE, I wanted to know if the 'penguin story' was true? I just couldn't pass up the chance to ask him directly if it was true that a fairy penguin here in Australia tried to bite him and that was part of what inspired the Linux logo Tux?
When I was a child I loved the then popular cartoon "Chilli Willi". Chilli is a cute little penguin with an even cuter hat. Sometime around my University days someone who knew this gave me a stuffed Chilli Willi as a gift. I asked myself where such a thing should be kept and the answer was obvious, the freezer. Twenty-five years, later Chilli is still in there after years of amusing anyone who looks in my freezer. I've also collected many other penguins over the years long before Tux was born and indeed when Linus was just a child. So I feel a bit predestined to using Linux. I mentioned this to Linus and his comment was, "You are weird". I'm very pleased that I've made an impression on him and look forward to the next time we meet. I found him to be very friendly and easy going which seems to be the general comment that most people make. And for a super geek, he seems surprisingly normal.
2007-01-17 11:00 Andrew Tridgell
Listening to Andrew Tridgell is always good. He has a great way of explaining complex things in a easy to understand manner. In this presentation Andrew spoke about how parts of Samba can be viewed as a database and how this effects it's use in a cluster. Click here for a sixty second Quicktime movie of Andrew's talk (be warned 10Mb file).
Lunch with the Finns from Nokia We finished off our talk with the decision that a trip to Bondi beach was in order. Our conference bags included a hat, sunscreen and a t-shirt so participants from overseas could Slip Slap Slop just like the natives. I hope they made it as the weather was beautiful.
3.00 PM Digital Preservatioon - The National Archives of Australia, Open Standards and Open Source Xena - XML Extraction Normalisation Archiving software.
2.00 PM Fixing Suspend & Resume on Laptops (or why it doesn't work). This is one thing that really bothers most people who use Linux on a laptop. Close the lid on many laptops running linux, inlcuding my Dell Inspiron 6000, and the power will turn off rather than the laptop suspending. Matthew gave us a lot of great information on why this happens and it basically comes down to good old drivers again. Nothing to do with the y hardware really. One great hint that Matthew gave us was that if you open your laptop after an attempted suspend and the screen is blank, if the caps lock works then you can be reasonably sure that the machine has resumed and the video driver is causing the problem. Another great hint was that if you want to compile your own kernel there is a switch that can be set that will write a value to the area of ROM where the clock data is normally stored. The value that is written there will be the pci code of the last device accessed before the computer hung. It's a bit tricky but also very clever considering that there really is no area of memory that can store this type of information during a reboot. Very clever to use the area of ROM that would normally hold the time. Of course, your clock won't have the right time but that can be dealt with later.
GIMP Uncovered: Understanding Images and Image Editing Akkana Peck from San Jose, CA
Author of Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional
File formats JPEG is lossy so be careful. Every time you write it in/out you lose a bit. Png tiff not standarised well used by publishers What do you mean, marketing? Promoting open source projects. Joe Zonker Brockmeier Editorial Director, Linux.com
See Zonker's articles about linux.conf.au 2007 at the Linux.com website .
11.50 AM If you have never heard Paul speak then you are really missing out. Paul's passion is Perl and he loves teaching it to people. So much so that he started a business just to do this full time. In this presentation he shared with us the trials and tribulations of setting up a business. One of his best tips was, 'marry your partner and then you automatically get half of everything'. Paul has put some notes up at http://pjf.id.au/business
3.00 PM Rides bike 12 Kilometers across Toykoyo and needed a way to check the weather.
2.00 PM Community, Community, Community
4.00pm - Open Day Open Day was an opportunity for the public to come and experience all the cool things happening in the Free and Open Source Software world. It was a huge success with over 1,200 people attending. UNSW computer students had a very interesting exhibit of robots, Google was there and several distrubutions of Linux were being handed out on DVD. There was a great booth about women programmers and what they are involved with in FOSS. A big hit with the kids (and big kids like me) was the self made balancing scooter I've mentioned before. If you want to see how he accomplished this, Geoffrey also gave a presentation Wednesday afternoon, How to Build an Open Source Segway.
Friday 19 January, 2007
Prize draw of Sony Vaio - I'm soooooo jealous
Keynote Speaker: How to create passionate users, Kathy Sierra
What are tbe attributes of passionate users? Use this to drive users. People are not passionate about things they suck at.
The CRAP filter - your brain is designed to supress needless information keeping people engaged
compelling picture clear path easy first step
Flow the psychology of optimal experience – interesting book
the flow state
knowledge and skill need to be balanced against challenge
the challenge is in what the user does with the app, not the app itselft
cognitive seduction – things that turn the brain on:
discovery challeng narrative sef-expression social framwork cognitive arrousal thrill sensation triumph accomplishment
make the right things easy and the wrong things hard
Keeping them motivated
User Expreience Spiral Motivating benefit --> Interaction --> Payoff
What are “levels” for open source development?
If you want them to RTFM, make a better FM
Java Ranch – an example of an online community – be friendly
threadless.com (t-shirts)
Users are on a Hero's journey How is the user changed by the journey?
worldonfire.ca
Our passions become pare of our identity Become part of a tribe. Buy a t-shirt to advertise it.
What aspect of your product could become part of your users identity?
What a talk, very very motivational!
11.00 AM Computers, Programs and Logic - What Does Linux Prove? Patryk Zadarnowski, National ICT Australia
Time lines of Mechanical Calculators Time line of Foundations of Mathematics
This was a talk aobut logic and involved a lot of what I interpreted as advanced mathmatics. Most of it went well over my head. 2.00 PM Excellent for laptops with sensitive information or protecting workstations with proprietory data. Overlay systems may be preferable to block level. There arent't that many block level for Linux and if you loose a block that's a lot of data. If you just want to encrypt something like your /home then overlays are the way to go. Which cipher to use? 3DES, blowfish popular. cryptsetup now has LUKS built in.
Highly dependent on type of workload. Server, database server, workstation, laptop etc.
4.00 PM - Closing Ceremony Group sang happy birthday to Rusty Russell and presented a cake.
Everyone was given a red and green glow stick on a piece of cardboard. Later the computer science students of UNSW did an experiment where a video camera pointed at the audience provided input of the ratio of green to red glowsticks being held up. This was used to drive a game of space invaders being projected at the front of the theatre. So it was supposed to be an experiment where the entire audience was controlling the game together. It was too bad that it didn't work at all. Apparently they were going to debug it and try again at the conference dinner that night but I never heard if it worked. It was interesting idea though.
Next a group of four students from Oregon University in the USA stood up to tell of how they managed to raise funds to attend the conference. Apparently they really wanted to attend a Linux conference and knew how popular linux.conf.au was but they only had 89 cents. So they registered the web site http://pleasesendustolinuxconf.info and raised the required $10,000. Not a bad effort for cyber beggers.
Another Sony Viao was given away in a draw. Earlier there had been a hackfest and the winner was announced and presented with a G5 computer. linux.conf has been raising funds for the John Lions Chair at the UNSW over the past year. They agreed to match funds donated up to $10,000 and the resulting $20,000 was matched again and that amount was also matched. The result was a cheque being presented to the Fred Lions Foundation for $80,000. Here is an article from The Age newspaper about John Lions and his work with the Unix operating system. Next all the speakers from the conference (about 90) were asked up to the stage. Over the next half an hour or so anyone could ask them questions. This was a very interesting session and covered a wide range of topics. The last order of business was thanking all of the people who made the conference possible. This year the main team of people were known as Team 7 and they introduced all the people that assisted them. The conference was truly outstanding and the presentations very high quality. This was reflected by the very long standing ovation given to the team by the audience. 7.00 PM - Penguin Dinner
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The Randwick Lodge where I'm staying is a lovely place. Close to Coogee beach, Bondi and only a few minutes walk to the University of NSW where the conference is being held. It's managed by Peter and his wife, an easy going couple. People meet in the lovely courtyard in the evening to use the barbeque and have their meals.
Listening to Chris I kept thinking about CASE member 
Dr Tanenbaum spoke about how to define a reliable operating system, why current systems are not achieving this and how operating systems could achieve this goal. His main points were that kernels must be small with all routines restricted to only what resources they require and that all modules should be outside the kernel. Apparently this is a point of contention between Linus Torvalds and Andrew. He offered Minux 3 as an example of these techniques which all attendees received in their conference goodie bag.
Dr Tanenbaum did validate my beliefs about MS by saying he did know people within Microsoft and that they simply have too much invested in their current operating system to start again. In frustration I asked if Microsoft's legacy to computing was really going to be an operating system that simply would never be stable and both Andrew and the rest of the attendees all agreed how sad it was but also how true they felt it was. In case anyone is wondering, this was NOT a Microsoft bashing discussion but was totally within the realm of discussing operating system reliability.
I can now report to you that not only is the story true but the actual penguin was at the National Aquarium and Zoo in none other than Canberra Australia! The penguin didn't actually bite him but he did describe that as he reached over the fence with his finger the penguin made a good go at snatching it. I don't know if Linus is a touch typist but just imagine how different Linux would be if he couldn't the letters Y, U, J, H, M or N?
