Playing with the network

I'm in the position of needing to improve my internet connectivity, so one of the first steps is to decouple all the things that provide the services I rely upon.

Stage one is to turn my modem into just an ADSL endpoint, removing any DHCP, NAT, and PPPoE termination from the device so that it has a single function.

Fortunately my nb604n ADSL modem has a nice easy-to-follow guide for taking it into bridge mode: http://support.netcommwireless.com/sm/videos/nb604n/nb604n-bridge-mode-setup-guide

Now onto greater things!

LCA2015 CFP Closing Real Soon Now

It's July, which means the LCA2015 CFP is open... but not for much longer.

I've been reading through what's been submitted so far, and it looks like linux.conf.au will again have an excellent program.  But, as Co-Chair of the Papers Committee, I want the program to be even better! :-)

So if you're working on a open-source or open-hardware project, and you're doing cool stuff, why not come to Auckland in January and speak at one of the best community-driven open-source conferences in the world?  We've got some great information on how to get your proposal accepted (also in video) to help you put your proposal together.

But to be a speaker at LCA2015 you need to make a proposal to speak to the CFP (which closes next Friday Sunday on July 13).  So hurry up, and submit your proposal today!

OpenStack Summit Keysigning

It's been a while since I've gone to a GPG keysigning, but at the Juno OpenStack Summit in Atlanta I joined in.  After all, it was my first summit and getting some id authentication is worthwhile.

After the keysigning party I made use of caff to sign all those keys.  But of course I needed to configure SMTP first in my development VM.  There's a nice guide to getting postfix working with gmail which helped that go quickly.  Just remember that gmail likes Application-specific passwords nowadays.

Oh, and another thing.  GPG has awful error messages.  When you receive your key signed by a third-party and you try to gpg --import it and you get the dreaded:

$ gpg --import your-signed-key.asc 
gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found.
gpg: Total number processed: 0
$ file your-signed-key.asc 
your-signed-key.asc: PGP message

...remember that the key has probably been encrypted with your public key so only you can read it.  The way around this is a simple:

$ gpg --decrypt your-signed-key.asc | gpg --import

Things would be mush easier if gnupg provided suggestions, but life often isn't that easy :)

LCA TV: More fun at linux.conf.au 2014

LCA2014 was a whole lot of fun, for so many reasons!  One thing I love is talking with people from all over the Free and Open Source community from around the world - meeting new people doing exciting things, as well as catching up with those who have become dear friends from years of shared experiences.

This year James Bromberger had a wonderful idea: LCA TV.  How about we interview people on the couch and broadcast these casual chats live alongside the conference video streams?  A kind of free software equivalent of David Letterman or Steve Vizard.  This fantastic new thing allowed me to combine a few of my favourite things together, and allow others to get to know some of the conference attendees in a more casual setting.

So, how did it go?  It went off like a bang, and despite having a few technical challenges, I think this 'experiment' was a raving success, and hopefully the start of yet another LCA tradition!

The result of these videos are now available over on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=SPmiuOcBMoxjdzEQTvqwHH46VbCib-_Icd and will soon also appear on the LCA mirror.

Getting your CFP abstract accepted 101 - linux.conf.au 2014

I had the wonderful privilege of speaking at linux.conf.au 2014 last week in Perth, Australia on Getting your CFP abstract accepted 101.  This is in the context of the linux.conf.au papers committee, which I've been a part of for the past decade.

I feel like it's an important service to the community to help some of the amazingly smart people who attend linux.conf.au take the step up to becoming a speaker.  I hope that what I've had to say will assist, and I feel honoured that I myself was given the opportunity to speak to this (despite my protestations that other talks be accepted instead).

Here's a link to the video of my talk, and to the slide pack.

Any comments on this material, or on my presentation, are of course welcomed!

LCA2014 - 2 sleeps to go!

Somehow, 99 days have flown by and we're now at 2 sleeps until LCA2014.  Wow.

So what's happened in this period?  How can 99 days pass without comment?  It's only by examining my photo-stream and Tripit that I can piece together what's been happening:

I started a great new job at Rackspace working on upstream OpenStack - which has been wonderful!  I've helped out on a school camp for 10 year olds. I've been to San Antonio for the first time, and Sydney 4 times. I've dressed up as a mullet-toting 80's rocker and had weekends away on Yorke Peninsula, Victor Harbor and Mt Crawford forrest (twice) with my family.  And spent many nights playing board games with good friends.

Life is busy but such a blessing.

The next week is also a highlight of the year - linux.conf.au.  The best conference going, along with a great community of freedom lovers!  Not to mention catching up with a whole bunch of people I only get to see once a year.  What talks am I looking forward to this coming week?

• Monday:  
• There's a bunch of stuff on the Developer, Testing, Release and Continuous Integration Automation miniconf that's interesting, especially failtest: more path testing for C. 
• Tuesday: 
• Just about everything in the OpenStack Miniconf.  This will be fantastic!
• Wednesday: 
• VirtIO 1.0: A Standard Emerges
• Building an affordable differential GPS positioning system
• Linception: Playing with containers under linux
• Python 3: Making the Leap
• HTTP/2.0 And You
• Rock your Emacs
• The changing Linux kernel development process
• Building 2D rendering acceleration with OpenGL
• Embedding Codec 2
• Bringing more women to Free and Open Source Software
• Advances in Validation of Concurrent Software
• Continuous Integration for your database migrations
• Thursday:
• Python Packagin 2.0: Playing well with others
• Rapid OpenStack Deployment for Novices and Experts Alike
• Gtk to Qt - a strange journey
• Going Global: Building Global Clusters for OpenStack Swift
• OpenCL, saving parallel programmers pain today!
• Zero-Copy Compositing Research to Reality
• There and Back Again: An Unexpected Journey in Agile Documentation
• Introduction to Go
• Friday:
• Raspberry Pi Hacks
• Building APIs Develoers Love
• How OpenStack Improves Code Quality with Project Gating and Zuul
• The Rust Language: memory, ownership and lifetimes
• Diskimage-builder: deep-dive into a machine compiler
• The best CTDB bugs ever!
• Processing Continuous Integration Log Events for Great Good
• Best of Breed vs Batteries Included: Design Decisions When Building Frameworks
• Provisioning Baremetal with OpenStack