Saturday 18 January 2014

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.

Monday 13 January 2014

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!

Thursday 2 January 2014

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