Paris Buttfield-Addison and I co-presented a talk at Linux.conf.au in Ballarat recently. The topic was on designing mobile apps that don’t suck on Android. The talk was pretty well received, the audience attentive and engaged (as evidenced by the fact that they heckled), and it was probably one of the better talks that Paris and I have co-presented.
The video of the talk is available as an ogv movie file, alternatively, the YouTube version is embedded below.
This week I’m at linux.conf.au, the southern hemisphere’s premier open-source conference. This year it is being held in Ballarat, about an hour’s travel from Melbourne. I’ll be documenting the trip and conference as much as I can given the limits of my enthusiasm and awakeness.
Friday 20th January:
Friday is the last day of the conference, and everybody is starting to look tired; it’s a full-on week. But, before we all go home, there are just a few more excellent talks to attend. The first of these was Friday’s keynote, given by Jacob Appelbaum, and what an amazing keynote it was. Jacob talked about the state of surveillance states. He explained what they are doing to keep track of all of their citizens, and the special measures that have been put in place in the last few years (mostly since September 11) that significantly curtail our freedoms in the name of privacy and safety. A few choice quotes from the talk:
Free software is for freedom, open source is for business solutions.
Be the trouble you want to see in the world. [It's in my notes, but I'm pretty sure it was actually just written on his shirt]
90s Nihilism: I have nothing to hide.
The data kept about you in [server] logs around the world tells a story that is not necessarily true, but is made up of facts.
This talk flowed on nicely from Senator Ludlam’s talk at the Penguin dinner.
After morning tea, I watched the talk by Rusty Russell and Matt Evans about why UNIX has been getting bigger over time (in terms of binary bloat). It’s mostly due to new features, but also because of the infrastructure that modern systems have and the libraries that are statically linked in these days (glibc is basically just bloatware). Also in this session I attended the talk by Simon Horman on Open vSwitch. It’s really interesting content, but the presentation was a bit dry. It’s definitely something I want to check out when I get home though, as it could be quite useful for me when I have VMs set up in Linux. The support for VLANs makes it a much better choice than standard Linux network bridges.
During lunchtime there was a meeting between a group of Tasmanian delegates, and it was decided that the Hobart Linux User’s Group should be started up again. So if you’re reading this, like Linux and live in Hobart, get in touch!
After lunch was the best-of sessions. These were talks voted for by the delegates that they wanted to see again, or missed the first time around. I watched two fabulous talks. The first was on Codec2 (presented by David Rowe), an audio speech codec that uses 1400 bits/sec for transmission, which is a 500x improvement on raw 16bit 44.1kHz audio. Very impressive. The second was on the freedom box project (presented by Bdale Garbee, which is a platform for developing easy-to-use home servers oriented towards federated social networking services (such as Status.net or Diaspora). This followed on nicely from Appelbaum’s talk that morning, giving a solution to some of the problems that were outlined.
The final session of the conference was the lightning talks. The real highlight was watching Paul Fenwick jump up on stage between the lightning talks and try to give a several minute long presentation in thirty seconds. He failed, but it was funny to watch. After the lightning talks was the closing ceremony. The main reason for this is to hand out a few awards and thank some people, but also to find out where the next linux.conf.au is going to be held. Next year, it’s in Canberra!
This week I’m at linux.conf.au, the southern hemisphere’s premier open-source conference. This year it is being held in Ballarat, about an hour’s travel from Melbourne. I’ll be documenting the trip and conference as much as I can given the limits of my enthusiasm and awakeness.
Thursday 19th January:
The Linux HA Tutorial
The morning started off with a keynote from Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. This was a fascinating talk about the dangers behind having proprietary computer systems running our essential services, the things we rely on every day for our modern society. Her biggest example (and an amazingly powerful one) is the pacemaker that runs her heart (or gives it a jolt if it stops, at least). Attackers could quite easily crack into some of the modern pacemakers via the wireless signal they emit, and cause all kinds of damage (like giving a shock when it’s not needed, or failing to give one when it is). In addition, there are all other kinds of things we rely on (voting machines, car control software, etc.) that are closed source and pose a risk to us because of this. So basically it was about how we really need to move to open source systems to make the world a better place, not just because of reliability or business reasons.
The Penguin Dinner
Between morning tea and lunch I viewed included a tutorial on setting up a Linux HA cluster using pacemaker (with an example MySQL set-up) which I learned a lot from. I’m going to have to try out the techniques at home more, and see if I can apply them to my systems. I’m not sure how well these practises will work over wide-area networks though, as they’re primarily designed for LANs (as Michael Wheeler said to me, “It’s not redundant until it’s geographically redundant.”).
Michael Wheeler seems unpleased
After lunch was another tutorial, this time on the basics of computer security. There are some crazy things you can do to try and break into a computer. I finally understand how buffer overflows work, and what can be done to prevent them (quite a lot, actually). Breaking into encryption was another strong topic. You can measure how much power a CPU is using to figure out whether it’s doing add or multiply, and things like that. But basically what you really need to do is maintain a much higher consideration of security while coding than you did before, and I hope this tutorial will help me achieve that.
After afternoon tea (during which I consumed a suspiciously large quantity of fruit… I must be craving healthy food) it was time for the talk given by my friend Chris and his friend Paris, titled “Android is not vi”. It’s probably the funniest talk I’ve seen the entire conference, and several delegates have mentioned it wouldn’t be out of place in a comedy routine. The talk was mostly about making the user experience on Android better, but with a surprise ending: the general principles apply to pretty much any user experience design, because they’re all the same. Not making the user think is pretty much the key.
Dessert!
Then of course, Thursday night means the Penguin dinner. This is the opportunity for the speeches and the presentation of the Rusty Wrench award, named after Rusty Russell who started running the conference back in 1999. This year it was given to Mary Gardiner for her services to the Ada Initiative, amongst other things. This is very well deserved too, as there is a nearly 20% female attendance rate at LCA this year. The meal at the dinner was also excellent. I had a pork salad starter, the chicken thigh main, and then an amazing mango cake dessert (pictured). After dinner, we received a speech by Senator Scott Ludlam on the surveillance state that Australia is turning into. 250000+ people have had some sort of police surveillance performed on them in Australia last year. Scary stuff, and I think it will only become scarier once we have heard what Jacob Appelbaum has to say in his keynote tomorrow morning. All in all, a great event.
This week I’m at linux.conf.au, the southern hemisphere’s premier open-source conference. This year it is being held in Ballarat, about an hour’s travel from Melbourne. I’ll be documenting the trip and conference as much as I can given the limits of my enthusiasm and awakeness.
Wednesday 18th January:
Paul Fenwick is awesome!
Quite a few more talks today; seven to be exact. The first was Paul Fenwick’s keynote address on “All Your Brains Suck”, which is about ways of hacking and exploiting the human brain. It’s fascinating stuff, even if I had seen the talk before (when he visited UTAS and gave the talk to TUCS). I now know that scary but logically safe places (like rollercoasters) are good places for dates. And that priming people with slow words (like ‘elderly’) make them walk slower. Utterly crazy stuff, just like the speaker of this talk. 
After morning tea, there were two talks on filesystems. The first, on btrfs, was given by Avi Miller, who was an excellent speaker. btrfs seems like an amazing piece of kit. I had always thought that you couldn’t do much with a Linux filesystem; but I was shown to be wrong. btrfs does file-level RAID, so you can how many backup copies of a file you want on the disks. It also does copy-on-write, so you have backups into the immediate past as well. The next talk was on XFS, given by Dave Chinner, and he showed how the performance of XFS has jumped up in recent years, as good as btrfs (sometimes better) and they both far outstrip ext4 now (no surprise, ext4′s underlying technology is about two decades old).
The first talk after lunch was on Ubuntu’s ARM ports, and how development is progressing for the various ARM platforms (of which there seem to be hundreds). The most interesting thing for me was the coming-of-age of ARM servers, which consume far less power than x86 servers (a good thing for the environment) while doing a similar workload. Because most services don’t require CPU-intensive workloads, we can save even more! The second talk after lunch was on adding millions of watchpoints to a Linux system. Most Linux systems currently only support 2 or 4 watchpoints, and this isn’t enough for good security analysis. So they added a driver to Linux that steps through instructions when an out-of-memory page is accessed (via virtual memory). Clever stuff, even if most of it went over my head.
After afternoon tea, I watched two talks on bootloaders. The first, on using Linux as a bootloader (given by Peter Chubb), was interesting, though was really only useful as a method in a small number of cases. Most systems are better off sticking to something like GRUB. Speaking of GRUB, the second talk (given by Josh Triplett) was about porting Python to GRUB, and the resulting project, BITS. This seems like a fascinating thing to do, mostly because it blurs the line between what an application is and what an operating system is. This is a line that Emacs has been tiptoeing on for some time now, and it is nice to see it has a friend.
The Debian Swirl
For dinner today, I attended the unprofessional delegates networking session (UnPDNS) which is held at the same time as the event for the professionals. We had a barbecue, which gave me a great opportunity to hang out with some of the other cool people who didn’t buy expensive tickets. 
This week I’m at linux.conf.au, the southern hemisphere’s premier open-source conference. This year it is being held in Ballarat, about an hour’s travel from Melbourne. I’ll be documenting the trip and conference as much as I can given the limits of my enthusiasm and awakeness.
Tuesday 17th January:
Bruce Peren's Keynote
Day 2 was full of a lot more great talks. First up in the morning was Bruce Peren’s keynote address. He talked a lot about trying harder to maintain the ideals we’ve worked for in the past. He says the fights we fought in the past, using our moral high-ground to our advantage, we might not win now because we have business groups (like Ubuntu and Redhat) speaking on our behalf… and businesses always have to put profit first.
After morning tea I saw two great kernel-related talks, the first by Jonathan Corbet and the second by Mathew Garrett. Jonathan basically gave a rundown of the Linux kernel development work that has happened over the last year, including the release of Linux 3.0 and for the first time ever, a kernel release having less source code in it than the last one (due to some cleanup work). Mathew Garrett gave a really impassioned talk on the good and evil of EFI. From what I gathered, the runtime services stuff offered by EFI is a great idea with a half-arsed implementation. On the other hand, the secure boot offered by EFI threatens to make open-source deployment to normal users a right pain in the arse… if it is possible at all. That’s a bit of a worry.
Greg Banks' "This Old Code"
After lunch I watched a talk by Greg Banks (who works for Opera) on renovating old source code to get it up to scratch with modern systems. His examples came from the Cyrus IMAP server, and there was a heap of great tidbits of information there. The second talk after lunch was given by Robert Mibus from Internode, about how they are implementing reverse IPv6 DNS mappings for their customer. With a possible 4TB of mappings for each customer, they have to generate them on the fly… but no existing DNS server did this. So they wrote their own. One thing I was very interested in, being an Internode customer, is that I can request to get IPv6 reverse mappings delegated to my own DNS servers; something I have already put in a request for.
More trainspotting!
The second last talk for the day was about moving large amounts of data and essential services from one datacenter to another with no loss of downtime… an impressive feat! Given by a team from Mozilla, it detailed how they prepared for and moved thir crash reporting system from San Jose to Pheonix. The last talk I saw was given by Sarah Novotny about caching databases, and how the many caches on a system can sometimes work against each other. It covered performance benchmarking and monitoring as well, just to make sure everything is running fine.
Dinner this evening was at the Irish Murphy’s we visited the night before. While a bit unadventurous, I was with a group who hadn’t been there before, and the food was still quite excellent. I was happy. On the way back to the hotel I got to do a bit of train spotting as well, which made me quite happy.
This week I’m at linux.conf.au, the southern hemisphere’s premier open-source conference. This year it is being held in Ballarat, about an hour’s travel from Melbourne. I’ll be documenting the trip and conference as much as I can given the limits of my enthusiasm and awakeness.
Monday 16th January:
Chris Neugebauer waiting for the conference to begin...
Monday is the real start of the conference. First thing to do was register and pick up the conference badge and bag. While eating breakfast (a lovely cooked breakfast of bacon and eggs for me!) I looked over the provided schwag to see what free goodies had been obtained. For most of the delegates (including me) the item of interest this year was a Freetronics Leostick, an Arduino development board in an absolutely tiny form factor. Then it was time for the conference proper to begin!
First of all was a welcome before morning tea. The sponsors and volunteers were thanked, and the conference rule #1 was revealed: Be Excellent To Each Other. So much awesome. After morning tea (where I filled up on caffeine like a camel on an all-nighter) it was talk time. Some highlights from the first day:
Yes, those really are My Little Ponies.
). This really piqued my interest; I’ve heard a lot about static code analysis but really failed to see it progress any further than trying to correct variable names or tell me when I have the wrong class member. This trawled the entire function call tree and tried to find security flaws (most of which end up from being non-escaped characters passed to database queries). Very informative. That talk, along with a few of the lightning talks from the open programming miniconf, really want me to do more investigation into what programming languages and compilers can do.
The Guiness Pie I had for dinner. Yum.
After the day’s talks it was time for dinner. But what to do for dinner? An Irish pub is never a bad idea. Ballarat’s is Irish Murphy’s, and they do a very good guinness pie. It was amazing. After that, back to the dorms for some blog post writing and some much-needed sleep.
This week I’m at linux.conf.au, the southern hemisphere’s premier open-source conference. This year it is being held in Ballarat, about an hour’s travel from Melbourne. I’ll be documenting the trip and conference as much as I can given the limits of my enthusiasm and awakeness.
Sunday 15th January:
Yay! My favourite mode of transport!
Sunday was spent travelling. My flight from Hobart to Melbourne departed at 8:35am, and it was a perfect day for flying. Warm, clear skies and little wind. An almost perfect flight. I landed in Melbourne before schedule and caught the SkyBus into the city. I was there by 10am, and my train to Ballarat (which I was travelling with my friend Michael Wheeler on) left at 5:08pm, so I had quite a number of hours to spare. Needless to say, I did what any tourist would do, and set about travelling on as many forms of public transport as I could in one day.
The View From St. Kilda Pier
I caught a tram down to St. Kilda, the light rail (which was merely a glorified tram) back, a suburban train out into a random suburb and back, as well as the plane, car and bus I had already travelled on. I took a few pictures, mostly from St. Kilda pier. A poster detailing the risks of getting in the way of a tram also caught my eye.
A rhino on a skateboard? Sure...
After my random adventures in Melbourne’s transport system came to an end, I met Michael (fresh from his trip down from Rockhampton) and we proceeded to get on the VLine train to Ballarat. We fired up our laptops and were just getting comfortable in a game of OpenTTD, and then the train was off! But not for long. After about 200 metres of travel it was announced that the train was cancelled, and we would all be transported on coaches instead. We finally arrived in Ballarat two hours late, at about 9pm.
In case you missed the news, PyCon Australia is being held on August 18th and 19th in Hobart, Tasmania. Like the first two PyCon Australia conferences, 2012 hopes to be full of presentations, tutorials and panel sessions from experts and core developers of the Python programming language, as well as the Python libraries and frameworks that you rely on for your work.
It’s time for us to start shaping the conference programme for 2012, and we need your help. We want to know what topics you want to see covered at PyCon Australia, or which presenters you think can help make our conference perfect for you.
If you’re already convinced, pop over to http://tinyurl.com/pyconau2012-cft and fill out our Call for Topics form. If not, read on!
Oh, still reading? Let see…
PyCon Australia is running a Call for Topics. This is like the reverse of a traditional Call for Proposals: instead of proposing a presentation, you can propose a topic that you’d like to see a presentation on at the conference, or possibly a presenter that you really want to see present. PyCon US have been doing this for a long time, it helps ensure that their conference attracts the best possible presenters. There’s a couple of reasons why you should help us out:
We’re planning on putting out our usual call for proposals in February 2012, but we need to make sure that the best possible presenters submit proposals to PyCon Australia. Our delegates, like you, want to enhance their skills in Python with every session that they attend. Our CfP can’t reach everyone, and even then not everyone who sees the CfP will think that they’re good enough to present at a conference — getting an invitation to present can be a pretty good motivator!
One great reason to come to a Python conference is to increase your skillset in the tools and frameworks that you use in your day-to-day work. Perhaps there’s a new library that you’re considering using? Nominating it as a presentation topic for PyCon Australia will increase the chances it being covered in the conference. If you don’t know of an expert in the field, don’t worry. We can find one.
Great! We can’t want to hear your suggestions. Just head over to our call for Topics form, and send in your ideas. Every idea can help make this conference perfect for you.
So one thing I forgot to mention on this blog is that I’ve taken over the reins of PyCon Australia for the 2012 and 2013 conferences. After spending two formative years in Sydney, under the direction of Tim Ansell, Richard Jones et al., we’re taking the conference south to Hobart, Tasmania. We’ve got a great team, consisting of myself, Joshua Hesketh and Matthew D’Orazio, and our papers committee is being led up once again by Richard Jones.
So, what can you look forward to? Well, here’s what we know so far.
We’re holding PyCon Australia around the weekend of August 18 and 19 2012. Our venue is the Wrest Point Convention centre in Sandy Bay. We’re really excited about our choice of venue — as well as offering us perfectly-sized rooms for our conference, the wide variety of spaces in the complex allow us to bring all of the traditional PyCon Australia events — CodeWars, the sprints and the conference itself — under the same roof for the first time.
Wrest Point is situated on the shoreline of the River Derwent, and this not only admits excellent views from the conference venue, but will also enable us to run some truly memorable social events, including the conference dinner, which we hope to share more details about shortly.
Our venue also lets us offer accommodation across a very wide range of budgets (starting around $124/room/night) to our delegates — this is not just a nominated conference hotel, it’s in the same building complex as the conference venue. This means that delegates can stay on-site for the entirety of the conference. We think this will prove very popular, especially amongst delegates sticking around for the conference sprints.
For students and those travelling on a budget — we plan on keeping the conference affordable: there’ll still be heavily discounted student tickets, and we’ll announce budget accommodation options when registration opens.
Finally, you might be wondering how you can help make PyCon Australia the perfect conference for you? Well, in the coming week, we’ll be opening a Call for Topics. This is an opportunity for you, as a potential PyCon Australia delegate, to nominate both topics and presenters that you’d like to see at the conference. By nominating presentations, you can help ensure that PyCon Australia can help you enhance your skills and increase your knowledge of Python.
Of course, if you have something that you could present at PyCon Australia, we’d love to hear from you as well. We’ll be opening a traditional call for presentations during February.
So, that’s it for now. I’ll be sure to keep you up-to-date on our progress as we seek to put on the best Python Conference that Australia can offer. If you’ve got something to ask, feel free to drop a comment, either here, on Twitter, or on our Google+ page — we’ll get back to you as quickly as possible!
(Photos: “Wrest Point” by JJ Harrison, CC-BY-SA; “View of Hobart CBD” by Aaroncrick, CC-BY-SA)
Now that university classes and exams have finished for the year, I have a lot more free time on my hands. Today I decided to make chicken stock. A few days ago we bought a roasted chicken from the supermarket to use the meat in sandwiches. We also got a chicken pasta bake from the meat as well. I wanted to use the entire bird (waste not want not). Also, stock is delicious. Especially home-made stock.
Note that this is just what I did… I’m not saying this is a perfect recipe.
At the start of cooking.
Ingredients:
Method:
Note that one bird doens’t make a huge amount of stock (probably about a litre), so it’s probably worth stockpiling the bones and skins until you have two or three. I was just impatient.
See you in January, Ballarat!
Google Reader’s just announced that they’re turning off reader sharing progressively from today. I wrote the following in my share stream a few moments ago, and realised that this was massively counterproductive — it will probably disappear in a few hours anyway.
So on the off chance that you subscribe to my feed and haven’t read this:
Hey all,
Reader sharing starts dying today. I’m pretty sad about that, I’ve loved reading the things all of you have shared over the past few years — I’ve discovered new things, built up new interests, learnt a lot and have had a lot of fun doing it. I’m going to miss reading what you have.
So what am I going to do? Well, I’ll be seeing if the ‘plus’ features actually replicate reader sharing in any useful form. Who knows, it might actually be a useful feature.
If not, we’ll see what manner of useful *external* sharing appears (share by e-mail looks particularly useful) — shared feeds don’t seem too hard to re-implement, and we could theoretically have something useful up and running over a weekend. I’m seriously considering doing this. Let me know if you’re interested!
So yeah, if you’re not already following me on twitter, that’s probably the most useful place to find me: I’m @chrisjrn. My blog is at http://chris.neugebauer.id.au. Keep in touch! I still want to read your stuff!
Thank you, and goodbye!
–Chris
Although I did not know the man, the contributions of Dennis Ritchie have have a profound effect upon my life and the community with which I associate. I interact with systems inspired by the first versions of UNIX, and write code in languages that owe their design principles to C, almost on an daily basis.
Dennis Ritchie was a giant on whose shoulders many of those in technology, including myself, can feel proud to stand on.
Front Cover
As you might be aware, I’m not a huge fan of Google, or indeed, cloud-based apps in general. When I saw The Googlization of Everything (and why we should worry) in my local campus bookstore, I decided that it would be a good read on the spot. It was a good read, and here’s why.
I will admit upfront that I’m probably not the most unbiased person in the world when it comes to what is really a review of a review of Google. If you dislike bias, go watch the Pakistani cricket team instead.
I’d always been a bit hesistant to use Google products (or any cloud product) because of lax privacy. How do I know that Google won’t be using my information against me? This book (partially) confirmed my suspicions. They are using my information, both for and against me. Every time somebody performs a Google search, Google stores the query and information about me (my IP, my location, browser, etc) and uses that to tune search results for me. This appears on the surface to be fine. I like it when I search “cat” on Google and Google knows that what I really want is the first result to be whatismyip.com (I use the “cat” Google search as a quick method to test Internet browser connectivity, I don’t know why). But Vaidhyanatham (the author) raises other points about this. Firstly, how long is our data kept? And who else is it being shared with? But perhaps most disturbingly, Google might prevent me from seeing new information because it’s too busy telling me about what I think I want. For instance, if a new species of cat was discovered in the jungles of Peru, I might miss it because Google is too busy customising my results with Internet connectivity tests. While that not matter much, on other (more important) subjects the splitting up of information based on what we think we want to see is disturbing.
Vaidhyanatham raises many other points in his book too. The Google Books project is designed to give everybody in the world access to out-of-print books, instead of having them sit on dusty shelves in university libraries. It’s a nice goal. However, the program is structured in such a way that nobody else could possibly compete with it, due to arcane copyright law and out-of-court settlements. Do we want Google to be the sole provider of this service? Shouldn’t this be done by a public or community organisation instead? They’re difficult questions, and the fact that we haven’t even started considering them should warn us.
Another similar situation exists for Google Scholar. Google has obtained agreements with universities to provide academic articles for inclusion in Google’s archives. The idea, similarly to Google Books, is to allow more people to see things they wouldn’t have otherwise seen. A noble goal. Again, however, there are several problems with the project’s implementation. Again, arcane agreements and laws prevent universities from easily collaborating with an alternative archive agent. Even more worrying is the fact that to most users (those without access to the paywalled sites that the articles actually reside on) only the abstract of an article is available. This results in a broadening but a shallowing of the information available to most people. This is another of those projects that might be better taken on by the people, for the people. I know of one user on an IRC channel I frequent who is collecting datasheets and manuals from PC components from the 1980s, before these datasheets become extinct. While not legal, and while he hasn’t made this public, it’s the right direction to go in.
Then there’s the shallowing of our knowledge due to Google. This is a huge topic, and so many authors have covered it in so many various degrees of rigour that I won’t even begin to scratch the surface. However, here’s the gist of the idea: Because we have access to the largest library in human history (the web) at our fingertips at any point we’re in front of a computer (which for those of us with a smartphone, is constantly), we don’t remember information like previous generations did. I’m still not confident that this is a bad thing; I am a lot more knowledgeable than I would be if the only learning resource I had was a paper encyclopædia. I don’t know a lot of facts, but I know where to find them. In today’s world, that’s what counts. Still, it’s something we should look into further.
A good portion of the arguments put forward in this book are more general than Google and apply to the Internet at large (such as the shallowing of our knowledge). Most of the other arguments could be taken directly to Google’s legal department in a court showdown (which would almost certainly be the court case of the century). Whichever way you stand on the issues, more information is never a bad thing.
This summer, like last summer, I’ll be travelling to linux.conf.au. This year it’s being held in Ballarat, which presents the opportunity for one of my favourite modes of transport: TRAIN! Here, tentatively, are my plans for that week:
I’ve also recently re-installed Debian on my laptop. Running Windows 7 last conference was embarrasing. I ran PuTTY full-screen the entire time just to cover up the fact.
I hope to see you all there!
TL;DR — submit a proposal at http://tinyurl.com/opm2012-proposal
before the first round closes on Friday 7 October.
I’m pleased to announce that The Open Programming Miniconf, a fixture for application developers attending Linux.conf.au since 2010 is returning as part of Linux.conf.au 2012, to be held in January at the University of Ballarat. The miniconf has been an opportunity for presenters of all experience levels to share their experiences in in application development using free and open source development tools.
The Open Programming Miniconf for 2012 invites 25-minute presentations on topics relating to the development of excellent Free and Open Source Software applications. In particular, the Miniconf invites presentations that focus on sharing techniques, best practices and values which are applicable to developers of all Open Source programming languages.
In the past, topics have included:
Past programmes can be found at http://lca2011.linux.org.au/programme/schedule/monday and http://www.lca2010.org.nz/wiki/Miniconfs/Open_Programming_Languages
To submit a proposal, visit http://tinyurl.com/opm2012-proposal and fill out the form as required. The CFP will remain open indefinitely, but the first round of acceptances will not be sent until Friday 7 October 2011.
OPM2012 is part of Linux.conf.au 2012, being held at the University of Ballarat on Monday, 16 January 2012. Further enquiries can be directed to Christopher Neugebauer via e-mail ( chris+opm2012@neugebauer.id.au ) or via twitter (@chrisjrn).
First of all, the usual warning: I take no responsibility for any harm done to yourself or your equipment if you decide to take my lead and mod the fan on your switch. It’s your fault for listening to some guy on the Internet you’ve never met.
A little while ago I acquired some old 3550 switches from a friend, and I haven’t used them much because they’re horrifically loud. Recently though, I decided to try and make them quiet enough to leave on in the living room. While I didn’t succeed, I made enough of a difference that I thought it might be worth sharing.
Please note that this mod isn’t going to work if your switch is a) under warranty; b) installed in an equipment rack with hot/cold aisles; or c) you don’t like taking the cover off equipment that has 240v inside.
Basically, the gist is this: The fan inside the switch has a cover on it. By removing half of the cover (the half that isn’t attached to the fan motor) and then mounting the fan upside down, you reduce the vibrations of the fan’s casing. Please also note that the outlet fan is thus turned into an intake fan; it takes cold air from the back of the router and blows it over the power supply unit.
The finished fan installation. Much quieter!
Research on the Internet (#cisco on Freenode and some forums) led me to decide that complete removal of the fan wasn’t an option, due to the switch overheating. I then wanted to replace the fan with a quieter computer fan, but the connector, though the same, is wired differently. Though I own (and can operate) a soldering iron, I’m also quite lazy. Turning the fan upside down (as suggested by a friend) was much easier!
Update 2011-08-17: I initially tried this with my non-PoE switch. Today I tried this with my PoE switch and tested it running a few PoE devices. It quickly overheated, so I don’t recommend this with the PoE (inline power) models.
Photo by Michael Wheeler
We all know a good password is necessary for good protection of our computer systems and our personal/business data. They are however one of the most annoying inventions in human history. The biggest problem of course is not that we need a good password, it’s that we need tens or hundreds of good passwords, ideally one for every single computer system and website we visit, plus more for banking, encryption and other miscellaneous tasks. For me, that’s at least 100 different passwords that I should have. Guess how many I used to have for all of these different things?
Three. Not thirty or three hundred, just three. One for encryption and banking, one for system logons, and one for all the miscellaneous websites I visit every day. Not ideal. Not even close to decent. Woefully inadequate. So I decided to change that, slowly and surely, until I had a unique password for every system and website. But how? I’m not stupid, and my memory is pretty decent, but the thought of remembering a hundred different passwords is boggling in and of itself!
So how on earth am I to solve this problem? I found a couple of inadequate options:
After a bit of research though, I stumbled across the answer. Password algorithms! The central idea is that like a password is put through an algorithm to produce an encryption key which unlocks your data (or a website), you are taking something you can remember (a normal dictionary word) and using it to produce a password.
The really clever element of the idea is that you can write your password algorithm down, because without the starting words the algorithm is useless. The amount of stuff you have to remember is greatly reduced! It’s genius! Here’s how it works:
For all the sites that you visit often, you’ll be able to remember the password in it’s complete form (via muscle memory). For sites that you don’t visit so often, you can take your simple word and produce the result password in only a couple of simple steps. It makes it even easier if you use a pool of common words (like fruit), as you can just keep guessing your way through the common fruits if you happen to forget even the simple password.
There are things you can do to make the passwords even stronger, too:
There are a few drawbacks, however. You still have to remember something (although remembering ‘fruit’ really isn’t that difficult). If somebody figures out both your pool of words and your algorithm, you are pretty much screwed. But those are fairly low-risk prices to pay, I think.
I’ve recently converted to using this sort of algorithm-based password mechanism. I think it’s great. I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts too: have you been using it for years? Do you think it’s a stupid idea? Should we all just be using biometrics instead? Let me know!
Photo courtesy of Michael Wheeler
I recently put a lot of thought into how I perform my computer backups. I’m one of those people that, while I would only be mildly pissed off by the failure of a hard drive, would be quite angry at myself if I lost even the merest hint of data that I wanted to keep. I used to perform my backups manually, using the Windows backup utility to back data up onto an external hard drive. It worked fine most of the time, but it definitely had process defects… the largest of which being, I had to remember to do it. It required my interaction to succeed (because I had to plug the drive in) and this meant there was always a human element involved. And humans are lazy.
So I set about designing myself the ultimate foolproof backup system. There would be multiple storage media, there would be encryption, there would be checks and validations and several custom-written applications. Then I started thinking, “what exactly am I protecting myself against?” It’s a good question. Here’s the list I came up with:
That was all I could think of, though I’m sure there are additional points (leave a comment or email me, please!). Then I figured out what I had to do in order to prevent these situations from happening.
So there was my analysis of the backup problem done. Now for the design stage. My current working computer systems consist of a laptop (running Windows 7), a desktop (dual-booting Windows 7 and Debian GNU/Linux), and my home server (which runs Debian GNU/Linux). So I chose to do the following:
I haven’t completed the process of implementation yet (in fact I’ve hardly started). Already though, I feel safer knowing that I’ve thought about the process of storing my data, and that makes me feel a lot safer. Most people don’t think about backups until it’s too late, and perhaps maybe they should.
A few months ago I moved in with my girlfriend (yay! ), and this necessitated the moving of all my computer equipment to her house. At my old place, I had strung Ethernet cables all down the hallway between the various rooms, and although aesthetically unpleasant, certainly did the trick. Moving in with my girlfriend meant I could no longer have the freedom to string cables everywhere. It looked horrible, somebody was going to trip on something eventually, and being in a rented house meant that we had to keep the place looking half-decent (Ethernet cables, surprisingly enough, are not everybody’s idea of a home decoration). So what to do?
My first thought, naturally enough, was to hook up some wireless adapters. This plan worked very well for one area of the house (where my server rack now sits), but horribly for another (where my desktop is). I read about the new-fangled Homeplug idea, which involves sending Ethernet frames over the AC power network in our home. I was dubious, but intrigued; Homeplug seemed to be the solution to my problems, in theory:
Of course I decided to give it a go! I hurried on down to my local computer store and bought myself a pair of Homeplug adapters, these ones made by TP-Link (who, despite being Chinese owned and operated, make some excellent equipment). I plugged one in near my router and cabled it in, and plugged the other end in near my desktop computer. Unfortunately I had to plug it in via the powerboard due to the size of the adapter, but according to the documentation makes no difference. I immediately noticed several problems:
Worst of all though, was this:
In the end, I couldn’t stand my computer pausing every three seconds to think, so I gave up on Homeplug (I handed the adapters to my housemate, who is successfully using them to plug a wireless black-hole in his bedroom). I’m now using a top-end wireless adapter and a strong aerial, and it seems to be working.
As an aside, I read that Homeplug does have serious security issues in it’s out-of-the-box configuration. You have to set up something similar to wireless network security in order to prevent your neighbours from connecting to your Homeplug network.
Basically, the short version is this: Homeplug is an awful idea, and avoid it if at all possible. Just use wireless, which is faster and far better tested. But if you are going to buy a Homeplug adapter or two, buying the TP-Link models isn’t a bad idea, they’re pretty decent.
I really like this shot — looking up Pine Street in San Francisco, with a B&W conversion done by punching a bunch of buttons in *cough*iphoto*cough.
I’ve been told it makes a good background screen for a certain 2:3-ratio mobile device, too.
Update: actually identified the street that the photo is of.
… When you’re completely distracted by all manner of things! So, as promised, here are a bunch of pretty photos of the things that I’ve done whilst here:
Wandered around San Francisco, looking at the awesome architecture…
Had fantastic coffee, brewed with SCIENCE^w SIPHONS! (Thanks to @bluebottlemint for that…)
Caught the Caltrain between San Francisco and Mountain View far too many times.
Visited clichéd tourist attractions (actually, the bridge is pretty spectacular, and I’m very glad I went to have a look at it!)…
Other things not featuring photos:
Since then I’ve been based in the lovely city of Mountain View, which appears to be the epicentre of much of the tech industry — it’s home to such notable companies as Mozilla and Google, and the coffee shops are full to the brim with people sporting laptops… and there’s ubiquitous free wireless internet provided thanks to Google. I’m spending a lot of my time at Red Rock Coffee, who I’m eternally grateful for, as they helped me to discover that the variety of espresso drink known as “Caffe Latte” in Australia is known as “Cappucino” over here [1]. They have an OK rotation of single origin espressi here, though they taste a bit over-roasted at times… it beats the crap out of everything else in the area though…
Downtown Mountain View, including Red Rock (on the right of the shot).
So that’s the short wrap-up of what I’ve been doing of lately. Hopefully I’ll have some more to report on in the next week or so. Or earlier. I’ve no idea.
Oh, and thanks to Paris Buttfield-Addison for showing me around the area, and also to Jon Manning, who occasionally emerged whenever Paris would let him 
Until the next post,
–Chris
[1] Ordering a “Latte” here appears to get you three weak flat whites served in a bucket.
And once again in the flurry of action that occurs during and after LCA, I have completely neglected to update my blog.
So since then, I’ve been doing various bits of development work for my benevolent mad scientist overlords at Secret Lab; this Thursday I’m off to the San Francisco Bay area to do three weeks of onsite work with my next client, which should be thoroughly enthralling.
I suspect the most reliable place to find any evidence whatsoever of my recent activity will be my Flickr stream, though I may take Jethro Carr’s lead and just post regular blogs with lots of pictures every other day (at least it *looks* like he’s had regular activity…).
Until the next post, whenever that may be!
–Chris
My friend Michael Wheeler has written an excellent article on the whys and hows of removing your data from the cloud. This post is basically just to point you all towards it.
Over the last few years I’ve been in a similar process, getting rid of my Google account and hosting my own email. I’ve attempted to get rid of Facebook, and learned a lot about myself, my friends, and Facebook in the process. I now no longer have twitter (again) and I’m just generally being a lot more careful with my data.
I think everybody will benefit from thinking just a little more about where their information goes, so I highly recommend you read this article.
Today was the first proper day of linux.conf.au, which is being held this year in Brisbane. This morning we were treated to a welcoming speech by conference organiser Dr Shaun Nykvist, and a presentation on the Google Summer of Code happening this year. In the welcoming speech, Shaun detailed how the organisers and volunteers had to work against water and time to get the conference ready despite Brisbane’s horrific flooding:
“I’ve got some lovely photos of our old venue with sandbags against the flood zones. It’s a shame the sandbags were about three metres lower than the water.”
After morning tea (some very lovely cakes and biscuits were provided) it was time for the Miniconfs. During the morning session I attended the Open Programming Miniconf, organised by my friend Chris Neugebauer. The first talk was about perl5i, which is a package of library modules for perl that makes it an almost usable language (almost, I don’t think that there is anything can truly save it). It was very interesting stuff, seeing how the syntax and semantics of a language can change. The speaker (Michael Schwern) was brilliant as well, which is always nice.
The next talk was about the F# programming language, designed by Microsoft. Brian McKenna’s speaking wasn’t great (but it was his first big talk, so that can be forgiven). Although I dislike the idea of languages that run on top of runtimes (such as JVM and .NET), F# looks like a good invention. Indeed, it’s basically where Microsoft develops and tests features that might be useful to put into C#.
After that was a talk by Brianna Laugher on generating English-language text using software tools, from a set of data. She was using it as part of her job at the Bureau of Meteorology to automate the generation of weather reports from their models. The idea was hugely interesting, and something that I want to implement. However, I didn’t really understand how the generation itself worked… quite a few arcane symbols seemed to be in use. I think I got the general gist though.
The final talk before lunch was about Go, the programming language developed at Google. I originally thought Go was a programming language for children, but I’ve now been set straight. It looks like something to test out… which is being added to my very long list of stuff to try now.
After lunch I went to see two talks from the Haecksen Miniconf. The first was about how open source software can help save the world, mostly by developing open source software to fix natural disaster problems, and doing it really really quickly and cheaply. The second was about setting up an overly-complicated home network, an area with which I am well acquainted.
Then it was back to the Open Programming Miniconf, where I learned about the demise of Java (basically, the Java community is dead, but Java itself will probably survive, and the JVM will definitely survive). The final talk before afternoon tea was about how to create compilers for the JVM using a parser written in Scala. Unfortunately due to the use of Scala I lost most of the detail of the talk, it went straight over my head. Which is a pity, because I was really looking forward to that talk. Ah well, guess you can’t win them all. After all this though, I was really interested in designing programming languages and compilers. I might have to give it a go.
During the final session of the day I was treated to a brilliant talk by Adam Harvey, who is a PHP developer (i.e. actually develops the PHP interpreter) telling us about the state of the PHP language. It seems Debian Stable is hugely out of date… but this is nothing new. He’s a great speaker, and I look forward to hearing his talk tomorrow, even though I don’t know what it’s about.
Last up was Jethro Carr, a hacker from NZ I know from attempting to complete his 30 Days of Geek challenge. He talked about the software revision control management tool thing he wrote, and talked about the benefits of using such software. Personally I quite enjoy using Redmine, but it’s requirement for Ruby means that I might be looking for an alternative when I get around to setting up my own installation. Currently I use the Quokforge service, run by one of my friends on OSDev.org.
So that was day 1. Or rather, the official day 1. Since then I’ve bought a printer and been to an Irish pub. More LCA news coming tomorrow, I hope.
Yesterday was day 0 of my adventure to linux.conf.au in Brisbane. I woke up extremely early (5:15am AEDT, which is 4:15am AEST) and caught a flight to Sydney and then on to Brisbane. I caught the AirTrain into the city (which is awesome, so much better than any other capital city’s offering) and met my friend Michael to drop off my bag at the hotel. After catching up with my sister for lunch (she lives in Brisbane) I headed off to the venue for the conference, QUT in Kelvin Grove.
I sat around with a few of my friends from the ##australia IRC channel on Freenode, while discussing the conference’s preperation on #linux.conf.au on Freenode. After a while, I went and registered for the conference, and got some awesome swag. The item of note is a Yubico Yubikey, which seems to be a really awesome solution to the password problem.
After the registration, I went with a few of the other ##australia geeks to get pizza from a local place in Kelvin Grove. It was a lot of impromptu fun, especially when a few more geeks from linux.conf.au showed up and also had a bite to eat.
After the pizza, it was back to the conference venue for the “noobie’s talk” which introduced us to what happens this week. In short, it sounds like a lot of fun. The presenter of the talk, Rusty Russell, has a great sense of humour. We then went off to the pub with the other first-time attendees, but we didn’t stay long because it was loud and we went off to something better.
Most of the attendees are staying at a place called Urbanest, which looks like an interesting place, mostly because of the density of geeks. Last night I went up to Urbanest for an hour or so, and watched the cricket and talked to a few other geeks. I met Jethro Carr, a geek from NZ whose blog I read. I then retired for the night, because you can only be awake for so long without a drip of caffeine.
Oh hey, I appear to be in Brisbane!
Linux.conf.au 2011 starts tomorrow, which means that today is the fun day of hanging around at the conference accommodation and watching the comings and goings of LCA people, and registering for the conference. Registration opens from 16:00 at the QUT Kelvin Grove Campus*, I personally intend to get to the venue sometime around 17:00.
As I understand, Rusty Russell’s usual newbies’ session is being held today, and that’s on at 18:30, also at QUT Kelvin Grove. If you’ve not been to LCA, this session comes highly recommended — I should know, I’ve been to all of them! (wait, what?) The session helps explain what LCA is all about to people who haven’t been, contains important advice about what sessions to show up to, and how to read the schedule.
Well, that’s it for me. Maybe another update later today?
–Chris
*Kelvin Grove being the QUT campus where the conference was originally scheduled NOT to be at. The conference organisers have done an awesome job at making sure that the event is going ahead at a new venue, especially given the conditions in Brisbane of late. Kudos etc!
Recently I was talking with a few friends, and mentioned a few of the things that my ultimate house was going to have, when I was rich and famous and got around to building it. They suggested a few more ideas, and we came up with the following list:
I recently travelled on an aeroplane to the Boxing Day cricket match in Melbourne. Before the flight home I was killing some time in the Borders in the terminal, when a book caught my eye. It’s name? Hacking Work, by Bill Jensen and Josh Klein.
After reading the back cover, I bought the book immediately. Who wouldn’t want to work smarter and get more done with less effort? It’s me in a nutshell. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed.
For most non-fiction books, the back cover is a very rough summation of the goal of the book, along with a few of the more interesting little titbits. For this book however, the blurb is the entire contents of the book. The other 200 odd pages are just fluff.
Section 1 of the book tells the reader that they are special, are born to “hack” work, and that managers will get in the way of everything.
Section 2 of the book tells the reader that they are special, are born to “hack” work, and that managers will get in the way of everything.
Section 3 of the book tells the reader that they are special, are born to “hack” work, and that managers will get in the way of everything.
Section 4 of the book tells the reader that they are special, are born to “hack” work, and that their employees will try to hack work too.
Unfortunately, nowhere in this book are there actual instructions for any methods of actually getting more done in less time. There are occasional snippets detailing what people have done before, usually followed by “we don’t recommend actually doing this”.
I personally consider myself somewhat of a life hacker, and this is a travesty of a book about “hacking”. The severe degradation of the meaning of the word “hack” is beyond annoying, it’s almost insulting.
Zero stars. I wouldn’t read it if it was free.
On Monday, I had the wonderful opportunity to walk through my third graduation ceremony for what is effectively the same degree! So a bit on how that happened, maybe?
Well, I completed my Bachelor of Science with Honours degree in June, from which I graduated with First Class Honours in August. Just on two weeks ago, I received a further letter, suggesting that I attend another graduation to collect a University Medal. The University Medal is the highest award that can be awarded to an Undergraduate Student at the University of Tasmania, and my friend Josh Deprez did an exceedingly thorough writeup of the dimensions etc of the Medal itself when he won his last year.
I note with some amusement the comment that I wrote on that post:
Hmmm. Not so convinced I want to aim for a uni medal now. Really really worrying about the number of opportunities the dean would get to mispronounce my name.
Luckily for me, they paid attention to this and solved the problem by awarding two other Medals in the same ceremony (one to a Maths/Physics student, Paul Stack; the other to my colleague from Computer Science, Theo Wadsley, both of whom thoroughly deserved their awards). This resulted in the script detailed in Josh’s post being altered to something resembling:
Naturally, my name still needed to be read out, so I made the requisite alteration to my card in the hope of something resembling the correct pronunciation appearing (this is primarily due to the Dean at my BSc graduation in 2009 pronouncing my surname as ‘Nee-ge-boa’):
The result wasn’t that bad (Something along the lines of ‘Neu-bauer’, which I’ll accept as a pass 
).
Since Josh’s graduation last year, they’ve made slight variations to the process of handing out Testamurs, instead of having blank scrolls handed out, the testamurs are now handed out in envelopes at the ceremony. In this case, like every other student, I was handed an envelope reading “Your Graduation Certificate”, bearing a large UTAS Lion on it. Unlike every other student, mine did not contain a testamur (I collected mine at my proper graduation in August), but instead a blank piece of cardboard — this naturally led to jokes about the worth of my degree…
Finally, here’s a photo of me with the medal, and its obverse, just in case you were at all interested:
Further to a post made by Rusty Russell earlier today, LCA2011 have just published a detailed anti-harassment policy on the conference website. Well done to the LCA2011 team for promptly and publicly preparing such a policy.
I’m pleased to announce that the two miniconfs that I am involved with at Linux.conf.au 2011, the Open Programming Miniconf and the FOSS in Research & Student Innovation Miniconf have published their draft schedules:
Unfortunately, you’ll also notice that both Miniconfs lack a complete schedule at this point in time. If you have a talk that would be of interest to either miniconf, we’d love it if you could submit a proposal as soon as possible so that we can publish our completed schedules! The CFPs for each miniconf are available from:
I look forward to seeing you at either of these miniconfs, presenting or otherwise!
Ooops, I’ve missed days 16 and 17. Meh.
Nothing in particular, but I do have a couple of counts I could make:
I’m sure I could come up with more if pressed, but right now I’m not! See you at the next post!
So the original topic for this was “Earliest geek experience”. I really couldn’t identify with that one, so I’m going to do something completely different. I’m sorry if this one’s a bit heavy, but it needs to be written.
I’d like to tell you about one of the worst times in my life. The year was 2006 — it was early January (early enough that I was still coming to terms with the fact that it was 2006…). The last term of school in 2005 was fantastic — I’d had one of my most successful periods academically, was successful in programming competitions, and I had a number of excellent friends who I shared many interests and experiences with. In the new year, that changed. I had a massive falling out with a very good friend, which caused me to question every aspect of the identity that I had built up over the past few years. I became unsure of personality traits, which I though were an important part of who I was, and which I thought were endearing to those around me. I questioned my interests in life. I questioned the validity of every relationship I had come to value over those late years of my schooling.
It is one of two times in my life that I had seriously felt suicidal. I guess this is one of the inevitable results of constantly questioning one’s identity. With each aspect of my personality that I felt needed to be changed to be worthwhile to people, I questioned the effort that would be needed to make that change. Thought after thought permeated my brain, and the weight of it all brought me to the conclusion that faced with the mounting “evidence” (in that state of mind, burden of proof is extremely low) that it probably wasn’t worthwhile to make such changes. At the end of it all, and after all of the changes that I would have to make, the person that I would have had to have been would have been unrecognisable to the person that I was then.
I still have no idea why I survived that week.
I made it through to the Sunday of that week, and was welcomed with open arms onto a flight to Sydney to attend that year’s National Computer Science School. It was during that week I properly discovered Python for the first time — it’s since become my favourite programming language. More so than that, it was a week of hanging around with geeks from all around Australia (and one from New Zealand), each of whom had different areas of interest and inclinations, and each had different skill sets. The tutors were smart uni students apparently studying interesting thing. The week gave me an insight in what it meant to be involved with IT and Computer Science. By the end of the week, I’d made heaps of friends (some of whom I still keep in contact with) who I shared interests and abilities with, and it was a fantastic revelation that there could be so many people around the country who I could just talk geek with. By the end of the week, things had resolved themselves back home — I’d forgiven and forgotten whatever it was that caused my friend and I to fall out, and I had a renewed drive to be awesome with my life.
I have no doubt, however, that I was saved by that week at NCSS. I’ve never had severe depression since, and I’ve been proud of my identity as a computer science-loving geek ever since.
Two years later I returned, this time as a tutor of the group that I had taken part in two years earlier — partly because I wanted to pay back a debt, and partly because I really really wanted to. Returning in 2008 led to me forming even more lasting friendships with people, not only tutors but students as well. I communicate with many of them every day, in one way or another. It’s where I first saw a Google office and decided that I really really wanted to become an intern there. Just afterwards I attended my first LCA in Melbourne, and have found, both there and in other geeky circles around the country, that my ties with NCSS are shared with geeks around the country — the line “I saw the girl on the hill with the telescope” is a wonderful calling card (if you ever hear James Curran lecture you’ll know what I mean by that).
So thanks to James, Tara and Michael (and everyone else from that week in 2006, you are too numerous to mention) — you have made something to be truly proud of… You may even have saved a life
Oh. You probably won’t be surprised to hear this one, but the answer is Linux.conf.au the Australasian Free and Open Source Software Conference. I’ve been attending since Melbourne 2008, and have since “been” to Hobart in 2009 and travelled to Wellington to attend in 2010.
LCA is a great conference because it gives people in the broader FOSS-using community in Australia (people like me) the opportunity to meet the people who put together the software that we used on a day-to-day basis. It turns out that they’re an entirely friendly bunch of people, who are all too willing to share their experience: in 2008, Andrew Tridgell spent 20 minutes one-on-one with me explaining how a particularly awesome piece of code he’d written worked.
In 2010 I ran one of the short single-day conference streams (known as “miniconfs”), on the topic of Open Programming Languages. This was a fantastic opportunity to give back to the LCA community, and help bring more of the topics that I was interested in to LCA — we had a fantastic lineup of presenters, and the day went awesomely. I’m glad to have the opportunity to do this again: I’m running the Open Programming miniconf at LCA2011 in Brisbane, and along with my friend Peter Lyle, will be running the Research and Student Innovation Miniconf. Both of them are shaping up to be excellent miniconfs.
So yes, LCA is in Brisbane this January, and I thoroughly recommend you get along if you can!
I can’t remember not having the traits that I described on day 1, so I guess that means that it’s a combination of personal interest and lifelong obsession. Not much that can be said here 
I can’t really think of much to say here, other than that I’d love to continue expanding my skills. As a soon-to-be Ph.D student, I’d love to expand my researching abilities (papers papers whoo!) — hopefully resulting in an excellent thesis topic, and potentially an excellent thesis too. As a coder, I want to learn more skills and techniques to help achieve my ends quicker. But really, I’m pretty happy with the direction my geekery is headed, and expanding out in those directions is going to continue to be useful.
So yesterday I was in the air, and unable to do day 10′s post. Luckily they make enough sense combined to combine into a single post.
Apologies for the blurry photo. I’ve shown this one because it contains both of my primary computers.
The desktop is a generic Athlon 64×2 of some specification, with some RAM and some hard discs in them, it also has an nVidia (HRRRRRNGH) graphics card of some description to drive my two monitors — I honestly don’t care much beyond that, as it serves its purpose. It runs Debian “testing”. The keyboard is a Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000 — I first used one of those during my internship at Google. I liked them so much that I bought one the moment I got home, and I haven’t looked back
The laptop is my general purpose on-the-road device. It’s a black MacBook from 2008, with an Intel Core Duo 2.4GHz in it. It also has RAM.
Turns out you’ve got all of the clues you need in there as well — the corner of my bedroom where my desk is serves as my primary hacking area. It’s softly-lit, and has plenty of working space when I can be bothered cleaning it up
As for music, well, it really depends on my mood whilst hacking on something — sometimes it’s nothing at all, but other times it’s something from my extremely esoteric and varietous music collection.
Oh, and if I get bored/stuck on a problem, I can always look out the window!
I’m a user of UNIX-like operating systems of different persuasions. On my laptop I run Max OS X 10.6. I’m not hugely attached to the Mac platform, for example the vast majority of applications I run are Open Source, or sufficiently generic that I can find Linux-based alternatives at the drop of a hat.
At home, I run Debian GNU/Linux’s “Testing” distribution. I like Debian, firstly because of APT/Aptitude, which makes delivering updates reasonably easy. However, these tools are available in a great many distributions now. The reason I use Debian over, say, Ubuntu is that Debian’s quality control protocols ensure that updates work correctly enough of the time that updating packages on a daily basis is not usually a dangerous process.
The “Testing” distribution’s policy with respect to release-blocking bugs means that the distribution is stable enough for everyday non-critical use, and that updates are reasonably timely.
Bring on the Red Hat/Gentoo trolls!
Android.
Android.
I like Android for a couple of reasons. The first is that it slots into the Google Apps ecosystem that I built much of my online life around prior to getting an Android phone — an excellent Gmail app for starters, but also my use of calendaring has improved significantly since getting my ADP1.
The second is that it’s Open Source. This means that (provided you have a suitable handset), it’s possible to obtain or write your own custom firmware which lets the phone do more than what its manufacturer intended. This, for me at least means running later versions of Android well past the support of the manufacturer.
This is a delayed post which is likely to show up as I’m several kilometres above New Zealand. The next few posts may/may not be delayed.
Nothing particularly fixed as far as food is concerned. I’ll eat whatever I can find (that I’d actually like to eat). Drinks, however, are a different story.
Firstly, I’m a second-rate coffee snob. I’ll only drink arabica-type beans, usually as a caffe latte, however, if circumstances dictate, I’ll have a plunger coffee au lait. If I have coffee out, it’s only acceptable if it’s better than the typical coffee that I have at home. This means I don’t drink that much coffee out.
Preferred soft drinks include a rotation between coke and lemonade, which is what usually powers me through a day’s coding/writing.
As it turns out, probably about 90% of the coding that I do these days is in the form of nifty hacks. This is particularly because in research the impetus is not necessarily to have code that is reusable in a lot of situations, but rather to try out an idea quickly and then throw the code [1].
For example, just today, I needed a couple of images to put into my research poster for the conference I’m presenting at in a couple of days’ time. This involved drawing some rectangles over photos were faces had been detected by some other software. Basically, by having sufficient data in a format I had documented (in the form of other code) this was easy to extract. There are countless other things in my Honours thesis which looks somewhat like this — lots of experiments done with a tiny bit of Python code tying other big packages together.
The hacks that I’m proudest of are the ones which provide me with sufficient useful output that I can reuse their results, and not necessarily the code.
[1] Obviously, no code should ever be thrown away. When I say ‘throw away’, I mean something more along the lines of ‘ceasing maintainence’. This is because you can never know when a piece of code you’ve already written could be useful.
When Jethro proposed this topic, he was probably thinking of computer programs. I’m going left-field. My greatest application to date was my application to become an intern at Google.
I applied for my internship in July of 2009, and heard nothing back from them until late October; I finally got accepted in late November, just a week out from when I was due to start. Despite the difficulties involved with moving away from home, to a completely different state at two week’s notice, the experience of living in Sydney and working daily with some of the most brilliant and driven geeks I’ve ever met was one that’s affected me greatly.
Being an intern at Google taught me a lot of things. Firstly it gave me exposure to being a part of a larger team of developers — there’s a very strong culture of discussion and peer review within that company, and learning to both get my own code reviewed, and justify decisions I’d made to people who are smarter than me was quite an important learning experience. Secondly I got an opportunity to learn how coding works in a large distributed environment such as Google’s. Neither of those experiences I’d have had elsewhere, and it’s definitely put me in better stead.
Getting an opportunity to learn and apply programming techniques to an interesting problem, and getting to meet all manner of interesting people was a fantastic experience. And I wouldn’t gave got there if it weren’t for making an application.
I have three things that I usually do with my day-to-day life:
First up, I’m an eternal student (or at least, I usually am). Unusually, this semester’s been spent not studying anything for the first time in most of my life; though I intend to take up a Ph.D. candidature from next year. I’ll probably be studying in the field of machine learning, since that’s what my Honours thesis focused on, and I seem to enjoy it somewhat.
Other than that, I’m an itinerant tutor at the University of Tasmania. I taught computer graphics programming (OpenGL et all) this semester, and machine learning the semester before that. I love having the opportunity to help people learn how to do things, and it’s great fun trying to convey some of my own knowledge to people who want to receive it. On the other hand, I hate having to deal with people who either don’t have the skill set to be taking the units which I teach, or people who don’t want to learn — marking assignments from people who don’t have a clue, or otherwise don’t care is a nightmare.
I also accept short-term contract coding whenever I can be bothered. The most unusual thing I’ve done in that respect is implementing a piece of installation art for a roller derby match. That was bizarre
This invariably changes, depending on what work I can be bothered doing at the time, so what I’ve said now probably won’t be the case in six months time.
Python. Need you have asked?
I use Python because it’s expressive, contains enough functionality out of the box to solve most substantial coding problems I have quickly; for everything else, there’s a fantastic array of libraries and frameworks for doing everything from image manipulation to statistical analysis. As a researcher, Python is an invaluable tool, and that’s why I use it.
Right, so for those of you who missed my announcement a couple of weeks ago, I’m taking part in the 30 Days of Geek blogging challenge throughout November. This is the first of those posts.
So this first of those posts. So, why do I consider myself a geek? I could list any number of stereotypical character traits, which I do see quite obviously in myself, but instead I’m going to go with just the one which sums up the most important issues nicely: Unhealthy obsession.
Let me explain. As I see it, the most important path to geekery is having a knowledge and understanding of a topic that exceeds that of other people you know. It tends to help if there is more than one such topic of which one has such a mastery.
I’ll start with the obvious first topic: I have an unhealthy obsession with computers. I learnt to program for the first time when I was 11 (MS QuickBasic 4.5 if I recall correctly) and I had a fascination for playing with settings on my family’s first Win98 machine (which resulted in doing a format/restore three times in the first six months of its ownership). Such tinkering left me in good stead for learning Linux a few years later: on the machine I had at the time, getting anything to work at all required hours browsing forums to find people with similar problems. Further to that, I could take the knowledge of how to solve these sorts of problems in Linux and apply them to new situations, frequently in an unrelated area of my system. I don’t think I’d have got anywhere near as far as I did without the unhealthy obsession with Linux I had at the time — this enabled me to spend weeks (when I had schoolwork to go on with) with a not-entirely-working computer, but fixing its problems.
So that’s probably the answer you expected to see. But it’s not just being good with computers that makes me a geek. This unhealthy obsession applies in other areas of interest. For example, I’m a keen follower of the Formula 1 motor racing series [1]. Whilst other people are content with just watching the races as they pop around, I spend ages learning the details which apply to each race — if I’ve a game where I can drive around a circuit to learn its layout I’ll do so. I’ll read Wikipedia so I can find out why people frequently crash at a given point on a track; and then I can relate the knowledge I’ve learnt from reading and gaming to the commentary of the race — which in turn feeds into a greater understanding of the race, which feeds into further learning about the event. Without the unhealthy obsession which comes with being a geek, I doubt I’d have the same level of interest (nor enjoyment) that I have.
So there, two examples of applied geekery, and how they relate to the my preferred reason for being a geek.
Up next, more in-depth questions. If I remember.
[1] Shock horror! I follow sports! Sorry if you think this disqualifies me.
In today’s exciting post I describe a rather amusing series of events and the end result of it:
The events:
So the conference is on November 8 and 9 in Queenstown, New Zealand; this leaves me just over two weeks to:
Hrrrnght.
My friend Jethro Carr has just suggested another 30-day blogging challenge, and unlike the last one, this one doesn’t require me to be highly introspective and emotional, which I can gladly cope with . Instead, the topic this time around is 30 days of geek.
The topics that Jethro’s suggested are:
Hopefully by the end of this you’ll have a good insight into my geekiness — posts will start showing up on November 1st.
In case you’ve missed it in other channels, the linux.conf.au 2011 miniconf CFPs close on Friday October 22 (for the most part).
For my part, I’m still looking for more presentations for the Open Programming and Research & Student Innovation miniconfs. The descriptions are as follows:
The LCA2011 Open Programming Miniconf helps bridge the gap between the low-level developer and the end-user by bringing the topic of tools and techniques for application development to Linux.conf.au.
We invite 25-minute talks on a wide range of topics, tools and languages with the aim of bringing together open source developers with presentations that share techniques, best practices and values amongst users of all open source programming languages.
If you know something about a topic of interest to the LCA Developer community, please read our call for presentations and submit a proposal!
To submit a proposal for the Open Programming Miniconf, you can find the CFP at http://blogs.tucs.org.au/opm/cfp
The FOSS in Research and Student Innovation Miniconf brings together researchers and students with an active interest in Free and Open Source Software with the broader Linux.conf.au community to highlight exciting work taking place within the often esoteric world of academia and educational institutions.
We invite 25-minute presentations on topics in two streams: “FOSS in Research”, which provides an informal outlet for those pursuing topics of interest to FOSS communities in their studies; and “Student Innovation”, which brings the perspective of the student delegation to the forefront, by allowing them to share their experiences of FOSS with the broader LCA community.
To submit a proposal, visit the CFP at http://blogs.tucs.org.au/frsi/cfp
According to their ingredients listing, which is available from their website, Crust Pizza use flavour-enhanced meat.
For those who can’t read it, their “bacon” contains: Pork (93%), Water, Salt, Mineral Salts (451, 450), Sugars (Sucrose, Dextrose (Maize)), Antioxidant (316), Sodium Nitrite (250), flavour enhancer (621), Natural Wood Smoke, water added.
Seriously, for less than than $20, you can buy high-quality pizza, with real flavours, and not MSG (Flavour Enhancer 621).
Until they pick their act up, never again.
