noogz.net

posted: Thu, 01 Jan 2009 15:42 | filed under: / blog/ life/ | permalink | Tags: 2009, new year, linux.conf.au, lca, lca2009, acm icpc, | Comments: 0

I notice that the most significant number on my clock has incremented (as it tends to do once every 365ish days), and hence I feel obliged to point it out to you all: Happy new year!

2009 looks like it'll be a really exciting year for me (for the first few months of it, anyway) -- I'm looking forward to (in no particular (chronological) order):

• Not going to Sydney to tutor at NCSS, instead, filling most of the rest of my summer break doing programming competition practice (exciting!!!?!)
• linux.conf.au 2009 in Hobart (and the associated bonus of finally getting friends from interstate to reciprocate visits I've paid). Only 18 more sleeps until the first day of miniconfs kicks off -- I'm thoroughly excited!
• Starting my final semester of undergrad study (not so much the overload that I'll be undertaking in order to actually finish my degree :()
• Easter in Germany!
• Competing in the World Finals of the ACM ICPC, to be held in Stockholm towards the end of April

May your 2009 also be fun, exciting and productive!

posted: Mon, 29 Dec 2008 13:45 | filed under: / blog/ computers/ | permalink | Tags: lca, lca2009, | Comments: 0

Now that the complete schedule for LCA (Including miniconfs) is available, I've chosen what talks I can go to. I'm quite impressed, almost every session for the entire conference has something that's caught my eye, and so I only have one or two slots left to fill per day. Currently, my selections stand as such:

Monday

9:30-10:20
 Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, Why?  
 by Paul McKenney 
 
10:40-11:30
 Undecided
 
11:40-12:30
 - PROBABLY -  Collaborating Successfully with Large Corporations
   by Bdale Garbee 
 
13:50-14:40
 How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love ACPI  
 by Matthew Garrett 

14:50-15:40
 Undecided
 
16:00-16:50
 Kernel Lightning Talks
 
17:00-17:50
 Ask a Kernel Hacker Panel 
 
-- 

Tuesday

9:30-10:20
 Beyond Open Source  
 by Arthur Sale 
 
10:40 - 11:10
 Future directions for Copyright Law 
 by Laura Simes

11:10 - 11:30
 OpenAustralia - Everyday democracy for everybody in Australia 
 by Katherine Szuminska and Matthew Landauer  

13:50 - 14:40
 Undecided
 
14:50 - 15:20
 Freedom in Focus: CC Photography and Cultural Change 
 by Rachel Cobcroft

15:20 - 15:40
 We are the translators! 
 by Jeff Waugh 

16:00-16:50
 Undecided
 
17:00-17:50
 Undecided

-- 

Wednesday


10:40-11:30
 Introducing the Re-Built Linux Desktop 
 by Keith Packard 

11:40-12:30
 From click to pixel: A tour of the Linux graphics pipeline 
 by Carl Worth 
 
13:40-15:40
 Introduction to Django 
 by Jacob Kaplan-Moss
 
16:00-16:50
 Joining the mob: the kernel development process 
 by Jonathan Corbet
 
17:00-17:50
 Cross-distro collaboration: packaging 
 with modern version control systems 
 by Martin Krafft

--

Thursday

10:40-11:30
 - PROBABLY - AIO: Why is this so hard? 
 by Zach Brown
 
11:40-12:30
 7 Things Lawyers Don't Understand About Software 
 by Anton Hughes
 
13:50-15:40
 The Joy of Inkscape 
 by Donna Benjamin
 
16:00-16:50
 - PROBABLY - the Inkscape LPE revolution! 
 by Andy Fitzsimon
 
17:00-17:50
 Tricks of the Trade: Learning Free Software 
 hacking from clever people 
 by Hugh Blemings
 
--

Friday
 
10:40-11:30
 autocluster - a system for automated 
 testing of clustered systems 
 by Andrew Tridgell and Martin Schwenke
 
11:40-12:30
 Ogg Chopping: techniques for programming 
 correctness and efficiency
 by Conrad Parker

13:50-14:40
 Power management that works 
 by Matthew Garrett
 
14:50-15:40
 Geek My Ride 
 by Jonathan Oxer and Jared Herbohn
 
16:00-16:50
 Open Source for Model Rocket Design
 by Bdale Garbee
 
17:00-17:50
 Lightning Talks! Yay!

If anyone's got suggestions for the talks I've not figured out yet, please let me know!

posted: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 22:44 | filed under: / blog/ computers/ | permalink | Tags: lca, lca2009, wtf, | Comments: 0

After a rather... interesting thread on #linux.conf.au today, I inherited a new e-mail address. I can now be reached at hair-removal at the secondary domain of linux.conf.au 2009 (marchsouth.org). No idea how that one happened.

posted: Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:41 | filed under: / blog/ life/ | permalink | Tags: life, tucs, lca09, lca, uni, exams, | Comments: 0

Time for me to enumerate a few things that have happened of late (in reverse order of occurrence, naturally), since it now seems like the time to do so.

Uni

I handed in my Computer Science term project today, which, I suppose means that my academic year is now complete. I'm fairly happy with how the semester's progressed, every unit that I studied (including the two that I chose on a whim) has been excellent, which is more than I can say for previous semesters. Analysis (Real analysis to be specific) was absolutely fantastic, and I'll be doing my best to enrol in the follow-up functional analysis unit (I've had it suggested to me by several people, and I'm convinced), and it's certainly made the maths major I'm now enrolled in seem like a very good idea.

As far as I can tell, exams went well, but I won't know for certain until results are released next week (I'm very confident with my two maths units, Graphics is a different story (though I don't recall doing as badly as the lecturer claims the class as a whole went)).

TUCS

In other (though slightly Uni-related) news, TUCS (The UTAS Computing Society) had its Annual General Meeting for 2009 last week, and as well as discovering the joy of barbecued* Woolworths' Quantity Burgers (they're excellent, really!), I was elected society president for 2009. The rest of the exec are also a truly awesome bunch of people, so the future certainly looks bright.

TUCS has run some excellent events in its inaugural year: our tech talks were, in general, wildly successful, amongst other things. Thanks to that, we've become what appears to be one of the most active societies on campus. I'll be doing my best to make sure that we can replicate, or even better that next year. (If you're a speaker, or know any good ones, and would like to give a talk, let me know!)

In related news, we also took delivery of some particularly awesome TUCS-Branded T-Shirts just after exams -- we're particularly happy with how that went and will probably do it again next year.

(*I will definitely be approving funding for a new barbecue for the society... the current one is truly dreadful)

LCA

Last week-ish, I had dinner with some members of the Linux.conf.au organising committee. Though much of what was discussed must be kept under wraps (it's thoroughly exciting, I promise!), I can tell you that the conference is shaping up to be most excellent, and if you haven't already booked your ticket, I suggest you do so as soon as possible!

That is all for me for now, more news as it comes (I hope!)

posted: Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:20 | filed under: / blog/ programming/ | permalink | Tags: python, minipycon, lca, lca2009, | Comments: 0

I just posted the following announcement of my proposal for a Python Miniconf to be held at linux.conf.au 2009 to Australian Python mailing lists. I'm posting it here in case anyone has missed it:

Linux.conf.au 2009 is to be held at the University of Tasmania's Sandy
Bay campus in Hobart, Tasmania over the week of January 19-24; and the
call for presentations [1] and mini-confs [2] is now open.

I am currently in the process of producing a proposal for a Python
Miniconf to be held at LCA, so I thought I should detail my plans to a
greater audience for the purpose of feedback/suggestions.

The miniconf would be a single-day conference on the broad topic of
Python programming.  Broadly speaking, the topics I would like to see
presented would range through:
- Recent developments on Python core (presented to a more
Python-oriented audience than may happen at LCA proper)
- Frameworks and libraries (e.g. Django, which I believe is hitting
1.0 this year)
- Techniques of Python programming (e.g. using advanced/new/etc
features of Python effectively)
- Discussions of Python use in the "real world" (e.g. Industry use,
education, etc, etc, etc).
- Anything else Python-related: please make suggestions! [3]

The intention is that there would be 5 "organised" talks of ~45
minutes length (although if there is sufficient interest/free space, I
could split blocks into 2x25 minute talks), with a 50-minute block of
lightning talks to conclude the event, with the possibilty of some
loosely-organised get-together of pythoners after the day's
proceedings have finished.

If you are interested in participating in the Python miniconf (which
requires you to also be interested in attending Linux.conf.au), please
e-mail me [3].  I would particularly like topics of talks that people
would be able to give (vague/general is fine at this early stage in
preparation), so that I can include them in the miniconf proposal (so
the earlier I receive them the better!).

Thanks in advance for any help that you may be able to offer me.

-- Christopher Neugebauer

P.S. if I have missed any user groups/potentially interested parties,
could you please forward this message on -- I've already dealt with
most relevant mailing lists in Australia, but international lists may
also be interested, due to the nature of LCA as an international
conference.

[1] http://marchsouth.org/media/news/6
[2] http://marchsouth.org/media/news/15
[3] for the benefit of google groups users: chrisjrn [ a t ] gmail.com 

posted: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:28 | filed under: / blog/ life/ | permalink | Tags: university, lca, lca2009, minipycon, progcomp, latex, | Comments: 0

Uni goes back next week, and after a long, and mostly uninteresting holidays, I'll be quite glad to go back. Not that my holidays were awful (NCSS and LCA made sure that they weren't), but it'll definitely be good to go back to some form of long-term regularity, which has been missing for the past few months. This semester I'll be studying three maths units (Algebra, Calculus and Operations Research, all at 2nd-year level) and the third year Concurrent Programming unit, which should be interesting (and hopefully difficult, challenging, and all of those other adjectives which acadmically-oriented people like to hear).

One thing that I thought might be worthwhile this year is to set some goals that fall outside the usual inevitabilities of an academic year, mostly because all these years that I don't, I tend to somehow let the uni/school-related ones take hold (and that normally makes the following December a lot more depressing than it needs to be), and in order to hold myself to this, I'm posting them here for the world to see:

1. Use LaTeX more. Using LaTeX to write up my Calculus 1B assignments last year seemed to coincide with a marked increase in marks for that subject (in comparison with the previous semester, in which I didn't) -- in fact, the only >90%-achieving subjects I've undertaken were the ones where I used LaTeX to write up my asssignments. Coincidence? I think not! Of course, the reasons I've just given aren't probably very sound, and there were probably better reasons for my doing well in those units, but there's still good reason for me to learn it better. So I will.
2. Improve my placing in the Programming Competition. Last year, my team achieved 16th (equal 11th according to the official standings). I want my team this year to achieve 12th or better. I'll figure out how to do this later on.
3. Better promote Free and Open Source Software at Uni. This one is important: UTas is hosting Linux.conf.au next year, and in my opinion, the cause of Free Software is not very well-known within the student body. Therefore, I'm going to try and hold as many events as possible (probably through the Computing society, whatever it may be called this year), including one just before Software Freedom Day in September (Since this is the big FLOSS advocacy day, it would be silly not to do something then). I'll also try to promote LCA2009 amongst the staff and students.
4. Get more involved with TasLUG. I've said it once, and I'll say it again: I was shocked to find out that TasLUG still exists, let alone that they were considering a bid for LCA2009. Now that I know that they do indeed exist, I'll be doing my best to become an active member of the local FLOSS community.
5. Organise a Python MiniConf for LCA next year. This one's really a no-brainer. I like Python, and from what I could gauge at LCA this year, there's a big Python community within Australia. Therefore, I think it's worthwhile that we have an organised conference at LCA, so I'll be trying my hardest to make that happen (if you think you can help here, send a mail to any_name_at_all at this domain).
6. Make a concerted effort to get involved with a Free Software project. Unfortunately, this goal seems to show up every year. I'm definitely going to make a concerted effort on this one, and I'll aim to participate in the Australian Summer of Code next summer (since I know that that's going to happen). Currently Python looks good, but we'll see how that progresses through the year.
7. Better promote NCSS within Tasmania. Another obvious one -- Attending NCSS as a student was a great opportunity for me, and going back as a tutor was wonderful. I want to make sure that more people get that opportunity.

And there you have it. I'll make periodic posts this year as I work on achieving these.

posted: Sun, 03 Feb 2008 21:21 | filed under: / blog/ life/ | permalink | Tags: lca, ncss, lca2008, | Comments: 0

LCA officially finished yesterday with the Open Day being a massive success. Here's my attempt to wrap up everything that I've done since Tuesday:

Wednesday

Keynote was Bruce Schneier, he gave a speech which was not terribly revelatory, but was entertaining nonetheless. This was probably to be expected -- keynoters are notorious for regurgitating talks, but the talk was well-presented, and thinking about the psychology of security was a particularly interesting process.

Other highlights of the day included The Kernel Report, and a talk on the OLPC by Jim Gettys.

Thursday

There was one standout talk from Thursday, and that was Andrew Tridgell's talk on Clustered Samba (not just a hack any more). The level of thought that's gone into the system is incredible, one particular standout from that talk was the concept of a "Tickle ACK", which in my opinion, was the most beautiful piece of TCP Hackery I've ever seen. The audience's reaction is well-justified -- make sure you watch the talk.

Leslie Hawthorn's talk on the Summer of Code and other Google Open Source stuff was worth going to; whilst the topics covered were for the most part repeats of stuff that's already been revealed, one small soundbite was dropped, and that is that Summer of Code is almost certainly going to happen in the Southern Hemisphere. This is great news for Australian coders, since the Northern Summer of Code really doesn't work for committed students (a clash with exams and 7 weeks of second semester is particularly discouraging). I'm seriously considering doing it this year. Thanks Leslie!

The Google Student Party was also really cool -- an evening in a dingy pub in the middle of Melbourne, chatting with students and hobbyists, and planning projects for the rest of the year -- I already have one, and thanks to Leslie, a contact to pitch it to. I'm looking forward to that!

Friday

The day started out with Anthony Baxter's talk on Python's latest developments, with a really stupid title. Fortunately, the talk itself wasn't stupid: it was definitely the standout keynote talk for the conference, and probably the best talk on Python, which is cool. He talked about all of the things that are going to break in version 3.0, future developments on the 2.x line, and also mentioned NCSS (in particular, he namedropped me, which is nice -- I'll be posting a post about NCSS in the near future for those of you LCAers who are interested in it)

Another cool thing done for the last day was a "Geek Junk Giveaway", where people would give out their old computer junk to people who wanted it: I hope this becomes an LCA tradition.

The lightning talks (can't find the video yet, sorry!), which went for the last hour of the conference were many, varied, and generally excellent. Standout talks included Jeff Waugh on Getting Laid (or rather, "Couple-oriented Software", or the lack of software services that don't recognise couples), and Paul Fenwick on Fixing the Web (using greasemonkey to remove content from Myspace).

Finally, the best part of Friday was finding out that LCA2009 will be in Hobart! And I've already started inviting people to pop by for it.

Saturday

Open Day == Schwag (Red Hats, DVDs, and a Google T-Shirt), Schmooze (I spent 20 minutes exploring the Clustered Samba codebase with Tridge -- and a generalised version of the Tickle Ack (the Socket Killer -- it's cool!), dicussing developments in Kate with Aaron Seigo, and playing Infra-red Pong with Rusty Russell), and Schpeech (that was dreadful, but the lightning talks were good)

So, that's it for LCA proceedings, onto my general thoughts: LCA was fantastic. To Donna, Peter, and the rest of the mel8ourne crew, you did a fantastic job, it's going to be interesting to see if Hobart can top it.

To the People of LCA, thanks for making it worthwhile -- people who work on cool stuff actually giving me the time of day (thanks Tridge and Aaron and Anthony for all of that), the community really makes LCA special. I will be going back every year that I can, as it's really a special event.

posted: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:58 | filed under: / blog/ programming/ | permalink | Tags: python, ncss, lca, lca2008, | Comments: 1

Today at Day 2 of LCA, I attened the Distro Summit for the first half of the day, and the Gaming Miniconf for the second part, this particular post is going to focus mostly upon the gaming talks, since it's probably the stuff I was more technically interested in, and the parts that I can remember best.

LCA Observation of the day:

The current distros of choice to bag out are:

1. Ubuntu
2. Gentoo

Python!

The latter half of the gaming miniconf spent a lot of time dealing with Python, which is excellent, given that Python is one of the main reasons why I'm attending the conference.

The first talk given was for Pyglet by Alex Holkner (the lead/founder of the project) and Richard Jones, a game development/media processing library (which would therefore make it a suitable replacement for Pygame), is written entirely in Python, and allows for extremely rapid development of games in Python. It's currently at version 1.0, but is soon to progress to version 1.1, which, amongst other things, introduces a proper event handling inner loop, which is something that is notoriously missing from libraries such as Pygame.

Pyglet is designed around the ctypes library that was introduced in Python 2.5: for those of you who aren't familiar with it, allows developers to register shared C libraries within python, and call them as functions without needing to write full-blown Python extensions in C. Pygame uses ctypes to wrap basically every media-related libary imaginable (frequently multiple libraries for different operating systems) and presents them to coders as a unified interface, so developers don't need to know whether or not their system is using Quicktime or OpenAL (for example).

Demos given included of an FPS and a full-screen Mandelbrot Set renderer, both of which were very fast (though the fractal did get a bit pixelated at high zoom, so there could have been a large amount of caching performed -- I'm not sure as I haven't really looked into it.

From a coding point of view, Pyglet looks like an excellent library, a worthy successor to Pygame, and could be extremely fun to code in. Which leads me to:

Richard Jones gave a talk about Pyweek, a twice-yearly Python Game Writing challenge; the aim is to write Python games, which must somehow link into a theme (for example "Energy" or "It Runs on Steam"), and the game must be written entirely within a week. You may code in teams or as ain individual. The next round will be in March, followed by September. I'm seriously considering taking part in the next one.

The final non-lightning talk I saw was on an interesting game system, whereby you draw a picture of the game you want to play, and it lets you play it. I can't remember the name of it, and can't find it on Planet LCA yet, so if anyone remembers the name of it, it would be great if you can let me know (such as via the comments on this post) -- this looked incredibly cool, and I'll definitely try it out at the open day.

posted: Sun, 27 Jan 2008 23:18 | filed under: / blog/ life/ | permalink | Tags: lca, lca2008, melbourne, | Comments: 0

LCA Observation of the Day

I can safely say that I've never been in a room full of people making unfortunate computing analogies in order to describe people bunching up closer together. I now notice the similarity between defragmentation, and shuffling down rows in lecture theatres.

Schwag Bag

The Schwag for LCA this year is really impressive (though I've not had the opportunity to judge it against previous years) -- Google have provided an umbrella (which, though not the t-shirt that I've been wanting for quite some time, is probably more useful given Melbourne weather), and there's a nice Aluminium (?) Drink Bottle; the bag itself is excellent, it's a laptop-sized bag, which should do well for holding my laptop over the next few days -- well done to whoever thought of the bags, they're certainly appreciated!

First Timer's Session

This afternoon, since I'm a first-time LCAer, I went to Kelly Yeoh and Rusty Russell's LCA Newbies' Session, which consisted of a 40 minute talk on what to expect from LCA, as well as a bit of a history of the conference. Rusty and Kelly spent the duration of the talk subtly referencing injokes from the history of LCA, whilst not referencing their context: this will probably have the effect of newbies making jokes about Dunk Tanks and Rusty's Credit Card (the latter has already definitely happened, since I'm already doing so.

The "Well-oiled machine" that was the first-timer's session was, despite it's very casual tone, reasonably informative, and looks like something worth repeating. I certainly know a bit more about what to expect that I wouldn't have if I didn't go to it. Well done to Rusty and Kelly on it.

Ad-hoc Socialising

One important part of LCA (according to Rusty) is Ad-hoc social events, and to prove his point, organised one: the 50-or-so of us (not all of whom were newbies... interesting) went to a pub near U.Melbourne (I don't think I've ever seen such a large pack of nerds take over a pub -- a sight to behold, if I do say so myself), and sat around chatting with people. Whilst as a student I generally hung around Students, we eventually got some interesting company in the form of Bernado Innocenti from the One Laptop Per Child project, who had some pre-release XOs to show off to us: whilst he stressed that they're pre-release and therefore buggy, I was generally impressed by the quality, and the UI, although slightly annoying at the beginning (slow, foreign, and almost entirely pictorial, so my command of the English language was absolutely useless in this context), was quite interesting to see in action, and whilst I'm not entirely sure, I suspect that the hype that they've generated is justified.

The XOs attracted Casey Schaufler, a developer of Smack (a Linux Security Module), who was very interesting to talk to: during the conversation, he made me feel very young on multiple occations, mostly by mentioning first releases of products, that he's had something to do with (he was at SUN when the first release of NFS came out, he was at the X11 release party (1987 by my reckoning).

Rusty was certainly right in the newbies session: you get to meet really interesting people at LCA, it doesn't matter whether you're a student, or an accomplished kernel hacker -- people will talk to you. I was sceptical about whether or not I would find my place at LCA, but if this first session is anything to judge by, I'm confident that the conference is going to be excellent.

LCA Continues tomorrow; I'll be attending part of the Debian Miniconf, and part of the Security Miniconf

Other Planet LCA2008

If you're the sort of person who likes reading planets that contain general interest meterial (as well as subject-specific stuff), then you may want to register yourself at Russell Coker's OTHER Planet LCA2008 -- this is an alternative planet that contains entire blog feeds (as opposed to just the LCA stuff). I've done so!

posted: Fri, 30 Nov 2007 20:23 | filed under: / blog/ life/ | permalink | Tags: sydney, melbourne, ncss, lca, lca2008, | Comments: 2

Hello, World!

My flights interstate have been booked: I'll be in Sydney for NCSS from 8AM on Thursday the 3rd of January, and leaving at 7:30PM on Wednesday the 16th. My trip to Melbourne (for linux.conf.au) will be from 7AM on Sunday the 27th of January to 7:30PM on Tuesday the 5th of February.