conference

Watch O'Reilly's Velocity Conference Keynotes Streaming Live

LJ Staff — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 13:00:00 +0000

We will live stream the Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference keynotes on Wednesday and Thursday, June 15-16, so those who can't be there in person can enjoy the content online. For more information on the keynote presentations and schedule, please visit the event site at http://velocityconf.com/velocity2011/public/content/keynotes and make sure to join us right here June 15th and 16th. Presentations will begin at 8:30 AM Pacific TIme each day.

Go to Full Article

SCALE: The Best Little-Big Open Source Conference

Miguel Hernandez — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 14:00:00 +0000

by Miguel Hernandez

The Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) is happening this weekend Feb. 25-27 and is, simply, awesome! I heard about it during its infancy but never even looked into it thinking it would be just as expensive as OSCON. Boy was I wrong! The first year I attended, it cost $60. This year the cost is $70. That's $70 for THREE days, which is a steal! Factor in the discounts provided to local open source user groups & it is downright highway robbery. You really cannot beat it.

Luminaries from across the open source universe abound. There are simply too many to list here. There will also be many open source-based companies on-hand hiring: Facebook, Google, eHarmony and Ticketmaster, to name but a few. There will be exhibitors ranging from local open source user groups to non-profits leveraging open source to make the world a better place to well-known linux distributions and everything in-between.

The events kick-off on Friday with some great tracks including DevOps, Build an Open Source Cloud Day, PostgreSQL Day, Fedora Activity Day, UbuCon, FOSS Mentoring and SCALE U.. Saturday and Sunday is the main conference with tracks for Open Source in Education (OSSIE), Beginners, Developers and System Administrators.

Go to Full Article

Linux.conf.au - Day Four

Jes Fraser — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 06:50:27 +0000

by Jes Fraser

The fourth day of the conference opened with a keynote by Eric P Allman, author of a little MTA some people may have heard of called Sendmail - an "... old program that has changed the world."

Sendmail grew out of an environment very different to the way our internet looks today - Berkely in 1980. Eric led the audience through the history of sendmail, it's original design principles, and certain problems with the original design - some of which seem glaring to us now with 20:20 hindsight.

After a morning tea for all attendees, the main conference stack started. I chose to attend Rusty Russell's session on Advanced C Coding for fun, detailing examples of '.. less sane' C programming tips and tricks, then moving on to Using splice and vmsplice with custom Embedded Linux architectures by John Williams, explaining system calls for zero-copy file and network IO using in-kernel pipe buffers.

Valerie Aurora, kernel developer, delivered a fascinating presentation on easing kernel development using User Mode Linux - a version of Linux that runs as a process within an already existing Linux installation. UML provides an alternative to having a seperate dedicated test machine or virtual machine, that needs constant rebooting in order to test. Valerie also mentioned briefly an upcoming project of hers - the Ada Initiative, to encourage women in Open Source.

Other highlights included Perl Programming Best Practices by Jacinta Richardson, and Building RPMS - How Fedora's Koji Works, and how you can use it to build your own software by Dennis Gilmore.

After the conference, those attendees who purchased tickets went to the Brisbane Convention Centre for the Penguin Dinner, a sit-down formal dinner event with a delicious restaurant menu and a charity auction to support Queensland flood relief efforts - raising over $20,000 AUD.

Image of the Penguin Dinner venue taken by Andrew McMillan, 2011

Go to Full Article

Linux.Conf.Au - Day Three

Jes Fraser — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 06:17:59 +0000

by Jes Fraser

Wednesday opened with Geoff Huston from APNIC presenting on Internet Address Exhaustion, and how it presents a real and present threat to the openness of today’s Internet. Geoff walked the audience through the history of the internet, and covered some of the barriers to IPv6 adoption. Geoff then discussed how without open addressing there’s no open network, and detailed how the current environment provides little incentive for the very big internet players who have benefited from the initial openess of the Internet to maintain that openness when it levels the playing field for their competition. Geoff’s vision of the IP apocolypse was a bleak one, with only one viable solution left - to alter our environment to favour the rapid adoption of IPv6.

We were also treated to a fantastic video by Project Horus of a high-altitude balooning flight piloted by Tux. The video can be viewed at http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2011/01/watch-tux-flying-over-adelaide-in-a-balloon/

Wednesday was January 26th which is Australia Day, a national public holiday to celebrate the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in 1788. It’s considered somewhat controversial, as for many it is hard to separate the celebration of the arrival of the British in Australia from the extremely poor treatment the indigenous population received at their hands. Among those who celerbate, it’s traditional for Australia Day to be celebrated with beer and BBQ, and Linux.conf.au got into the spirit by putting on a genuine Aussie sausage sizzle for the attendees.

Wednesday marks the first day of the conference proper, with the end of the Miniconfs and the start of the full conference track. Early in the morning I attended Freeing the Cloud, one service at a time by Francois Marier of Catalyst NZ, discussing some of the open alternatives to the incumbent social networking giants, and walking the audience through his creation of Libravatar, an open and libre replacement to Gravatar. Other highlights included Making file systems scale: A case study using ext4 by Theodore Ts'o, Matthew Garrett’s traditional rant about ACPI under Linux, and a brief but fascinating look at Virtual Networking performance: flows, bridging and tunnels byStephen Hemminger.

Go to Full Article

Linux.conf.au 2011 Day Two

Jes Fraser — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 02:01:56 +0000

by Jes Fraser

The second day of Linux.conf.au in Brisbane, Australia, opened with keynote speaker Vinton Cerf, vice president of Google. Vint Cerf is often spoken of as one of the 'fathers of the internet', having been one of the co-designers of the tcp/ip protocol.

Vint discussed some of the history of the internet, pointing out how much of the current state of the internet still reflects the original architecture, and covered some of the mistakes that were made in light of what we know today - for example, the current scarcity of IPv4 addresses and the security and privacy issues that have arisen with today's social internet.

After breaking for morning tea, the second day of miniconfs followed.

Miniconfs Schedule:

Systems Administration
Multicore and Parallel Computing
Mobile FOSS
Data Storage
Research and Student Innovation
Libre Graphics Day
Open in the Public Sector
Rocketry

I chose to spend the day in the Systems Administration miniconf, starting with a presentation by Devdas Bhagat on Implementing DevOps in the Real World. Devdas explained how DevOps is not about technology, nor process, but about culture and how to implement this cultural change. Following Devdas was a fascinating presentation on system time keeping and time sources by Julien Goodwin in his Brief History of Time Sync.

Other highlights included an update of Samba 4 features by Andrew Bartlett, a brief presentation on how to set up a HA cluster in 20 minutes by Sander van Vugt and an excellent summary of the features of Cgroups by Steven Ellis.

After the conference proper the conference speakers were given the opportunity to network at the Speakers Dinner, held in the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre.

Go to Full Article

Linux.conf.au 2011 - Day One

Jes Fraser — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:58:27 +0000

by Jes Fraser

“ Against all odds, Linux.conf.au is here! ”

This week more than 500 people from around the world are arriving in Brisbane for Linux.conf.au 2011. As last month Brisbane and indeed much of Queensland was devastated by severe flooding, it’s an incredible effort by the conference organisers that the conference is able to continue at all.

In December of 2010, a prolonged period of torrential rain contributed to massive flooding in Queensland. With 31 people reported dead and an estimated 1 billion AUD in damages, this is a natural disaster on a large scale that was spread across the state. To put the scale of the disaster in perspective, Queensland is 1.7m square km, or larger then the state of Texas. Arriving in Brisbane on Sunday the 23rd, there were still some traces showing where the water line was, but the cleanup work has been impressive.

Monday morning started with the traditional Welcome to linux.conf.au session, detailing essential conference information and giving us an opportunity to give the organisers a pat on the back for their amazing efforts managing to bring a conference together under these circumstances. John Ferlito from Linux Australia continued along this theme, and also encouraged conference goers to attend the Linux Australia AGM on Wednesday.

Carol Smith from Google’s Summer of Code program finished up the introductory talk with a brief introduction to the Summer of Code program and some statistics from previous years. After a catered morning tea, the miniconfs schedule for Monday started.

Miniconfs Schedule:

Open Programming
Freedom in the Cloud
Southern Plumbers
The Business of Open Source
Multimedia & Music
Haecksen
Arduino

Monday I spent in the Southern Plumbers miniconf (http://lca2011.linux.org.au/programme/miniconfs), which was opened by Jonathan Corbet’s Kernel Report. Jonathan covered the highlights of the previous year in kernel development, as well as some fascinating statistics. Other talks included Matthew Garrett discussing power management on Enterprise Hardware, Linaro Arm Toolchain development by Michael Hope and Linux/X/Wayland input directions by Daniel Stone.

Go to Full Article