Conserving power
With my laptop on 32% charge (not quite a record for me) and my own
internal batteries needing a bit of charging, I looked at the programme
after afternoon tea. There wasn't anything that really stood out for
me as a must-see, and as Jeff said in the opening speech it's important
to conserve one's energy and pace oneself at LCA. So I enjoyed a quiet
walk back down the slope to Shalom College, to see if they have Wifi
here yet.
I have to say that I do like the UNSW campus. It has the same style as QUT in Brisbane - fairly closely packed, and a mixture of the old and the new with little nooks and lawns of greenery amongst it all to enjoy as one goes past. Passing the John Lions garden outside the Computing Science building is particularly poignant given last year's fundraiser. And, while some people might complain a bit about the walk uphill to the conference in the morning, and even I end up feeling unfit and slightly out of breath after tackling it, it's very pleasant to walk down in the afternoon.
After Jeff's talk was a talk on Conduit, a GNOME subsystem designed to make synchronising data between a source and one or more destinations easy. It looked absolutely awesome, because the guy who gave the talk understood the problem space well and had solved it in a way that allowed both 'headless' sync to happen behind the scecnes and fully GUI-enabled ad-hoc sync with conflict resolution all beautifully handled. This allows any application that uses DBus to facilitate syncing of data, without having to be an expert in asynchronous synchronisation (not, in this case, a contradiction in terms). Jeff's talk was about enabling social networking and putting GNOME on a phone (so to speak), and this talk was about making synchronising that data seamless and easy. Cool!
And now to my afternoon's entertainment: getting my WINE patch to work. I've got all the code working, including the two bits I'd commented out because I didn't quite understand where the data was coming from. It compiles with no errors and only one or two warnings, which as far as I can see aren't caused by my code. Now I have to go through and manually label my build directory so that it has the right SELinux contexts to have execmod permissions. Presumably Fedora's SELinux configuration assumes that any big bunch of libraries compiled quite recently in your home directory aren't guaranteed to be trustworthy to use as libraries. Fine by me.
Maybe I'll find out if Wifi is enabled in Shalom, so I can post this and Google for solutions to the execmod problem.
Update: Nope, Wifi is not working in Shalom. A quick call to my front
man Steve revealed that it hasn't worked today, will be ready when the
gods have been appeased and the troubleshooters have shaken their voodoo
sticks over it, and is only likely to be sporadic even then. I realise
that this is as much a question of getting bandwidth down here as
getting the time to set stuff up, and I least of all people want to
hassle the network guys with requests that they're already trying to
handle. But it's not a great way to end the day for everyone staying
on campus.
posted at: 17:59 | path: /tech/lca | permanent link to this entry
Why are wii here too?
Just a quick clarification before dozens of Jdub and GNOME fanboys jump
on me and toast me to a crisp: the overall idea is sound. Social
networking and making nice interfaces and embedded GNOME, yay. But
demonstrating this with half an hour of rambling Wii play was not my
idea of a good way to get this across.
posted at: 14:49 | path: /tech/lca | permanent link to this entry
Why are wii here?
Here at the GNOME miniconf we've been watching Jeff play with his
Wii. The talk's called "connecting the dots", but as far as I can see
it should be titled "watch Jeff play with his Wii and get absolutely
nothing done". We've got some guy down from the audience and are
creating a new 'Mii' character for him, but I've already switched off.
And the repeats of the music are going from mildly irritating to
annoying, and in another five minutes it'll be insane rage time.
Sorry, Jdub, but this doesn't cut it as a talk.
Still, I've got another inconsistency with my WINE patch sorted out,
and I've just discovered another, so I've got something to do.
posted at: 14:20 | path: /tech/lca | permanent link to this entry
It's not just for sharing music?
First talk: virtualisation; and Jon Oxer talking about trying to manage
Xen clients across multiple machines without twelve layers of abstraction
and SAN thrashing. Very good stuff, and while a friend of mine commented
that it was "welcome to the 1980s" as far as IBM and large-scale mainframes
are concerned I think that Jon's got a lot of good ideas to bring this
to the Open Source world. My tip to speakers from that talk is to assume
that you get about half of your time to talk and half of your time to
answer questions. Oh, and manage your questions - the microphones are
being passed around so that questions can be recorded; take the question
from the person with the microphone.
Second talk: Avahi. I'd noticed this a while back when I was using RhythmBox at work - all these extra playlists would turn up in my sources list. I soon realised that these were Apple iTMS instances of other people just broadcasting themselves on the net. Learning about how these things work - and learning some of the tools to add Avahi functionality to programs - is pretty cool. Now to create my Avahi Mandelbrot Set calculator that grabs whatever processors it can find around the network. World domination, here we come!
Aside: had one of those embarrassing moments that seem common at LCAs: meeting a friend and not quite remembering where I'd seen him. On the one hand, I'd gone to sell him my old car, so I should have remembered him instantly. On the other hand, he'd changed his beard (again), grown taller than I remembered him, and my memory was tricked into thinking he was a person I knew from 2001 or so and I still (logically) owe a CD of Renaissance music. My memory is weird.
Jeff confirmed that they're still working out the programme for the Conference Party, and will get back to me tomorrow regarding whether I can mix there. I'm good with that.
Now, with a good spicy Beef Rendang in me, a lead recharging my laptop
and a can of V (bought along with seven others and a block of 70% cocoa
chocolate on Sunday afternoon) ready to go, it's time to decide what new
coolness I'll see this afternoon. Probably Jeff's GNOME talk.
posted at: 12:59 | path: /tech/lca | permanent link to this entry
LCA Day 1 - so far so good
Waking up was as easy as ever at LCA conferences - at 7AM the alarm
rang and I cursed. My tossing and turning at the new, hard and somewhat
scratchy bed hadn't made it an easy sleep. Getting to bed at half past
midnight after coming home from the Lowenbrau Keller hadn't helped either.
But, strangely, I was energised - rather than dropping back into sleep I
was ready for the first day at LCA. Shower. Dress. Eat breakfast.
Head on up to the top of the campus. Get connected to the Wifi,
courtesy of a random Seven team person who was keen to find out whether
the network was working. All good.
I note that the Programme has been updated, and that my 'request' to do
some mixing at the Conference Party hasn't. All good. I better start
practicing mixing again, then. I don't think my patches to WINE are going
to come good, and VMWare is having trouble getting installed. It's going
to be back to closed-source sinning...
posted at: 09:21 | path: /tech/lca | permanent link to this entry
All posts licensed under the CC-BY-NC license. Author Paul Wayper.