Fri, 12 Feb 2010
FOSDEM 2010...
... is over (for almost a week now), and it was a blast again.
If you went to one of the distro devrooms, I would appreciate it if you were to reply to this mail. We need feedback to improve stuff for next year.
Thanks.
In related news, I've uploaded the slides of my (unexpectedly horrendously successful) talk here
Tue, 26 Jan 2010
Going, obviously
If you thought otherwise, you're crazy, but just for reference:
This year I volunteered to organize the "distributions" devroom/track, because it seemed to be going nowhere, and the people who where supposed to do so were too busy with other stuff. I'm still not very fond of the idea of mixing all distributions in one room, but at least we managed to avoid complete and utter disaster wherein nearly no talks would have been submitted.
Let's see how it goes, now.
Sat, 14 Feb 2009
Debian @ FOSDEM 2009: Postmortem
Well, no, neither FOSDEM nor Debian are dead. But FOSDEM '09 is gone, over, and dealt with.
It was a breeze, for the most part. I'm still not very happy with the booth; that needs to be done better next year. Help and suggestions in that area are more than welcome.
One thing that more than deserves a follow-up is Lucas' post about FOSDEM:
On a more sad note, the worst talk of the week-end was without any possible doubt Frans Pop's release team bashing. Nobody is claiming that the release management of the lenny release cycle was perfect: there's always room for improvement. But given the context and the constraints, I think that they did a very good job. Frans' talk boiled down to: "The release team doesn't know what they are doing, I would have done much better because I'm so qualified."
As the person responsible for allowing Frans on the schedule in the first place, while being fully aware of the relationship between Frans and the release team (not at first, but certainly in time to kick him off if I'd have wanted to), I'd like to comment on that.
First of all, I do not agree that the last statement in the above is true. Frans showed a few stories of things that went on in the release team, and gave his opinion on what he believed went wrong. He also explicitly said, at the beginning of the talk, that none of the talk was meant personally; that he wanted to offer some constructive criticism instead. I believe he did not fail in doing that, but of course YMMV.
Secondly, and more importantly, I do not believe it is healthy for
Debian (or any project, for that matter) to reject criticism. Indeed,
nobody is claiming perfection. I do not believe any venue where talks
can be had should be a good news show
. People in a position of
power—not just the release team, but also, say, the DPL,
ftp-masters, buildd maintainers and whatnot—have received our
trust to do what they need to do to the best of their abilities. If
someone in the project would believe that I can significantly improve my
work as buildd maintainer, it is not just their right, but indeed their
duty to inform me of that fact. This is exactly what Frans was
attempting to do, and there is nothing wrong with that.
It is also not as if he's not tried reasoning with the release team first. He has made suggestions, which have gotten ignored. I feel that talking to more people about what he feels is right, to see whether they agree with him, is the next logical step to take, and that this it is exactly what Frans was attempting to do at FOSDEM.
Having said that, I agree that finishing the talk late was a very bad thing. If anything, a talk on a subject like this should have more, not less, time for discussion. So while I do not agree that his intentions were wrong, I do agree that the execution could have been better.
There, that was criticism too. Now, what's next?
Oh yes, suggestions. If people have suggestions on how to improve the Debian presence at FOSDEM next year (especially, as above, ideas for creative use of the booth would be welcome), then please send me an email, making sure the subject contains the word 'FOSDEM', so my mailfilters know what to do with it. You'll preferably do so now, while FOSDEM is still somewhat fresh in your memory; I'll take notes and use those for doing better next year.
Thanks,
Sun, 18 Jan 2009
FOSDEM Debian Devroom: annotated schedule
FOSDEM is a 2-day weekend of insanity. 218 talks this year; if you want to understand exactly how insane that is, have a look at the schedule grid. There are 19 rooms where events are held; possibly more, since I understand not every devroom has sent in its schedule yet.
Might be hard for people to make a choice that way, I guess.
Now there're supposed to be abstracts of each talk on the FOSDEM website, but reading them all can be quite tedius. In an effort to help, at least for the Debian devroom, here's the schedule for our devroom with a bit of explanation of what it's about. Note that this is mainly aimed at people not familiar with Debian; those who are should probably understand it enough by looking at the titles.
Saturday:
13:00 - 14:00: 'Outside broadcast on a budget - the DebConf video team and DVswitch'. DVswitch is the software used to create those excellent Debian videos. The best ones yet, IMO, are the ones of Debconf8. Check them out. There's nothing Debian-specific about DVswitch, except that it was written by Debian people. It's a great way to do live Internet .ogg streaming by using nothing more than DV cams, Firewire, and plain old Ethernet.
14:00 - 15:00: 'Ultimate Debian Database: datamining Debian made easy!'. UDD is a SQL database containing a shitload of data related to Debian, and which should allow easy datamining. Hence the title. This probably won't be of any interest to people who are not either a Debian Developer or a statistician, but I might be mistaken.
15:00 - 16:00: 'Introducing DDE, Debian Data Export'. This is a new project Enrico came up with, and which is related to the same subject as the previous talk. I don't know much more beyond what's in the abstract. However, given the fact that Enrico is going to be doing this talk, it can't be bad. Seriously.
16:00 - 17:00: 'The Debian status quo on the Openmoko Neo Freerunner'. Yup, Debian runs on the OpenMoko, and has done so since Debconf8, last august. This talk should give some more insight; if you have an OpenMoko, this definately is for you.
17:00 - 17:30: 'Running Debian on Inexpensive Network Storage Devices'. I've been running Debian on a Thecus N2100 for a few years now, and it's great. There are more options, however, and Martin does most of the hard work related to these devices. He's done a similar talk on the two previous FOSDEMs (go check out the videos), and this one will mainly be an update on what's going to be new in Lenny.
17:30 - 18:15: 'Grid Computing with Debian, Globus and ARC'. These guys are a group of academics from three different universities who've been doing grid computing (i.e., something like 'SETI@Home', but then somewhat different) with Debian and some other technologies. They'll be explaining how, exactly. I don't know much about this talk; it could be great, or it could fail miserably. I guess we'll see.
18:15 - 19:00: 'What does the DPL do?'. This is really firmly targetted at Debian people. If you're not in the least interested in how Debian does things, you'll be bored.
Sunday
09:15 - 10:00: 'The state of Virtualization in Debian'. If you're a Debian user interested in virtualization, this talk is for you. Henning will explain what virtualization options exist in the upcoming 'Lenny' release, and how to use them.
10:00 - 11:00: 'TDebs'. This might not be too interesting to you unless you happen to be involved in Debian infrastructure. TDebs don't exist yet, but will sometime soon; Neil will be explaining how, why, and what.
11:00 - 12:00: 'Internationalization in Debian: How to improve further?' If you're interested in i18n, this is probably for you.
12:00 - 13:00: 'The Common Debian Build System (CDBS)'. CDBS is one way to build a Debian package. This is probably only of interest to Debian people.
13:00 - 14:00: 'Release management in Debian - can we do better?'. Frans isn't a member of the release team, but has some criticism on how they function. He intends to present his arguments in order to start a discussion. This is Debian internal kitchery, really.
14:00 - 15:00: 'Lenny - the road to release'. Neil is a member of the release team, and is going to explain how we got to the current state. I hope he'll also explain why we still haven't released. I guess we'll see :-)
15:00 - 16:00: 'The long road to KDE4 in Debian'. Um, yeah. I'm not a KDE guy, but I understand some other people are. In any case, might be an interesting talk even if you don't use Debian, since I understand it will look at some of the new features in KDE (and how they relate to packaging).
16:00 - 17:00: 'Debian and Google Summer of Code 2008: wrap-up and insights'. I guess Leslie will be there. The speaker was a student working on Debian during this year's SoC, and he will present what's been accomplished.
There, that's it. Now my only hope is that there'll be many people attending. If previous editions are any indication, however, that won't be a problem.
Of course I am
In case there was any doubt:
Not that I think there was, but, well.
In related news, there've been some minor updates to the devroom schedule, especially on saturday. If you were interested in some of the saturday talks, you'd better go have a look.
Sun, 24 Feb 2008
FOSDEM, day two
This is no doubt one of the best FOSDEMs, ever. At least to me it was, and I've been to every FOSDEM, and to the second day of the original OSDEM as well. Great weather, great people, great talks, and great fun. What more can one want? Where I had to nag about a few things yesterday, today I can only feel exhausted, but happy.
Some loose ends:
- Apparently someone forgot a camera in the Debian Developer's room; this is a Kodak EasyShare ZD710. If you're quick, you may be able to still get it at the info desk; otherwise, contact either me or "Chipzz" on the Freenode network (perhaps in the #fosdem channel). If you're still in Belgium, we may arrange for you to pick it up, otherwise we'll have to send it to you.
- Thijs said it after the last talk in the Debian devroom, but let me repeat it here: if you have comments about the Debian presence at FOSDEM (and I mean about any subject, really), just let me know. This was a great FOSDEM already, but there's always room for improvement. Oh, and yes, we need a bigger devroom, and the FOSDEM people know this, and they can't really help us but they'll do what they can. Unfortunately "too many people" is a general problem at FOSDEM.
See you next year!
FOSDEM 2008: Day one
Day one of FOSDEM 2008 has now ended, and almost everything seems to have gone fine from my end. Note, "fine" is not "perfect"; there were some issues.
- Unfortunately, Lars fell ill, and couldn't make it. Shame; I was actually looking forward to meeting him again. Fortunately, Frans Pop offered to hold a replacement talk, and that talk went well, given the low amount of time he had to prepare it.
- The Debian developer's room is now really too small. Last year, we were having issues with the room being too full to accomodate new attendees, but this was very much dependent on the actual talk going on; the room couldn't accomodate the audience for all the most popular talks, but in general there were no issues. In contrast, this year around I haven't yet seen the room not being too small.
- The security staff sucks. Again, they kicked us out of the DevRoom before the agreed-upon time of 19:00. I'll need to remember that for next year, and not try to assign talks until the very last moment; perhaps stop by 18:45 or so...
- The idea to let my hair grow to prove to Nattie that it's ugly that way seems to have failed to meet its purpose. Darn. This is the last time I'll come up with such a lousy excuse for allowing my hair to grow.
- I've been slacking with things, and not following up on stuff people sent me mails about. As a result, I needed to fix some things at the last minute while the event was already underway. Silly me. Most things worked out nicely, however; and the booth—I think I shouldn't bother to make up a schedule anymore next year.
Nothing spectacularly problematic; and as for the last item, that can be easily fixed by introducing fresh blood in organizing the Debian side of FOSDEM next year. Not that I want to stop being involved, but at least not being the only one responsible might be sensible.
Other than that, no real issues, really. Well, except for one; I was so backlogged with everything that I had to postpone finishing my slides 'till the very last moment—half an hour ago. Ugh.
But, well. Great FOSDEM!
Thu, 21 Feb 2008
my FOSDEM TODO list
In less than two days, and I still have loads to do
- Clean the office. The floor is pretty dirty right now, no place to lay down guests.
- Pack my bags. I host guests at the office, which requires me to sleep there, too.
- Figure out a solution for the booth (I did get some volunteers, but did not follow up on that yet).
- Write two sets of slides: one for my talk about the Belgian eID card in Debian, one for the key signing party, which I'm also organizing
- Clean out my SD cards, so that I can actually take pictures. This involves some sorting out of what needs to be kept and what not, etc.
Most of this has to be done this evening. And all this while feeling horrible; I think I'm sick again. If I didn't have to give this perl training, I'd have stayed at home today.
Here's for hoping I'll feel better during the weekend. And that I'll get everything done by tonight.
Tue, 22 Jan 2008
FOSDEM 2008 approaching...
In just over a month (1 month and 1 day, to be precise), it's FOSDEM again. The Debian Developers Room schedule is almost complete, and some interesting things are being published around it.
Such as the pre-FOSDEM beer event. In previous years, this always happened at the "Le Roi d'Espagne", a bar at Grand Place in Brussels. This was a nice place for many years, because it's easily found, and they have this backroom where quite a lot of people would fit in. Unfortunately, "quite a lot" does not equal "a huge number", with the amount of people going to the pre-FOSDEM beer event more and more approaching the latter than the former as the years go by. Last year, it finally became too crowded, and it was decided that the pre-FOSDEM beer event would change bars this year.
Which has now happened. This year, the pre-FOSDEM beer event will be at the Delirium Café, which is not at the Grand Place anymore, but just 100m away from it; the FOSDEM website has more information. A nice feature of the Delirium Café, besides the fact that they are much larger, is the huge amount of different beers they have. Over 2000 of them, which you can query online!. And that's not even considering the soft drinks or waters or whatever, which they also have on their menu.
Another novelty this year is the streaming; the main tracks that will be held in Janson will be streamed out of the event, and the Debian video team is also planning to do some streaming. Meaning, even if you can't make it to FOSDEM, you'll still be able to follow some of it. You won't be able to follow everything, especially not the hallway track which at FOSDEM is a very important one; but at least you'll be able to sample some bits, which is nice.
Other than that, not much will change. There'll be a key signing party, organized by yours truly. There'll be Lightning talks, there'll be the Main track, and there'll be a number of Developer rooms, including the Debian one—which, occasionally, is also organized by yours truly.
This conference has always been my favourite (even though I haven't been to many conferences besides FOSDEM); I've never missed even one edition ever since the very first one back in 2001 (when it was still called OSDEM). And since a few years, I've also been offering crashing space at our office, for international geeks who don't mind roughing it a bit (it's an office, there no shower, there's only floor space). This year, perhaps I haven't been spamming enough for that, but for now I only have two people who're interested in sleeping over (and they're not even sure); if you're going to FOSDEM and still need a place to sleep, you're (probably ;-) welcome. Send me an email.
On the Debian front, things are going well, for the most part. The list of speakers for the Devroom is nearing completion, leaving me with little more to do than to start assigning times. We've been assigned a booth as well, but there I still need to figure out how to organize it, and what to do with it. There will of course be the regular UK T-shirts, and probably some other merchandizing, but I also want something involving some computer device. We've had this d-i "babelbox" installation running a few times now, which was nice; but I do think we need some variation, too. The only problem with that approach is that I don't really know what that variation could be. Suggestions are welcome!
And so time goes on, and FOSDEM draws nearer. At some point it'll eventually happen, and then it will be over before one can say "blueberry pie". Sometimes I wonder whether all these months of preparation are actually worth it. But when FOSDEM is actually here, I'm sure I'll find that it is, indeed, worth it...
Sun, 26 Feb 2006
That's why!
I had been wondering about Lars' talk's title for a while, but of course everyone is free to choose their own title.
I was just now browsing a few websites in connection to this and last year's FOSDEM Debian Devrooms. Of course.
On FOSDEM, beer, and oldworld powermacs
- The second day of FOSDEM was (at least) as good as the first day. Though I'll try to find some volunteers to help me out with talk moderation next year, so that I won't have to sit there all the time but actually do have time to speak to random people, rather than having to say "Hi, you're here! Nice to see you! Sorry, but I have to go."
- Beer is nice. Belgian beer is good. Belgian beer in le Roi d'Espagne together with a few hundred other hackers is very good. Having to yell to get through the noise all night and subsequently losing your voice for the rest of the weekend? Less so.
- When bringing an oldworld powermac for Sven Luther, it would be
great had I actually told him
this is your box
rather thanyour box is at the booth; when you want it, go there and pick it up.
Doing so might have prevented Sven to pick up the wrong box when going home. As it is, I'm stuck with an oldworld powermac that I have to find storage for, while Sven is stuck with a box that isn't his, and that we have to find out who it belongs to, how to get it to him/her, etc.
Several people told me this happened to me last year, too, so I suppose it's correct. I don't remember, however. Must make sure it doesn't happen again.
Other than that, I love this weekend.
