Waking up

Today is the monday after FOSDEM 2014, and I'm slowly waking up.

Being in charge of the video team, and after having spent a whole week preparing followed by a whole weekend stressing about, today is a day of slowly waking up from hibernation and returning gear to various rental companies.

At FOSDEM 2013, we had recorded five rooms. Even though we did lose a few talks, I felt pretty good about the whole thing, and I think we did pretty well then. It had been my plan to increase the number of rooms to be recorded from 5 to a reasonably higher number—say, 10 or so—but someone convinced me to do all of them.

I'll readily admit I was afraid. Scratch that, I was terrified. Petrified, that we wouldn't be able to pull it off. For previous editions, we'd kept the number conservative, since video work is a high-risk business: if something goes wrong with volunteers work (say, the heralding volunteer doesn't show up), you find a replacement, or you have a staff member introduce a speaker, and the show will go on.

Not so with video work: if something minor goes wrong, you will most likely lose content. If something minor goes wrong in one devroom, I'll deal with it. If something minor goes wrong in 20% of devrooms, that's 4 to 5 devrooms, and I can't deal with it. Moreover, finding enough volunteers to manage the video for five rooms was a challenge last year; I couldn't even begin to imagine how to do so for 22 of them.

We did work out a way that didn't seem too far-fetched, and that might work: why not look for volunteers from the devrooms themselves? But then, they couldn't be expected to have the required experience, so we'd have to do a lot of handholding.

The week before FOSDEM, four of us sat down in an office in Mechelen, and started preparing. We had a lot to do; and when you do, more jobs keep being added to the pile; TODO lists tend to grow longer, not shorter. Installing servers, testing cameras, setting twinpact dipswitches, configuring laptops. Changing a few tests in the config management system, and having to go over the laptops again. Buying extra gear. Buying yet more extra gear, several times. Buying cardboard boxes when it appeared that the plastic foldable ones we'd ordered wouldn't make it in time, and unloading the pallet of them when it did, after all, so we could load them into the van with all of the other gear. Laminating instruction sheets. Receiving shipments of rented gear. Calling another supplier last minute when one of our other suppliers had contacted us to let us know one of their cameras that they'd promised us had broken down, and couldn't be repaired in time. Calling that last-minute supplier again when we found out that some of the cameras we'd rented could do HDV only (and not DV), and we needed to find more than the ones we'd already asked for. Discovering that his cameras were of the same problematic model and so also couldn't be used. The feeling of relief when he called me a few hours later and told me he'd managed to scrounge up enough cameras to help us out after all.

And then it was time to go to the ULB and start setting up everything. On friday, we had a little bit of help, but did have to do most of it ourselves. After setting up everything in every room and testing as much as possible within the time constraints that we had, we picked up the most expensive bits of the gear, brought it down to a safe place, and went home.

On saturday and sunday, for me it was mostly a matter of handing out gear to various devrooms, running around to fix various issues, and then in the evening receiving boxes back, using a checklist to ensure everything expected was in the box (and that things not needed would remain in the room, or be sent back).

It was exhausting, to the extent that on saturday afternoon, I had to take a bit of time off so I could go and rest.

I think it's safe to say that something like this hasn't been done before. FOSDEM is a huge conference; most conferences with multiple rooms don't have more somewhere between 5 and 10 of them. The fact that we have so many more, and the fact that we record all of them, puts FOSDEM video work in a class of its own, to the extent that the professional cameramen I talked to in order to get the right cameras would incredulously ask "what do you need that for?" when I gave them the numbers we needed.

As such, I didn't expect, nor was aiming for, perfection. Unfortunately, with video work it is close to impossible to attain perfection; I have told multiple people during the event that I would be happy if we reached 85% of talks recorded at acceptable quality; and though it is much too soon to say for certain, my gut feeling tells m that we've probably achieved that.

One thing we hadn't planned for was streaming. During the past three years, FOSDEM enlisted the help and sponsorship of flumotion to get streaming going. Unfortunately, that did not work out this year; and since we already had far too much on our plates with everything else, we decided to forego streaming and focus on recording, only.

A few days before the event, however, Steinar Gunderson took it upon himself to fix that. While we couldn't support him a great deal, we could give him access to the secondary laptops (which weren't otherwise doing much anyway) on which he could then do his thing. This was mostly transparent to us; we did communicate to some extent (e.g., when a machine that had been down had fixed and was working again), but he mostly did his thing while we did ours. Full details, for those who want it, in the linked blog post.

Today, then, I spent most of my time handling hardware: waiting for other members of FOSDEM to drive the van up to my office; waiting for the laptop rental company to retrieve most of the laptops; waiting for two of the camera rental companies to retrieve their cameras and tripods; driving over to the final camera rental company to return their cameras and tripods; and finally, driving up to the ULB to retrieve the last laptops who had been copying files all night.

As I write this, some video files have already been uploaded to the FOSDEM video archive. However, these are extremely low-quality renditions of video snippets that need to be reviewed; they are not ready yet for public consumption. When those files exist, expect an announcement through the main FOSDEM website.

"Nuclear precision weapons"

Now that the madness is mostly over, I have some time to catch up on reading my newspaper.

Last week, one article in De Standaard talked about the nuclear weapons on Belgian soil which officially didn't exist (until wikileaks proved otherwise) and which are now apparently going to be modernized. The newer model would be "nuclear precision weapons".

Ignoring the question of whether today's world still requires nuclear bombs (this may or may not be true, I don't care), I question the logic which leads to that phrase. A nuclear weapon is a weapon of mass destruction. By definition, a weapon of mass destruction causes collateral damage. By definition, a precision weapon is a weapon that does not cause collateral damage—or, at the very least, where every effort is made to limit the amount of collateral damage.

Even the very first nuclear bombs were capable of destroying entire cities. Today's nuclear weapons, even the smaller ones, are far more powerful than those.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not a peace activist. In fact, I have been contracted by companies who produce military equipment, and don't feel bad about that. But to claim that it is possible to create "nuclear precision weapons" is to deceive oneself. A nuclear weapon is not very precise.