Sunday 13 November 2016

Debian MiniConf ARM Cambridge 13/11/16 - Day 4 post 5 - Wrap ups

For those following along at home - that was Holger Levsen and Chris Lamb talking about Reproducible Builds immediately followed by Lucy Wayland on SIMD or how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Vector.

Next up Lars Wrizenius on the vmdebootstrap sprint and the results.

Last of all will be Steve wrapping up, chasing us out and the clear up team doing a final chase around.

Apparently very slightly lower turnout than last year - but still some new faces, lots of familiar faces and a lot of "stuff" : some awesome Debian merchandise that I couldn't quite justify to myself but there's always next time :)

Almost at the end of a really enjoyable four days for me - back to work tomorrow :(

Thanks to all our sponsors [ARM, Codethink, HPE] whose names you will have seen in between the video segments for facilities and sponsoring meals and the like.

MiniDebconf ARM Cambridge 13/11/16 - Day 4 post 4 - lightning talks

Ian Jackson - dgit in two slides with attitude :)

Mike Crowe - Code Club - volunteering to teach programming to school children in after school clubs. Scratch: version 1 is packaged for Debian and Raspberry Pi  CSS HTML Python - all materials provided. Projects for Microbits as well. No slides.

Dimitri Ledkov - SPI board - explaining about SPI. SPI - US non-profit, also registered in Europe. Collects donations, can register trademarks, can hold assets on your project's behalf.  Volunteer project: controlled by member orgs.

Guus Sliepen - ifupdown -  dual protocol, bonding, VPNs, wireless,
- too many slides :)






MiniDebconf Cambridge, ARM, 13/11/16 - Day 4 post 3

Just about to watch Daniel Silverstone demonstrating his new FPGA board.

Mystorm - open hardware - growing out of Icestorm. Programmable hardware - toolchains - and showing the hardware.

The Debian video team have advised that they are about to start the transcoding process - videos will be available soonish :)

http://video.debconf.org/minidebconf-low.webm


Debian MiniConf, ARM Cambridge, 13/11/16 - Day 4 post 2

Just watching Lars Wirzenius talking about Qvarn - identity and data protection management on large scale. Compliant with EC data/identity management regulations and concerns.

The room fell silent at 1100 for two minutes - as we did on Friday 11/11/16.
This is remembering the dead, wounded and those  affected by the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Inevitably, it also reminded me of friends and colleagues in Debian that are no longer with us: for Espy and so many others before and since, thanks from me - you are well remembered here.

Debian MiniConf, ARM Cambridge 13/11/16 - Day 4 post 1

Just got here, partway into Guus Sliepen's talk about issues with sourceless packages and the DFSG. Lots of problems with, for example, music for games and imagery and also areas where packages autobuild / use generated blobs which are not supplied or are not able to be regenerated.

Checked in by front desk - thanks again to Lisa, to Jo McIntyre and Lucy Wayland who have been very patient waiting for us, very helpful as ever, chasing us at the end of each day to reconcile badges and people and doing all the useful stuff that no one sees.

ARM security folk are still here, obviously, and the building work has stopped for the weekend so we can get in and out of the building more readily.  Thanks once again to the ARM staffers who are also Debian-ites and to the ARM management who have to authorise all of this and allow us to use their facilities, buildings and guest WiFi. It's testament to a whole lot of hard work  behind the scenes that this all seems seamless and (generally) works so well

Saturday 12 November 2016

Debian MiniConf ARM Cambridge - post 5

Daniel Pocock finally getting Jitsi to work - us talking to Berkeley, CA.

He's just given a talk on OpenPGP / Clean Room ISO creation for creating keys / CA certs appropriately offline and keeping everything secure.

It's been a good day, but I'm feeling pretty bushed :)

Debian MiniConf ARM Cambridge 12/11/16 - Post 4

Now Daniel Pocock on RTC. Again, a few technical issues :(

Big thanks to the video folks who have been working hard: they couldn't get into this room until 1800 last night and spent until about 2000 fixing the cameras etc. They must be shattered.

Thanks for front desk: who also pointed out that the security staff in over the weekend are also volunteers.

MiniDebconf ARM 12/11/12 - post 3

A crazy presentation on amateur radio and dongles for SDR for which I was at least partially responsible which may well have inspired others and piqued their interest - but, if nothing else, it was a lot of fun.

KiwiSDR - there should be anything up to 200 deployed in the end worldwide - look for them on sdr.hu - all done on top of a Beaglebone running Debian.
Four users independently tuning the receiver from 0-30MHz
Lunch was sandwiches in the kitchen - much hilarity as the door appeared locked, folk were shut outside - and the door was open all the time.

A presentation / group discussion on diversity and on ways that we can improve the understanding of Debian

Debian Miniconf ARM Cambridge Day 3 12/11/16 - post 2

Steve Capper on Java.

Room quiet - lots of folk listening and typing simultaneously.

A couple of folk behind me are writing for later in the day.

Thanks to all for their help (and what is it with me and typing dates this week) :)

Debian MiniConf, ARM, Cambridge 11/11/16 - Day 2 post 2

It's raining cats and dogs in Cambridge.

Just listening to Lars Wirzenius - who shared an office with Linus Torvalds, owned the computer that first ran Linux, founded the Linux Documentation Project. Living history in more than one sense :)

Live streaming is also happening.

Building work is also happening - so there may be random noise happening occasionally.

Friday 11 November 2016

Debian Miniconf ARM Cambridge - 11/11/16 - Day 2 post 1

Lots of chatting at various points  - a couple of extra folk have joined us today.

I've been fighting UEFI network booting: found inconsistencies on various Wiki pages - then found that the laptop I was intending to boot was just too old to support UEFI properly. In the meantime, the person I was intending to help has moved on and hit something else ...

Release team have managed to hammer out a couple of points: various other progress from the video team. It's all going fairly well.

Lunch - and coffee - excellent once again.

Thanks to front desk folks - and ARM folks - who are tolerating the end of their working week being invaded by Debian folk.

Thursday 10 November 2016

Debian Miniconf ARM, Cambridge 10/11/16 - Post 4

As we left at about 1740, Wookey was still working on the Cubietruck I'd left him with but had made progress.

Dispersed to various pubs and eateries: we all ended up talking a great deal, much as last year. Tsk, tsk - you hardly see people for 20 years then you see the same people twice in two years :)

Though I didn't see that much of them through the day, thanks to Jo, Lucy and all who kept front desk running as ever and thanks to all the various ARM staff who were helpful with opening doors for the visitors and all the little things around administration - wifi access, badges and all that goes with hosting.

And why, O why, did I not notice that I'd subconsciously typed 10/11/12 not once but three times

Debian Miniconf, ARM Cambridge 10/11/16 - post 3

Quiet room with occasional outbursts of talking. One of my problems with radio gear down to broken cable so that's OK-ish - I have spares.

And suddenly it's 1720 and we need to leave at about 1730.

2 x radio receivers tried: 2 x transmitters working ready for talk on Saturday.

Spare huge bag of cables appreciated by others - it's amazing how often you find someone else needs stuff :)





Debian Miniconf ARM, Cambridge 10/11/16 - post 2

Now about 30 people here: the video team are chasing down power leads and cables in readiness for the weekend.

One large open plan room with about 30 small quadrilateral tables - two make a hexagon. Very quiet for open plan: periodically the room falls completely silent - lots of developers quietly coding / reading screens.

Lunch was very good curry: ARM caterers feed us very well indeed :D

The radio I'm trying to program refuses to play with the software: the maintainer is at the back of the room and has offered to sort out a backport to Debian stable. Debian can occasionally seem like a dysfunctional family but it's good to be a member.

The Cubietruck I bought last year is sitting with another developer as I speak - he's going to try adding multiple disks for a RAID array on a machine that only draws 5W or so.

Debian Miniconf, ARM, Cambridge 10/11/16 - Post 1

More or less just getting going: there are eight of us here.

Release team are round one desk and a couple of others of us are on adjacent tables. Coffee is good, as ever :)

ARM very helpful as ever: they have been able to provide a disabled space for me though parking here is really, really tight