Planet SLUG January 31, 2006
Ian Wienand
How Linux on IA64 boots, roughly
I toyed with the idea of vectorising this, but it seemed too hard.
In essence, SAL (System Abstraction Layer) starts the machine with one processor running (the boot processor) and the others asleep.
The boot processor jumps to _start in
head.S, which checks a variable
task_for_booting_cpu to see if it is the boot processor
or not.
After that, it jumps into platform specific code and gets the
machine ready to go. Eventually we fall into smp_init()
which starts the other processors. For each other processor in the
system we call do_boot_cpu which sends an IPI
(inter-processor interrupt) wakeup to the other processor.
The other processor wakes up, and again jumps into
_start, however this time when it checks the
task_for_booting_cpu it will be set as the idle thread,
so it knows it is not the boot processor. It jumps into
start_secondary but largely follows more or less the same
path, but skipping the platform setup stuff. Eventually it calls
smp_callin to flag back to the boot processor that it is
alive and sitting in the idle thread.
The boot processor waits a few seconds for each CPU to check in as alive before assuming the worse and moving on. Once all the CPUs are online, the system is pretty much booted.
Michael Fox
Mythtv rocks
Well after sometime, I cracked it.
I purchased a 2nd tv tuner today, which is the same as the other one I bought this time last month. Installed into the machine and bingo.
4294686.444000] bttv0: detected: Twinhan VisionPlus DVB [card=113], PCI subsystem ID is 1822:0001 [4294686.444000] bttv0: using: Twinhan DST + clones [card=113,autodetected] [4294686.465000] bttv1: detected: Twinhan VisionPlus DVB [card=113], PCI subsystem ID is 1822:0001 [4294686.465000] bttv1: using: Twinhan DST + clones [card=113,autodetected]
Its a Twinhan DVB-T Mini Ter, and it works very much out of the box with Ubuntu 5.10 as suggested.
I’ve written a HOWTO on using this card in this version of Ubuntu, however it doesn’t include any steps after mythtv is installed. I will be cleaning it up a little and posting a copy of it on my website. As time goes on I will add more steps to try and describe how to navigate mythtv-setup application and add the card etc, as well as tuning for channels. Plenty of other guides around the place cover this so I might leave it out for the moment.
Anyways, very impressed. More so now 2nd tuner is installed and working. The backend picks available tuner as required, so if it knows encoder1 is in use, the show will use encoder2. So its great.
Lovely day
It was another nice day. Headed off to Jamberoo and rode a few slides etc. Was a good day, although got fairly burnt. Mind you we put on 30+ protection every 2 hours or so.
Ah well.
Mythtv attempt #3
After some work, I got it to work. I wasn’t going to let the install beat me.
I am so impressed with mythtv, as I can have a backend just sitting in a room recording shows and then (when I get it working) can transcode convert stuff, or use the mythfrontend on the same box to watch them (or as the case may be use the frontend binaries on OSX to watch it on my mac mini or wifes Powerbook).
I used ubuntu 5.10 and didn’t have to compile a thing to get my new dvb-t tuner to work, just had to edit some files (/etc/modules) and reboot. It works so well so far, that I am going to buy another tuner on Jan 9 soon as the shop opens for the new year. Then my backend will have 2 tuners, and this should be more then enough for what I want to do.
I dont have any remote or tv hooked up to the backend but if this is required I will work on it.
Soon as I get sometime, I will write a quick howto on installing my selected dvb-t tuner on ubuntu 5.10 and what files I changed etc. Then the process I used to install mythtv and mythtvweb plugin. As I am sure a few people would love an easy and quick way to get something going. It literally would only take about 2 hours I reckon. Super easy, but then you can spend more time on your own attempting to get other stuff to work.
Biggest downside at the moment, the mjpegtools package on Ubuntu 5.10 doesn’t work with nuvexport.. 
Pictures of the frontend running on mac mini can be seen on my gallery at http://heimic.net/gallery/ (in mythtv section)
New hardware
Well the new hardware I purchased recently has all arrived, as suggested I got a Twinhan card for some more Mythtv testing.
Although the best items I got would have to be the nearly purchased Cisco 837 ADSL router and a UltraWap access point.
inet-gw uptime is 2 days, 12 hours, 0 minutes
System returned to ROM by power-on
System image file is "flash:c837-k9o3sy6-mz.123-8.T3.bin"
As you can see above, the Cisco 837 is running nicely. Although it has been a learning exercise. I can say that I certainly dont like CRWS that Cisco made. The web interface is just got so many problems. I’ve managed to do all my configuration on the unit via the console CLI. And so far so good.
Should of bought one ages ago, then I would of saved buying 2-3 other routers since then, Oh well.
Mythtv (attempt #2)
I am planning on attempting Mythtv again, I have purchased myself a Twinhan DTV card as a friend advised that he is running 2 of them without very little problem. Although they dont have the remote side working, they do have the cards working.
So I thought yes why not. I still want to get a working system so that I can use mythweb to program shows from anywhere I might have internet access to home. If I can get it all working nicely, I have even considered paying for iceguide data, as I can see the benefits. Hopefully I will get it working without too much problems.
I am leaning towards using Ubuntu purely cause I want to throw something together quickly, and not compile packages (or atleast not yet).
Hrmm
Good party. Very tired. It turns out my wife bought me a nice Traxxas Revo nitro petrol r/c car. All I need to do now is run through 5 tanks of fuel.
And today is my Birthday..
No idea about presents, still yet to get any. I got up early as our wedding dvd suffered a problem and I have been trying copies from family members who got a copy to recover it. It appears I might have enough different sources to get enough of it back. I’ve managed to find a vob that didn’t work on my copy works on someone elses. So I am just demuxing all the streams and cutting out the bits that dont seem to work. It looks like we have so far lost about maybe a min or so off the credits (which to me is no big deal anyways).
Nearly my birthday
It’s my 30th Birthday in 2 day’s. Can’t believe I am about to turn 30 already. Doh
New Hardware
I recently purchased Battlefield2 and I must say I am not very good, not like some of these pro gamers who must play all day and night. But in any case I love playing.
I decided next year (2006) I will purchase some new hardware to make the gaming experience more enjoyable, so have decided to purchase a new PC to be used for playing bf2 and expansion pack, as well as anything else that takes my fancy.
The plan is to purchase a AMD X2 Dual Core, probably only a 4200+ since I dont think I could justify the cost of $200 more for the next model up. I also plan to grab DFI LANPARTY UT ULTRA-D motherboard, as well as new memory and various other stuff. Basically build a new machine. The current machine I have will be used more for some linux stuff, who knows I might even give mythtv another go with some different cards, I plan on buying a visionplus twinhan chipset card to give it a try. With the new machine will come I think the leap for SATA drives, so hopefully it all works out sweet. I haven’t added up the cost yet, but its certain to be about $1000 or more in bits.
I figure my Apple Mac Mini with 20″ Apple screen can continue to be my main desktop machine used for mail and web surfing, since its very realiable and stable.
Peter Hardy
We're all different!
Truth in advertising?
The guy who works at Professor Plum's in Crows Nest has the exact same bright purple Crumpler laptop satchel as I do. We pass each other on the way to work fairly often, each steadfastly ignoring the other in a vague attempt to assert his individality.
It is indeed moderately embarassing.
January 30, 2006
Simon Rumble
I never thought I'd say this...
But I now have no reason to complain about the Australian Tax Office. I just completed (yes, very late) my UK tax return for 2004/2005. ARGH!!!! I think the Marquis de Sade couldn't design a more convoluted, confusing form.
TongMaster
tax-payer funded tribute to a tax-avoider
A creative protest is being organised against the tax-payer funded tribute to a tax-avoiding businessman who contributed nothing to our nation and leaves it in a poorer state than he found it because of his practices. Read on for more from the notice:
If you don't support government as a welfare state for the rich, come and join us outside Howard's obscene event at the Sydney Opera House on Friday, 17 February at 11am. Hey, just as Bob Hawke declared a public holiday when Australia won the Americas Cup, the least Howard can do is make his Packer-dead-day the equal of the Queen's-birth-day, Australia-day, Xmess-day, etc, via his WorkChoices legislation.
Why we are protesting on 17th February
Why the protest as the Little Man pays to give a 'send off' to the Big Fella?
Well, actually it's us, the taxpayers, who are paying for the State Funeral, not John Howard.
And there is another important principle at stake here, namely that State Funerals are supposed to be for people who have made an outstanding contribution to Australia.
Kerry Packer, when he wasn't gambling, spent most of his time trying to avoid paying tax despite his huge income. After his death his sycophantic media, along with most mainstream media, have praised his generosity in paying to install respirators in some ambulances. This cost Packer less than he lost in some years in gambling, and much less than he avoided in tax.
Packer wasn't generous, he was a greedy, selfish man whose actions are deplored by all decent Australians. He was representative of much that is wrong in our society. So, why does Howard want to honour him? Well, for starters, Packer used his media empire to help Howard become Prime Minister and keep him there. The Packer and Murdoch media, which has come to dominate Australia's media, continually puts a positive 'spin' on Howard's economic policies which have done so much to make the rich richer while the rest of us find our working conditions deterioration, as we pay higher rents or mortgages.
In return, Howard has repaid the favour by amending the Media Cross Ownership laws to make it easier for Packer and Murdoch to 'gobble up' smaller media, concentrating so much of the commercial mass media in their own hands. In the same period, funding for public media (ABC and SBS) has been cut. Need one wonder why?!
Also Howard - like Hawke, Keating and Beazley - actually admire capitalist bullys like Packer. After all, they have a lot in common.
What can you do? For a start, stop buying Murdoch or Packer newspapers, stop watching their TV channels, etc. And stop voting for political parties what provide alibis for corporate domination of our lives. And why not come joint us on 17 February ? You have nothing to lose but the illusions that Packer et al are great Australians.
James Dumay
Has anyone seen Ycros?
I thought he was supposed to be back today at work - but he hasn’t called and managers have called me looking for him.
If anyone knows where he is or saw him last just comment on this post.
Mark Greenaway
From ginmar
I found that it is always better to fight than not to fight, always no matter what. -Andrea DworkinPeter Hardy
pah!
Did a quick run down to Yass this weekend to visit family, and came home late on Saturday night with a big bag of plums. A lot of them weren't quite ripe, so I thought I'd try something a little bit different, and make plum pie!
I've never made pie from scratch before, so it was a bit of a challenge. Found a basic butter pie crust recipe on the Internets which worked fairly well. Ended up using a bit more flour to get the dough to a good firm consistency. Also, it turns out that getting the dough in to the pie dish without making a huge godawful mess of everything is a fun, interesting and above all lengthy exercise.
The base needs to be cooked for a while. I heated the oven to approximately 200 degrees, and stuck it in until it was nice and golden.
To make the filling, I quartered 20 or so smallish plums, and took out the pits. Fed a few of those quarters to my rats, and put the rest in a pot on a medium heat with a quarter of a cup of water. Around about this point I also opened my second bottle of Monteith's Summer Ale, and learned that a white t-shirt and white shorts are not recommended attire when handling bright red juicy fruit.
While the plums are cooking, combine a quarter of a cup of sugar and a third of a cup of plain flour. When the plum mix has thickened up a little, pour it in, add one egg, and mix like the blazes. Until well mixed.
Pour in to base, put top on pie, stick back in oven until it looks cooked. Let it cool for a little while. I highly recommend serving with cream, and another bottle of Monteith's finest on the side.
January 29, 2006
Linux Australia
Election Results
The election for the 2006 linux.org.au committee has concluded and here are the results:President : Jonathan Oxer (jon@oxer.com.au)
Vice-President: Pia Waugh (greebo@pipka.org)
Secretary : Anthony Towns (aj@azure.humbug.org.au)
Treasurer : Terry Dawson (terry@linux.org.au)
OCMs : Leon Brooks (leon-linuxaus@cyberknights.com.au)
James Purser (purserj@k-sit.com)
Stewart Smith (stewart@linux.org.au)
Congratulations to all involved.
Andre Pang
Nettwerk Records vs RIAA
Canadia’s largest independent record label is litigating against the RIAA on behalf of consumers: schweet. (I personally like Nettwerk since they’re the home of some of my favourite artists: Sarah McLachlan, Dido, and the Barenaked Ladies.)
Linux.conf.au, Day 6 (Saturday)
Ah, the last day of LCA: it’s been a killer week, and definitely one of the best technical conferences I’ve ever been to. Personally, I think this ties with Linux.conf.au in Adelaide and Brisbane as the best LCA yet: I didn’t find the talks as invigorating this year, but the social side of things have been the best ever, with action typically going well past midnight every night. It’s finally started to take its toll on me, though: I left early tonight to both do some private hacking, and to catch up on that “sleep” thing that I’ve been missing out on for the past week.
Thankfully, the last day of the conference wasn’t too hectic: a late start, a keynote, one talk, followed by some best-of talks, a panel and the conference wrap-up. Of course, even though there was a late start, I still got up early since I wanted to get a ton of personal work out of the way, and I’m glad to say that I had enough time to do both that and have the usual leet-bix breakfast at Pia and Jeff’s again. Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote — which I thought would be rather controversial or about Ubuntu vs Debian — turned out to be completely not about Ubuntu vs Debian, and was excellent. Mark was pushing the whole notion of distributed revision control systems as the future of the entire open source movement, and possibly even computing in general. I do agree with Mark: distributed revision control is an incredibly powerful tool, and it has enough potential to change the whole underlying way that entire operating systems are constructed.
The only thing that soured Mark’s keynote was a barrage of incredibly irritating comments in question time, initiated by people in the audience who seemed to want a microphone for themselves. You always get these kind of morons at conferences: those folks that can ramble on at length about some completely unrelated topic in an attempt to show their supposed intellectual superiority, and who think that anything they can think of is important and worth nothing. Of course, in Alanic fashion, they just end up looking like idiots rather than looking intelligent, and unfortunately also waste everyone else’s time. These are the same dropkicks who consistently interrupt the speaker in a talk to offer “helpful hints” and “advice”; I had one such mongrel in the svk talk yesterday which nearly prompted me to show my skillz of an artist and exclaim “Let the speaker get on with his talk you stupid f***!”. There’s nothing quite like a super-enthusiastic babbling dumbass. Anyway.
The rest of the day wasn’t such a headspin as the past few days: we had a shaving session held at the same time as the lunch BBQ. Explanation: at last night’s auction, numerous silly people, such as Jeff Waugh, Greg ‘Groggy’ Lehey, Dave Miller and Rusty Russell, volunteered to have various bits of hair shaved off them if the bidding reached a certain price. Of course, with the UNSW cartel reaching a bid of $10000, we hit that price, and so it was decided that the shaving would be done in public, today, at lunchtime. I tell you: Rusty without a moustache is just weird. He’s, like, totally not the same guy. Jeff, Greg, and Dave all look the same, but Rusty… he could even, like, pick up chicks and stuff now. Brr!
The rest of the day was spent socialising with the other geeks and attending the panel, prizes and conference close. That was all a pretty standard affair, apart from the very sad fact that I lost my favourite silver long-sleeve Banana Republic jumper some time that afternoon. (Weeps with the moon.) Oh well, I guess that’s an excuse to do a little more shopping the next time I hit the USA…
MySQL were holding drinks that night at the Captain Cook tavern, but unfortunately I didn’t attend them since I was sadly looking around for my jumper. (Weeps with the moon yet again, this time with violin music in the background.) So, I joined Erik, Matt, Shane, Jaq, Ashley and a few other folks at none-other-than The Terrace for dinner again. I tell you: a mixed grill of lamb, chicken, pork and beef on hot rocks doesn’t get boring, and neither does a Barmaid full of beer. By this time, the five hours of sleep that I’d been getting per day really hit me, so I retired at about 9 o’clock to head back home and sleep.
So it’s been an excellent wind-down to one of the most awesome conferences I’ve been to. Next year’s Linux.conf.au organisers will have to work hard to top this one, but from (very) early indications, that prospect looks promising already. Thanks to all the organisers who made it such a educational, inspiring event to attend, and all my friends there who made it a serious boatload of fun!
P.S. For those of you that know of Andrew Tridgell, he was quoted in the Otago Daily Times (that most excellent of newspapers) as being a Jim Carrey lookalike. Truly awesome.
January 28, 2006
Simon Rumble
Flat pack bowls, plates and cups
Wow, these flat pack bowls, plates and cups look great. I think I want them.
James Purser
A Member_man update
Okay I've been hacking some more on member_man, and I'm grinding my way through the features I want to add.
Matthew Palmer
That's Not A Question, *This* Is A Question!
I've just come out of Mark Shuttleworth's Saturday morning keynote, and I'm a bit irritated. His talk was fairly short, and so there was a long question time. I use the word "question" in a fairly general sense, as there seemed to be a lot of people who were keen on using their 15 seconds of fame to expel a long-winded monologue. A few notes for those people (and there were quite a number of them):
- A question is a sentence of enquiry that asks for a reply. It ends with a rising inflection. It shouldn't take more than a couple of breaths to complete.
- If your question requires a lot of explanation, it's probably not suitable for general question time -- if only because 90% of the audience can't hear your exposition. Ask it later.
- If your only reason for asking the question is to make yourself look clever, don't bother. You don't look clever.
- If you really want to have a forum for your monologue, get a lightning talk slot.
This has been a public service announcement sponsored by Opinionated Geeks for A Less Painful Session (OGALPS).
Simon Rumble
It's a boom, not a bubble!
Wired are doing their cheerleading again. This time, we're assured, it's a boom and not a bubble. Of course, last time Wired told us we were in for 25 years of prosperity, freedom and a better environment for the whole world.
Still, the last bubble was a lot of fun, even if it means my CV is littered with companies that no longer exist. Must be time to dust off my plans for Bubble Goo and make bank.
Jamie Wilkinson
a bug aggregator and triage tool
At LCA 2005, Luis Villa presented a talk on being a bugmaster, and that inspired me to do some triage on SCons. Unfortunately that means dealing with Sourceforget's hideous tracker interface, so of course I never got around to it.
Some months and thinking later, I realised I needed to pay more attention to my Debian bugs, which being in a separate bug tracker meant they were rarely on my radar. In our own office, we have both a Request Tracker and a Bugzilla, and keeping a track of my todo list is pretty hard when it's split between the two -- it's hard enough when requests come from staff out of band of either of them.
I also forget how to use the tools: there's a threshold of work in triaging bugs, and if that threshold is too high, I'll do something else instead.
So the solution was to make a tool that put all my bugs, all tickets, issues, problems, feature requests, and so on into a single view -- aggregate them from all the trackers that I use and put them on my desktop. Present a single interface to triage all those bugs, so that I don't have to remember how to use the upstream tracker.
I mention this all, because Mark Shuttleworth's keynote this morning really hit home with me -- all of the merging of information and collaboration is exactly the way to go forward, and I'm excited that Canonical is building the infrastructure to help push that forward.
So, I have this tool, still in development, in bzr:
bzr pull http://repo.spacepants.org/bugtool/bugtool.dev/
It's able to pull bugs from Sourceforget, and from the RT instance in our office; needs a bit of work now to get the interaction going but that should appear in the coming weeks.
I don't like the name, though... I'm thinking it should be called 'tuffet':
Little Miss Muffet
Sat on her tuffet
Triaging her bugs all day
Along came a spider
and sat down beside her
So she "triaged" that bug with some spray.
January 27, 2006
Andre Pang
makex0r
I have the weirdest things in my .zshrc file sometimes…
~ % which -a makex0r
makex0r: aliased to makeLinux.conf.au, Day 5 (Friday)
Ah, a good start to the day: I got up nice and early so I didn’t have to rush through the morning routine, and joined a few other geeks at Pia and Jeff’s apartment for breakfast. After downing our daily intake of leet-bix, we went with high expectations to Damian Conway’s keynote, titled “Sex and Violence: Technical and Social Lessons from the Perl 6 Development Process”. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, Damian’s a brilliant speaker, and today was the best talk I’ve seen that he’s given. Not too many public speakers I know can take pokes at everyone from Guido van Rossum to type theorists and get laughs from the people he’s paying out, weave in slides featuring S&M pictures and Web pages from What Would Satan Do, give good, practical advice to people managing any sort of project, and inspire the audience about Perl 6, all at the same time.
Along with Gus, I was lucky enough to have a good chat to Damian afterward about the interaction between the Perl and Haskell communities, the awesomeness of the amazing Audrey Tang, and thank him for taking Perl 6 in what I consider to be the right direction. One of the greatest things about these conferences, and Linux.conf.au in particular, is that you do get to rub shoulders with the best and brightest in the world.
(Warning to my non-geek friends: geek content in this paragraph!) The rest of the day turned out to be the most educational one so far: Conway’s keynote taught me many useful things about project management, and I learnt plenty from the other talks too. For revision control geeks who somehow missed svk on their radar: go check it out. All I have to say about it is that you can work in a distributed manner (e.g. offline) with any existing Subversion repository, in a very simple, darcs-like way. Very nice indeed. Van Jacobson’s talk about optimising the networking stack in the kernel actually drew a standing ovation from the crowd, and he proved that he’s still a networking God after 20 years: he had some incredible tables and graphs to show just how well he managed to optimise networking performance on Linux. (I was quite amused how their optimisations made 10Gb Ethernet peak out at 4.3Gb/sec because that was the peak limit of DDR333 RAM…) Interestingly enough, Shane and Jaq pointed out that the guys at the Gelato project at the University of New South Wales have been researching and advocating this approach for years, except that they did their research on that evil M thing that’s so hated in the Linux community (“microkernel”). Not to discredit Van Jacobson in the least, but it’d be nice to see the KEG, NICTA and Gelato guys get some due credit for their work too!
So, after yet another afternoon of more fun geekness, it was time for the LCA conference dinner. This year’s affair was pretty standard for an LCA dinner: that is to say, very good, with lots of drinking, plenty of socialising and chatting, and, of course, an auction. This year, they auctioned off the the John Lions book on the annotated source code for the AT&T Unix Version 6 kernel, autographed by some of the most renown UNIX hackers in history: Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Marshall Kirk McKusick, Eric Allman, Peter Salus, Linus Torvalds, Van Jacobson, and all the speakers and conference organisers for LCA 2006. I am proud to say that thanks to the great generosity of the students, lecturers and alumni at the University of New South Wales, UNSW won the bid for the book. As such, the Lions book will return to the shining halls of UNSW in its rightful resting place, where John Lions lectured and inspired so many students for so many years. Kudos to all those who contributed in the bid for this piece of history, and thanks to Benno and John for organising it!
That wrapped up the night quite nicely for me and set me in a hell of a good mood for the rest of the evening. Thankfully, I decided that I had quite enough drinking for the evening (you know, since I actually had to pay for my drinks that night), and that more than four hours of sleep before another full day on Saturday might be an idea…
Linux.conf.au, Day 4 (Thursday)
After the big night last night courtesy of Google, I woke up more-or-less on time this morning with no hangover, which was a bit of a small surprise considering I’ve never quite drunk that much before. (Whoo!) I didn’t quite early enough to make it to Jeff and Pia’s place for breakfast before heading off to the keynote, but I made up for that by grabbing a rather nice ham and cheese roll a bit later in the morning.
(Warning: geek content in this paragraph.) Dave Miller’s keynote was pretty good, and thankfully I understood a lot more in his talk today than his original TCP zero-copy talk at CALU in 1999 (gee, my technical knowledge has increased a bit in the past seven years — who would’ve thought?). The other talks that day didn’t set me off too much, with the exception of Rusty Russell’s talk on talloc. Here’s my take on talloc: if you absolutely have to use that portable assembly language named C, think of talloc as a gift from God. Memory management with talloc still isn’t completely painless, but it makes it nearly as nice to use as if you were coding in Objective-C with Cocoa, or in modern C++ (using references everywhere so you don’t have to new/delete everything). At any rate, it’s a hell of a lot better than using malloc/free. If you use C, use it: you will be much happier.
Since Rising Sun were kind enough to send me as a professional this year, that also meant I got to go to the professional delegates’ networking session (a.k.a. dinner). OK, if that was the professional delegates’ networking session that I attended, I’d love to see an unprofessional delegates’ networking session, because we had a riot of a time. The presence of the boisterous Aussies in combination with Australia Day led to quite an awesome night indeed: our dinner was held at the beautiful Larnach Castle in Dunedin, with yet more free beer and wine for the entire night. This, of course, led to plenty of singing and more singing on the bus back home, with even our beloved Linux Australia Vice President, Pia Waugh, quite energetically (and somewhat drunkenly) joining in our Australia Day celebrations.
So, chalk up another damn good day at Linux.conf.au — so far, it’s been four out of four (or five out of five if you count Sunday night, which I do). I’m a lucky man to be here!
Jamie Wilkinson
LCA photos retagged
I just read from Joshua that the LCA photo tag on flickr is lca2006, so now I've retagged all of mine with that one and boosted the count to 429 photos in the set :-)
The Lions' Commentary auction at LCA 2006
Congregation,
Please open your Lions' Book to Chapter Seven, page 7-1, verse 7, and we shall begin.
At the Lower Level, "processes" are inactive entities which are
acted on by active entities such as the processor.
On Sheet 15, line 1550 (Chapter 1, "Initialisation, Process Initialisation"), we
find the main() function of the kernel. It takes no arguments, and
returns nothing. It starts by zeroing and freeing all of core, and
printing a copyright :-)
The System 6 code uses an initial indent of 3 spaces, and then 8 spaces for every level of indent after that.
--
Tonight, a "cartel" of ex- and current UNSW students pooled together to win the auction of a copy of the Lions' Commentary on the System 6 Unix Source, famously distributed by John Lions from UNSW via photocopier before it was officially published in 1996.
The book in question was signed by the original Unix hackers Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, as well as Eric Allman of Sendmail fame, as well as Linus Torvalds, to name a few. (The speakers of the LCA 2006 conference also have signed the book). The auction was to raise funds to support the creation of the John Lions Chair -- a position for a professor of great talent to teach in perpetuity at UNSW.
Tonight, we raised and bid $10,000 to this cause. The book will appear on display at the University of NSW, in honour of Lions, who has inspired generations of students and academics in the elegance of simple design, open communication and sharing of knowledge; key elements of the community of open source.
We'd like to thank those members of the open source community who offered bonuses to the auction to boost the bid, and as such claim the following:
Jeff Waugh's hair.
The text 'The KDE Project uses and recommends the GNOME DESKTOP' in the KDE 4 about dialog.
Rusty Russell's mustache.
Dave Miller's facial hair in its entirety.
Greg 'groggy' Lehey's facial hair.
The text 'We may be fast, but for real data security, use PostgreSQL' in the MySQL 5.1 release notes.
A thankyou to John Lions in the Planet 1.0 release announcement.
oh there were probably more, but who can remember? :-)
(the LCA 2006 photoset has been updated)
(the LCA 2006 photoset has been updated)
Ben Leslie
Just over $1 per line...
of source code is what Gernot Heiser, John Ferlito, Conrad Parker, Jamie Wilkinson, myself, and a host of around 20 other other, mostly ex-UNSW students just paid for a copy of the revered Lions' Book.
That's right, between us, we kicked in $10,000 Australian dollars to buy a copy of the book which has been signed by both Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie of UNIX fame, along with Kirk McKusick who wrote the Design and implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System, Eric Allman author of sendmail, and Linus Torvalds creator of the Linux kernel. It also had the signatures of all the speakers from the 2006 linux.conf.au.
Of course with any LCA bidding process there were some other non material rewards on offer. With the $10,000 bid we also won a lot of hair, including Rusty's mustache, Jdub's hair, and Greg "Groggy" Lehey's beard! OMG! LOL!
Oh yeah... so why were people happy to offer such money and go to such lengths, on one side, it is the awesome respect people have to John Lions, who is a leading light in the idea of open source UNIX. And also I think the respect graduates have for UNSW's School of Computer Science and Engineering. The money from the auction will go towards creating a perpetual chair in John Lions' name. And even better, Linux Australia is contributing massively by matching the bid, raising the donation to $20,000 and USENIX is doubling this again to give a grand total of $40,000 towards the Opearting Systems chair at UNSW. This is pretty impressive! Hopefully by the time linux.conf.au rolls around next year, we will be able to announce that the chair is fully funded!
Oh, and a big thanks to John maddog Hall for organising the auction and the prizes.
pexif 0.1 release
Short version: I release some code. It edits EXIF data.
Long version: All I wanted to do was write some simple code to add a GPS location take to my photos. It should have been easy. A couple of hours of scripting at the most. But it wasn't.
Most JPEG images have some meta data at the front of them telling you stuff like, when it was taken, what camera took it, wether the flash was used, and so on, and so on. The latest version of the spec also has a bunch of fields for storing GPS information. Unfortunately my cheapo camera doesn't store that kind of information, so I want to add it in after the fact. I thought I could just grab an existing EXIF editing library and away I would go.
Unfortunately the two Python libraries out there pyexif and EXIF.py, only handle the parsing of EXIF data, not the updating of it. The also seemed to be a C library libexif that claimed to do editing, but it was basically undocumented, I couldn't work out how to use it, and besides I wanted to write in python not C. (And I didn't feel like writing a Python wrapper for a library I didn't uderstand.)
This led me to writing some of my own Python code to try and just do enough to insert the GPS tags and nothing else. Unfortunately the way EXIF works things aren't quite that easy. Inside the file format you end up with internal offset pointers, which means if you change the layout (by inserting some extra tags), you end up needing to change all these pointers to work with the new offsets.
I thought this wouldn't be too bad because I'd just append to the end of the section I was working with, (which was unfortuantely first), and then the other sections could move freely. Unfortuantely these pointers don't reference from the start of a section, they reference from the start of the file. This basically means that I need to parse everything into memory, and then know how to write it all back out again. Pain, pain, pain. (This was of course a bit of a simplication, so please don't email me saying that isn't exactly how EXIF is structured.)
Anyway, I now have a library, which can read all the EXIF data, including the thumbnail section, edit and insert values into it, and then spit out a valid file again. Now I can start writing the code to do the actual tagging, which should be more interesting than this stuff, but right now, time for the LCA dinner.
Jamie Wilkinson
You heard it here... second...
LCA 2004: Peter Chubb presents a paper on user level device drivers, an ongoing research project at NICTA discussing various advantages (with performance of the device, and stability of the OS the two key points) to user space device drivers (including the networking stack, as well as block device access and filesystems).
No kernel hackers attend. (Or perhaps more correctly, no influential kernel hackers attended as far as I remember, my memory has been weakened by many extracurricular activities at LCA over the years..)
LCA 2006: Van Jacobson presents a talk describing how to eliminate a network performance issue in the current networking stack, a design dating back to the days of MULTICS, by moving the networking stack out of the kernel and into userspace.
Jacobson receives a standing ovation.
Isn't that Alanic, don't you think?
I'm not bitter, I don't work for NICTA :) I know a lot of people who do, though -- I'm glad for them that the subject of their work is also being researched by others held in high regard, which means that their work is more likely to come to fruition and acceptance by the community.
So, it's all good in the end.
more LCA photos!
I've just uploaded another 78 photos from the last few days of the conference to my LCA 2006 photoset ... commentary coming real soon.
January 26, 2006
Simon Rumble
Guardian starts spamming
The last two days, I've received emails through two addresses registered over the years with The Guardian. These were addresses used to register for competitions, forums etc. I never gave permission to be spammed with "GuardianUnlimited Today". That's rather sad as they used to be The Good Guys.
Fortunately, the addresses they were spamming are (or were, as you'll see) Sneakemail addresses. Sneakemail allows you to createdisposable email addresses for just these kinds of things. When they start spamming you, you know the source and how conned you into supplying the email address. What's more, once it starts getting spammed you can delete it. Lovely!
James Dumay
For once a serious post *gasp*: On Love
I’ll be qick and honest. I live the party life - sex, drugs and Madonna. As a gay man, this is pretty much the social norm - you work all week and then the weekend comes and you go to a club and get fucked up (and hopefully get fucked).
Excuse me for being so vulgar.
Out of all of those close enounters of the queer kind, I have never met anyone worth my while, who I clicked with or who I could see myself with in a loving normal relationship.
Really, the gay scene doesn’t give you that. It’s fun, sexual and exciting but its hollow.
Last weekend I met a guy named Martin and we basically had made out before we really knew each other. This isn’t unusual. But we started talking and talking and talking. The more we talked the more I felt a connection.
Sex is not a connection, no matter what Cosmo has to say.
At one point in the conversation he stopped and said to me “I want you to be my boy…”. I was shocked and excited. I felt the same way deep within. I was sharing the same intense feelings of joy and awe rolled into a package deep within my heart with him. I replied “I want you to be my man.”
I was worried that night that the drugs had made us feel this way and this feeling would burn away like fog in the morning sun.
I awoke the next day and rushed to work hacking out a quick message “I still feel the same way”. Shortly, a message returned: “Me Too”.
We met again tonight - we didn’t have sex (For the first time for both of us, we are going to wait) - we hugged, laughed and cried. We bonded and marvelled to each other that somehow we had found each other in the din of the party, in the haze of the drugs and the desolate lanscape called the gay scene.
My name is James Dumay, I’m a geek, 18, gay and I’m falling in love.
Ian Wienand
Import a patch into subversion
I keep expecting there to be an easy way to do this, but I wanted
to replicate the BitKeeper bk import -tpatch behaviour
with subversion where you can give and diff and it will be imported
into the repository. Importantly this involves adding and removing
files as per the patch.
I thus wrote svnapply.py to do this. It actually turned out to be a little more in depth than I had hoped, as there are a few nuances with different diff outputs.
I even tested it by importing a 33mb kernel diff, comparing an
export of it to a tree patched using the usual patch, and
also re-creating the diff and applying it again, again comparing to
the normally patched version. It all came out the same.
Andre Pang
Linux.conf.au 2006, Day 3 (Wednesday)
Right, it’s definitely shaping up to be one of those kind of weeks. I finally managed to catch some sleep this morning by missing the morning tutorials: considering I had a huge three and a half hours of sleep last night, about 6 hours the night before, and no sleep on the night before I flew off to New Zealand, I think it was about time to let my poor body recover for a while. I normally feel rather seedy and tired (in that unproductive-tired way) when I wake up at midday, but it was all good today.
So, I got my lazy ass over to the conference (O, the hardship of 5 minutes’ walk through beautiful university grounds) and actually managed to see all the talks that day, huzzah. Andrew Tridgell’s talk on Samba 4 absolutely rocked as you’d expect, even if you, like me, weren’t interested in Samba 4 at all. Being able to write Javascript to script server-related Windows RPC calls is crazy enough, but remotely editing a Windows’s machine’s registry via an AJAX-style interface in your Web browser was something else. Oh yes, and my little tip about inverting your screen to make it more readable also really saves your battery life: I was easily getting over 3 hours of battery out of my 3-year-old Powerbook. The temperature today’s a bit more like what the forecasts predicted, too: much cooler, being around 14℃ in the morning and night, and around 22℃ in the afternoon. I’m glad I brought along some long-sleeve tops!
Of course, it was after the conference proper when the fun started. Google were holding a round of drinks for conference delegates at night at the Bennu bar in Dunedin, so of course a lot of people came along to try to completely empty out the bar. It was meant to go from 9-10 only (so hurry up and get completely plastered in an hour) but it turns out that offering only beer for free makes a tab go a long way, so we were all still drinking courtesy of Google well past midnight. I managed to get several rounds of free vodka shots off the Google folks too, so overall, I didn’t do too badly considering I’m a Cadbury’s boy: four beers and three vodka shots left me in quite the happy mood when we left there some time after midnight. It was, again, damn good to catch up and socialise with everyone, and even more so when free beer’s offered! It’s a good week to be in Dunedin indeed :).
Linux.conf.au 2006, Day 2 (Tuesday)
One interesting rule of thumb that Damian Conway mentioned in his presentation skills session is that, on average, it takes 8 hours of preparation per one hour of talking. I initially raised by eyebrows at this figure, but it turns out that Damian’s likely right (as usual): I ended staying up until around 4:30am to finish off our slides, and got up rather excruciatingly at 8am to grab breakfast at Jeff and Pia’s again. For those interested: Weet-bix + three pancakes (although I made a token attempt to be too polite to have their lovely pancakes, since I’d already had the weet-bix…). Ah yes, and the excellent Otago Daily Times’s front page story today was about how all the poor Dunedin citizens were all pasty-white thanks to a lack of sun this summer at the beach. I read this as a very nice excuse to slap pictures of three hot chicks in two-pieces on the front page of the paper.
I actually decided to skip the morning talks that day to work on the slides, so I ended up holing myself up in the (lovely) apartment until around 12. Yes, I think Damian’s 8 hours of preparation was correct indeed: Anthony and I probably spent around 10 hours of prep in total, though I’m fairly type A when it comes to making sure all the details are nailed down right.
I ended up having an energy bar and a Coke for lunch (sorry about that mum!) and managed to catch the end of Conrad’s talk on CMMLWiki when I got back, as well as watch parts of Keith Packard’s hilarious talk on Linux-powered rockets (complete with pictures of rockets hitting the earth at 800KM/h, and stories of their failed recovery of a CompactFlash card inside said rocket…).
I’m glad to report that I think our talk went pretty well: we had around 30 people attending, and Anthony and I got to chat afterwards with some people who were pretty interested in the stuff we were doing. Hopefully we’ll be able to get a videotape of it some time in the future, and I can place it here as a contribution to embarrassing myself more.
Since the talk was over, we decided that having some dinner was in order soon. No-one had any plans, so I made an executive decision to meet up at the Terrace at 7 o’clock, and the 4 or 5 folks who decided to go there grew to 8, then 10, then about 18. Hooray for lots of company! I had a most excellent mixed grill on hot rocks and more Speights beer for dinner, and enjoyed the merry company of all the other geeks until around midnight. Catching up with everyone here is truly great; since I’ve moved over to using a Mac as my main platform, I’m not so involved with the Linux community these days, and I forget from time to time how awesome everyone is (both from a social standpoint, and just how damn good these people are at what they do).
P.S. Linus is here, for those fanboys who are interested. The more amusing thing is that he’s really sunburnt. For the serious geeks, Van Jacobson (yep, that Van Jacobson) is also giving a talk. You can bet I’ll be attending that one.
James Purser
Photos From My LCA Talk
Strange as it may seem there are actual photos from the talk I gave to the Digital Arts miniconf. Thanks to Jamie WilkinsonWell here they are:
Just before the talk
Silvia Pfeiffer - my arms during the talk
Just after the talk
If I haven't said it before, thanks to everyone who helped out with getting the talk happening, and I look forward to LCA 2007 when I can uhmiliate myself in person :)
Jamie Wilkinson
LCA 2006 Day 0
(1345 NZDT)
Erik, Andrew, Matt, Shane, Andre, and myself got off the NZ182 at Christchurch, and met up with Silvia, Jean-Marc who had missed their connecting flight beacuse they didn't get through customs in time, so we found the airport bar and began sampling the local brew.
Andrew Cowie lent me his 28-105mm lens with stabliser, and I took the opportunity to document the pores on Matt's face:
Later the others got on their flight, but Andrew and I stuck around chatting about policy and procedures, QA, and systems automation in the Air NZ business lounge. There was an opportunity to make art right outside the window:
It's black and white, so there's no way I can lose this photoblog competition!
Turns out Andrew knows Luke Kanies, puppet developer, so we had another chat about systems automation and scalability on the plane.
We scored a lift from the organisers from the airport after landing, got a quick tour around Dunedin, and found our rooms. Then it was off to the local, Eureka, to meet up and taste beer.
Met with Tim from Weta, whom can talk for hours on NAS kit, so if you want to know the virtues of Panasas over NetApps, despite their poor reliability, you should talk to him! :-) Their problems involve massive storage and speed and scalability of those systems, like two orders of magnitude greater than any webhosting storage I'd ever encounter. The financial side is an entirely different world, too: if a solution looks like it didn't involve enough planning, it's because the cost of planning anything can quickly get into the millions of dollars, so what may seem like an expensive quick fix may actually work out cheaper in the VFX industry. That's just mindblowing.
Then we lost to Sri Lanka in the one dayer, to the enjoyment of the kiwis in the pub, so it was time to go home :)
Finally, here's a picture of the pre-dawn from my room in Unicol, at which point my clock reckoned it was still 4:30am (Sydney time, of course).
January 25, 2006
Jamie Wilkinson
f-spot and flickr
The announcement at the LCA welcome yesterday morning motivated me enough to a) get the photos off of my camera, b) hack f-spot again so it works with flickr, and c) blog about it.
So after trying for several hours to get stock f-spot and libgphoto in debian unstable to realise there was a camera plugged in the USB, Silvia offered a USB CF reader, which Just Worked, albeit was very slow :)
Then I had the joy of discovering that CVS f-spot no longer compiles with Mono in Debian unstable, but hacking the configure to accept the version I have installed, and commenting out the one line in some random export module that I won't use that required the newer libraries, it compiled fine.
Turns out the new flickr auth
patch still hasn't been
incorporated upstream.
*hack*hack*hack*. Ok, so now it's
uploading to flickr! Yay!
The f-spot tags are broken when uploading though, so I dig around and just add doublequotes to each tag, so that "linux.conf.au 2006" isn't broken up into two tags. Brilliant.
One more hack to make the photo title the first 30 characters of the comment, instead of some random filename, and it looks good.
Link to photoset in the next post, but right now it's lunchtime!
Ben Leslie
Linux.conf.au 2006 Wednesday
In the morning I attended the writing a gcc front-end tutorial. This was really interesting to find out about the internals of GCC, and also got into some of the new features gcc will have in the future. While being intersting, I think if I was writing a new language right now, I would still do the classic approach of outputing C (or maybe C++) and then passing that to the normal compiler.
Jimi Xenidis gave a cool talk about the new Cell processor and (failed) attempts to optimise the zeroing of pages. The basic idea of this work is to zero out pages in the background and keeping a set of zeroed pages ready, rather than zeroing on demand.
Unfortunately, it is really quick to zero a page, because of the
dcbz instruction, which invalidates cache-lines without
having to touch memory. This instruction has a 1 cycle latency so for
4kb pages, they can be zeroed in 32 cycles. Unfortunately the
instructions to get the DMA engine to zero pages is almost 400
cycles. It was actually pretty encouraging that the overhead was only
around 1%, which is really just in the noise.
The really interesting thing would be if they used bigger
pages. For example, if you were using 4MB pages, instead of 4kb pages
the dcbz aprroach would be slower, and would actually
suck more because it would probably require writeback. Hopefully once
the Gelato guys will get
their super page stuff into the kernel soon.
The afternoon had the excitement of the Linux australia AGM, where it was announced that linux.conf.au 2007 would be held in Sydney. This was followed up by a dinner meeting between the LA and linux.conf.au committees at Table 7.
Dinner drinks were hosted by the Google hiring squad, who basically put a big tab on a bar in the city for us, which basically meant free beer for the whole conference.
Matthew Palmer
LCA 2006: The Hackfest
There's a fairly standard set of activities that go on at linux.conf.au each year -- keynotes, tutorials, seminars, miniconfs, BOFs, lightning talks, keysigning, etc. The hackfest is a standard part of the program, but one which (in the past) maybe hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. I think this is because, in 2004 and 2005, the hackfest was a fairly narrow task -- in Adelaide (2004) contestants had to write a tetrinet client (fairly complex), and in Canberra (2005) contestants had to write either a GUI or an AI for spellcast (a fairly esoteric game that nearly nobody has ever heard of).
Prior to this year, I'd never participated in a hackfest. I've never played tetrinet in my life, and I knew I had no hope of writing an AI for spellcast. Also, since the contest in both cases ran for most of the week, to be competitive I figured you had to spend all of your spare time working on your program, and there was beer to be drunk, so I decided it was a bad use of my time.
This year, though -- phwoar. A totally different problem set, a new way of running the hackfest. Far more approachable for a much broader collection of hackers, and since it was a 4-hour session, you knew how much time you had to invest up-front.
I really appreciated that there was something for pretty much every type of competent programmer. One task, for instance, was to build a config GUI for the ccontrol tool, another was to write a Sudoku puzzle generator. These aren't simple problems, but I'd say that most people I'd call a programmer could make a good showing at one (or both) of these problems.
At the same time, though, there were some really low-level problems (like optimising a C program or turning some PPC64 assembly code back into the original C function). These were interesting for me, as it's not something that I'd ever touch myself in the normal world, so it was nice to be able to submerge into something like this for a little while.
There were even a couple of problems that didn't require much programming skill -- fix a corrupted gzip archive, and fix a corrupted filesystem image. These are difficult problems, but don't (necessarily) require the production of reams of code to solve.
To be able to win the competition, though, you need to have a broad range of skills. This is entirely appropriate (although it rules me out of the running) as a true hacker is adaptable to new problems. With the previous competitions, if you happened to luck out and be a tetrinet or spellcast guru, you had the competition in the bag. This competition will slightly favour someone who is a PPC assembly expert over someone who doesn't know much about anything, for example, but your PPC guru (who can't do much else) is going to get 0wz0red by the problem-solving, google-loving generalist.
The time limit aspect was a very, very good move as well. It meant that I could accurately estimate, up front, my total time commitment to the game. I didn't have to worry about getting flogged by someone who dedicated themselves day and night to cracking the problems while I was out stonegrilling my dinner and emptying barmates. Now I only have to worry about getting flogged by people who are just Better Hackers -- which I have no problem with. It was also great to be able to switch on the iRiver and bury myself in the problem for a few hours, instead of putting it off all week and then bodging up a poor solution in the last few hours.
So, kudos to Chris and the rest of the team who ran this year's hackfest. I really enjoyed this year's competition, and I hope that next year will be equally interesting.
Ben Leslie
Embedded miniconf talk
For a hastily prepared talk this went pretty well. I demoed the PLEB -- showing off hardware is always good for getting the interested level up. Of course I managed to screw up the demo, by failing to actually trn the external power supply on! There were enough questions to think that people were actually listening to the talk, which is always encouraging.
I have the slides available if anyone is interested.
Matthew Palmer
LCA 2006: Luxurious Student Accomodation
For anyone who's ever stayed in University dormitories, the words "luxurious" (or even "comfortable") and "dormitory" might seem to be polar opposites. They're typically tiny, old, and worn out, with strange smells and uncomfortable furnishings.
But mine eyes have seen the glory of the UniCol. My room, whilst not quite "suite" level, is certainly large enough to orbit a reference feline if you're a little careful, and everything is so damn new. The shower stalls are nice and big, so you don't have to be a contortionist to wield a towel, and everything is so new. Did I mention that everything is new? It's such an unfamiliar concept for a dorm. Apparently the older part of the building is a bit less shiny, but I don't have to venture there, so what do I care?
One part of the accomodation that is a "little slice of normality" is the dining hall. The chef is definitely a subscriber to "function over form" -- everything's edible, but it doesn't always necessarily look that way. But I've never let a little thing like inedibility slow me down, so I've been getting a giant sausage-bacon-egg-hashbrown breakfast every morning. Yum.
A common topic of conversation around the dorms is "how the hell do they ever get anyone to leave?". It's hard enough to get Uni students to leave for the real world at the best of times -- you'd need a crowbar to extract your average student from this place.
Ben Leslie
Linux.conf.au 2006 Tuesday
On Tuesday I attended the miniconf, which was pretty fun. Mark Philips provided a great inspiration talk about why working in the embedded is the cool place to be. Most of the talk focussed on robotics, and had great examples of current robotics stuff.
Paul Campbell from Digeo presented on set-top boxes using Linux. The main interesting thing from this talk was the use of a secure boot loader to get into Linux so people can't ripoff any content stored on the set-top box.
Ian Walters from Trolltech gave an update on Qtopia. This stuff looked kind of interesting, they have basically come up with their own programming environment which totally abstracts away POSIX which is underneath. This would be an interesting system to run directly on top of Iguana.
Yutaka Niibe gave a really cool talk on using a USB hub to control AC devices. In Japan they have a much higher respect than we do here, (they signed the Kyoto protocol after all), and care about things like turning off peripheral devices when they are not in use, so they have USB controlled power cables.
There was a bunch of cool hardware shown off, but probably the most interesting one is the gumstix hardware. It would definately nice to get some of these with L4 running on it.
This year the embedded miniconf was more a microconf and only ran for the one morning. So in the afternoon I went along to the GNOME miniconf, it was really cool to see CryoPID which does process checkpointing in Linux.
Dinner was at the Terrace where they serve beer in 3 litre glass tubes, which have there own taps. Pretty damn cool! The meat is served raw on hot rocks which is a pretty cool idea, but I'm not too sure if serving people 3 litres of beer and then giving them boiling rocks is the best idea!
James Purser
Another Catchup
I've been trying to find the time to blog for the last couple of days but haven't been very successful. So here's another catchup on events.As you know if you've been reading this blog I did a presentation at the Digital Arts miniconf on Podcasting On A Budget. For those who want to listent to me fail completely at talking to a monitor (I have found I really need an audience to bounce off) you can find the ogg file of the talk here: Ogg File. If you want to play along with the slides that were used they're here.
Right now that is out of the way, in other news, I have been elected as an Ordinary Member on the Linux Australia Committee for 2006. So not only will I be continuing with the podcasts and other projects I'll be doing my best to make sure LA rocks on through out the year!
Matthew Palmer
LCA 2006: Samba 4 -- Oh My!
It's always worth catching a talk from Andrew Tridgell. He's very funny, informative, and always makes his topic accessable to the entire audience.
This year's Tridge Talk was on Samba 4, which has just released it's first technology preview. As always, the room was packed -- I really feel for any speaker who's in a parallel session against Tridge, because he's always such a big drawcard, no matter what the topic.
The technology in Samba 4 is quite impressive. They've built their own LDAP server, since OpenLDAP is quite strict in it's standards compliance, and that's the last thing you want when you're trying to interoperate with Microsoft. They needed a Kerberos server as well, but in this case Heimdal Kerberos is suitable and nicely integrated. There's also some very strange stuff inside -- for example, there's an embedded JavaScript engine inside, to drive the all-new, hypercool, AJAX-enabled SWAT. Yes, you read that right, parts of Samba 4 are powered by JavaScript.
But of course, a talk is always so much more impressive with a demo. The chosen feature was the entertainingly named "Vampire tap" functionality -- "now with longer fangs". You take a Win2k3 domain controller, a Windows XP workstation joined to that domain, and a Samba 4 server. Point the Samba server's fangs at the Win2k3 box, wait a few seconds, shut down the Win2k3 server, change a couple of settings in Samba, restart the Samba service, and then log in again on the Windows XP machine.
It all Just Worked.
I avoid supporting Windows machines wherever possible, but when such an eventuality is unavoidable, it looks like Samba 4 will make the process significantly less painful.
LCA 2006 -- The Early Years
So, I've arrived at LCA (linux.conf.au) 2006, in Dunedin, New Zealand. You're going to be getting a lot of these blog posts over the next few days, from me and other people, but it's only a week-long conference, so weather the storm.
Plane trip over was... well, it was a plane trip. I can be thankful that I didn't lose my luggage (as one bloke has already had done to him). Beyond that, all aircraft interiors are identical, so no need to discuss that.
At the stopover in Christchurch, we all headed for the bar (as geeks tend to do). I handed over a brightly coloured note in the local currency in exchange for my beer, and I get my change. What is part of my change? An Australian 10c piece. <sigh>
Mad props to the conference organisers so far -- one of the organisers was at the gate (the only gate) at Dunedin airport to pick up speakers, but he gladly took us ruffian attendees into town, saving us all a few bucks in shuttle bus fairs. It was a nice guided tour in, as well, showing us all of the useful sights (like the pubs, 24 hour minimart, and eateries). He also dropped us off at the registration desk, so I got my conference schwag already (see my separate review of the schwag).
Dinner involved walking into the octagon (a loop street with, unsurprisingly, 8 sides) and finding a place that serves you raw steak and a hot rock. It's like a portable BBQ construction kit. Amazingly tasty. We're going back tomorrow night for more of the same, as it's so tasty and fun -- you are legitimately allowed, even encouraged to play with your food. I also got a "barmate" (don't mispronounce that in front of your significant other) -- a yard-high glass cylinder with a tap at the bottom, filled with your choice of beer. Much merriment ensued amongst the assembled geeks, as we all plied ourselves with Speight's Gold Ale. I think it's about 8-10 pints worth of beer all up. Value.
No Internet access yet, as they're still working out the kinks with the special conference network. I hope it's all up and running by tomorrow morning -- my mail queue is starting to seriously bulge with all of this outgoing mail.
LCA 2006 -- Schwag Review
It's a conference tradition that you get a pile of schwag at registration -- some sort of collection of toys, brochures, and other miscellania to remember the conference by. Or something.
LCA is typically characterised by a pretty good schwag haul -- I can't think of an LCA I've been to (all 2 of them up 'til now) where I've been disappointed with the schwag.
This year is no exception. The organisers have clearly gone to a lot of effort to dredge up all sorts of geek-friendly gear to dish out. For example, the conference bag -- it's a laptop-friendly backpack-type apparatus. Lots of pockets, shoulder strap, the whole kaboodle. Very tidy. It's a pity I've already got my Targus carry-everything-including-the-kitchen-sink model, because this bag would make a very nice alternative to that.
The stuff inside the bag is just as impressive. There's another retractable network cable, like last year (a bit of a pity, perhaps, but this one is Cat-6 rated, for extra... something), as well as a tiny little 1-AAA torch. There's the usual pad/pen, tourist detritus, and conference program. More interestingly, there's a very shiny yo-yo (puppy dogs, beware!) and (possibly most importantly) a keyring-mountable bottle opener. There's also what is possibly the world's smallest frisbee (less than two inches in diameter -- as one of the organisers said, "Throw it at a speaker you don't like, because it sure as hell doesn't fly"), a laser-cut placemat (tres cool), and a chunk of chocolate (because we're about 5 minutes walk from the local cadbury's factory).
Finally, there is the T-shirt. Loved ones will be pleased to hear that the T-shirt this year is basic black, meaning that you won't have to worry about being seen in public with a red-clad Matt. (For those of you watching at home, my wife isn't keen on red coloured clothing for some reason, so last year's conference T-shirt was not a big hit).
The speakers are going to have to work hard to top the schwag pile. I await their response with baited breath.
Jamie Wilkinson
seven
w00t! LCA 2007, back in Sydney! It's going to be huge!
(mad props to the rest of the seven team: benno, jdub, pia, matt, lindsay, sara)
Andre Pang
Linux.conf.au, Day 1 (Monday)
I’ve had not a bad start to the day at all. Anthony and I went to Jeff and Pia’s apartment — a whole 30 steps away from our apartment, them being directly below us in the building — for an excellent bacon and eggs breakfast this morning. The Otago Daily Times newspaper is also an excellent contributor to a good start for the day, where the front page features stories such as Mexico’s guns for computers program. I look forward to what’ll be on the front page of that paper tomorrow.
So, after breakfast, I trundled along to a three-hour talk by Doctor Damian Conway about presentation skills, which I’m happy to say was very worthwhile. Damian’s one of the best presenters I know of in the Linux community (rivalling Andrew Tridgell), and an opportunity to take some presentation skills from somebody who’s damn good at it wasn’t one I was going to pass up. I ended up taking away 3 pages of notes from it; let’s see how many of those points I can apply to our talk tomorrow!
The rest of the afternoon was spent at the Digital Arts miniconf, which had some very cool sessions, though I was pretty familiar with both Annodex and Flumotion since I was one of the Annodex developers at my previous job, and was part of the team maintaining Flumotion servers at Linux.conf.au last year. The weather’s been ranging between quite cool in the morning (~15℃) to reasonably hot in the afternoon, being around 28℃ right now (although I think today’s hotness is an anomaly) — I’m hoping that tomorrow’s a bit cooler!
The Digital Arts miniconf organisers also were holding a jam that night at the Arc Café (whose name will no doubt amuse those of you who are involved with any Ogg/Vorbis/Theora discussions on the xiph.org mailing lists), so Anthony and I rocked along to that. Lo and behold, a lot of people turned up that I knew — Conrad, Silvia, Erik, Horms, Shane, Hal, Gus, John, Jaq, with about 40 people in total. I got to meet and socialise with a lot of new folks, too, and had three or four beers of Tui’s (not to be confused with Tooheys, which is much, much worse). There was some rocking psytrance-style electronica being played on the big PA system there, which set the mood quite well for the night. It makes me wish I’d finished the DJ mix I’ve been working on for the past week or two, so I’d have a chance to play it on the big speakers there too. Ahh well, now’s the time to set a goal to have a mix of mine played at next year’s LCA digital arts mash-up!
Anthony and I ended up heading back a little early at around 11:30pm to work on our talk (mind you, 11:30 over here is only 9:30 Sydney time). Conrad and Silvia (who were organising the Digital Arts miniconf) confirmed with us pretty much today we’d be giving a talk at the Digital Arts conference tomorrow on the use of Linux at Rising Sun Pictures, so we thought we’d actually try to make it half-decent and actually prepare for it :).
Oh yeah, and New Zealand TV seems to be filled with bizarre saucy phone sex advertisements at night… like, all the time. As in, they’ll be the entire regiment of advertising on the night. Coupled with the New Zealand accent (“cæll now!”), it was just plain weird.
So I’m predicting a bit of a late night tonight to prep for the talk tomorrow: we don’t want to have a bored audience, after all…
Jeff Waugh
Seven
The Seven team is…
- Lindsay Holmwood
- Sara Kaan
- Ben Leslie
- Matthew Moor
- Jeff Waugh
- Pia Waugh
- Jamie Wilkinson
Ben Leslie
linux.conf.au in Sydney 2007
linux.conf.au will be held at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia in January 2007.
I'm on the organising committee and looking forward to creating an awesome conference next year.
Lindsay Holmwood
LCA07
And the winner is…. SYDNEY!
The core organising committee is:
- Jeff Waugh
- Pia Waugh
- Matt Moor
- Jamie Wilkinson
- Ben Leslie
- Sara Kaan
- Lindsay Holmwood
Just announced at LCA06’s Linux Australia AGM.
January 24, 2006
TongMaster
Licence to Kill
Kill myself, that is. I got my motorbike L's last Friday.
:))))
Housewarming / TripleJ Hottest 100 party tomorrow, phone me if you want to come.
Tony Green
Solaris Jumpstart Clients using ISC DHCPD
Took me a while to figure out why I couldn't get Solaris Jumpstart clients working off a Solaris based ISC DHCP install. Finally figured it out and here's the dhcpd.conf that I used :
# option definitions common to all supported networks...
ddns-update-style ad-hoc;
option domain-name "$DOMAIN";
option domain-name-servers $DNSIP;
option subnet-mask 255.255.0.0;
default-lease-time 600;
max-lease-time 7200;
# Jumpstart Support
option space SUNW;
option SUNW.root-mount-options code 1 = text;
option SUNW.root-server-ip-address code 2 = ip-address;
option SUNW.root-server-hostname code 3 = text;
option SUNW.root-path-name code 4 = text;
option SUNW.swap-server-ip-address code 5 = ip-address;
option SUNW.swap-file-path code 6 = text;
option SUNW.boot-file-path code 7 = text;
option SUNW.posix-timezone-string code 8 = text;
option SUNW.boot-read-size code 9 = unsigned integer 16;
option SUNW.install-server-ip-address code 10 = ip-address;
option SUNW.install-server-hostname code 11 = text;
option SUNW.install-path code 12 = text;
option SUNW.sysid-config-file-server code 13 = text;
option SUNW.JumpStart-server code 14 = text;
option SUNW.terminal-name code 15 = text;
subnet 10.218.0.0 netmask 255.255.0.0 {
range 10.218.80.56 10.218.80.56;
option broadcast-address 10.218.255.255;
option routers 10.218.100.250;
}
host jumpstart-client1 {
hardware ethernet 0:3:ba:4c:ff:7e;
fixed-address $CLIENT-IP;
option host-name "jumpstart-client1";
vendor-option-space SUNW;
option SUNW.sysid-config-file-server "$JUMPSTART-SERVER-NAME:$SYSIDCFGDIR";
option SUNW.JumpStart-server "$JUMPSTART-SERVER-NAME:$JUMPSTARTDIR";
option SUNW.install-server-hostname "$INSTALL-SERVER-NAME";
option SUNW.install-server-ip-address $INSTALL-SERVER-IP;
option SUNW.install-path "$INSTALL-PATH";
option SUNW.root-server-hostname "$INSTALL-SERVER";
option SUNW.root-server-ip-address $INSTALL-SERVER-IP;
option SUNW.root-path-name "$ROOT-PATH";
next-server $TFTP-SERVER-IP;
}
Obviously, you'll need to edit all of the variables to match your own requirements (Anything starting with a $ will need to change).
It's the 'next-server' that's really the key that's missing from a lot of the other howto's which I found.
Hope it helps someone.
Bruce Badger
Village Earth
nz = au?
This year the annual linux.conf.au conference is being held in Dunedin, New Zealand.
uk = fr??
London to host start of 2007 Tour de France.
It's good to see the old barriers being broken down :-)