Debian miniconf in Cambridge

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 19:08:00 +0000

I spent a few days in Cambridge for a minidebconf. This is a tiny version of the full annual Debconf. We had a couple of days for hacking, and another two days for talks.

I spent my hacking time on thinking about vmdebootstrap (my tool for generating disk images with an installed Debian), and came to the conclusion I need to atone my sins for writing such crappy code by rewriting it from scratch to be nicer to use. I gave a talk about this, too. The

I haven't started the rewrite, and it's not going to make it for stretch.

I also gave two other talks, on the early days of Linux, and

Wednesday: Mako Hill's keynote was very inspiring. Concepts of autonomy and anti-features are good. Matthew Garrett's "Making yourself popular" talk was good, though perhpas a bit shallow. JobsBOF was a washout for me, nothing interesting there. Roger Fenwick's "World's worst inventions" was funny.

(The above photo is rather bad. Sorry. I did not feel like carrying around with a real camera so I made do with the phone's.)

Thursday: Glyn Moody's keynote quite exceptionally good. He's one of my favorite two IT journalists. (The other one, Jon Corbet, was also at LCA, though I missed his talk and failed to talk to him.) Skipped the rest of the conference day, as Soile and I went and opened bank accounts and shopped for a car.

Friday: Lighting talks were ok, it's a good concept. Photo management BOF not too exciting, but interesting to hear that most people think tagging is too much work to be practical. I might want to make Dimbola be really good at that. Martin Krafft was late for the DebianBOF so I chaired/secretaried it. Lots of discussions, I almost felt it was my crowd still.

Penguin dinner in the evening was a disappointment from my point of view. Too many people, too much noise, I did not hear much and was slightly miserable. I should learn some day that I do not thrive in noisy crowds. I did, however, draw a penguin on my phone while there.

Saturday: LCA Open Day, talked to a bunch of people from companies, handed out my business card. A company called Lucid is doing a backup program called LBackup, free software, I might want to collaborate with them, given my continued interest in Obnam.

Also, saw a

. An overview of the dilemma a distributor of free software stuff faces: copyright and license info has no markup language, and indeed is often out of date, which causes some legal risk. Fossbazaar.org and others are trying to come up with a format that everyone can use and that hopefully most people from upstreams to Linux distros to others will adopt. DEP5 was mentioned.
Lana Brindley: Creating Beautiful Documentation. The time slot had been shortened, but good stuff anyway. While I haven't personally done much documentation writing since leaving the Linux Documentation Project in 1997, apart from a manual page every now and then, I agree with Brindley that good documentation is an important factor in a successful project. Tech writers and graphical artists are sorely needed, as is shaping projects so that coders are no longer kings.
Scott James Remnant: Cutting down boot times. Missed this talk, but that's OK, Scott seems to have missed it, too, due to travel.

The conference venue works well, except for occasional wireless problems.

Attempted to see how long my X200s battery actually lasts, and I managed to get through the day without charging. When I left the hotel, the battery was fully charged, and when I came back, there was an estimated 15 minutes left. However, I didn't use the laptop all the time, and I can't figure out from the GNOME Power Manager how much battery time I've actually used up today. The history dialog is entirely incomprehensible to me.

One thing that happens in conferences, including this LCA, is that people realize they've forgotten a cable or a charger or something, and someone else lends it to them. There's a bit of a shuffle for the lender and borrower to meet. I wonder if it would be too big a hassle for the organizers to set up a "post office": the lender would bring the cable, or whatever, put it in a bag, put their own name and the borrower's name on the bag, and then give it to the reception people to keep. The borrower could then fetch if from the reception whenever is suitable. Maybe this would be too much work and responsibility for the organizers, who are overworked as it is.

The weather is pretty nice. Some rain occasionally, but lots of sunshine, too. Pretty warm. People are very friendly.

tag/conference

Debian miniconf in Cambridge