lca2013 – Day 2 – Session 3

Getting your talk accepted: write a convincing talk proposal – Jacinta Richardson

Background

  • On a lot of papers committees
  • LCA, SAGE-AU, OSDC

Pick Conference you want to speak at

  • Some easier to get into than others
  • SAGE-AU 50%
  • OSDC 50%
  • YAPC easy
  • OS Bridge – harder
  • OSCON – 30-50% chance
  • everywhere else – medium
  • LCA – really hard. 5x the proposals received than accepted

Speaker rewards

  • Free entry

Call for Proposals

  • Not always widely distributed
  • Join mailing lists, watch websites, ask

Write Abstract

  • The hard bit
  • Some confs narrow or wide on talk topics
  • Audience 1 – The programme Comittee
    • Doesn’t know if you are a good speaker
    • Look for link to video of you speaking
    • If no video then assume if writing bad/good then speaking similar
    • Check spelling and writing style
    • Tell a story but not too long
    • Not academia , avoid insane amounts of jargon
    • Paragraphs good. Might only read the first
    • “read first sentence of each paragraph”
  • Audience 2 – The attendees
    • Why your talk?
    • Against other options
    • Good title
    • Skip over – “X for fun and profit” , “making X sexy” , “What I did on my X holidays”
    • 5 or fewer words for title
    • Convincing first paragraph or even the first sentence

Ask for help

  • From usergroups
  • Or people you have met at LCA
  • people on the papers comittee

Enabling Compute Clusters atop OpenStack – Enis Afgan

cloudman – usecloudman.org

  • People want a ready to use service, something they can just sit down and start using
  • Bridge between Saas and IaaS
  • Allows somebody to create a pre-configured compute cluster

Deploy

  • Start with Cloud account
  • Start master instance
  • Use Cloudman web interface
  • Multiple types of clusters availabile

Galaxy Cluster

  • Used for Genomic Science
  • Web based platform

Value Added features

  • Customise your instance, add tools, add image, snapshot images, share images
  • Auto scaling
  • Flexible architecture ( openstack, Amazon , etc)

Open Programming Lightning Talks

Adam Harvey

  • Not all are sites are facebook
  • Big frameworks are overkill for some people
  • Microframework – “Under 1000 lines of code”
  • Silex
    • autoloads in lots of extra code
    • 33,086 lines of php code being pulled in
    • Not very micro 🙁
  • Slim
    • Autoload – 6000 lines
  • Flight
    • Autoload – 800 lines of code
  •  Maybe just use raw PHP instead of a framework

Paul L – The Poor Man’s SANbox

  • Allow people to enter python code into program
  • Way to stop them doing bad stuff was over my head

Dave Boucher – Yak Shaving

  • Transactional memory – red/black tree insertion
  • Graphically show how RB tree inserts something
  • Use SVG library in python
  • SVG has animations
  • Pretty!

Tom Sutton – Safe Strings in Haskell APIs

  • Turn on OverloadedStrings
  • Create customer datatype
  • Can put special string types that don’t do things like concatenation if you don’t want (eg for a special type with SQL commands)
  • andhetalkedsofastatheendIcouldn’tundertsandhissolution

Roger Barnes – poker, packets, pipes, and python

  • Wanted a poker buddy
  • packet caputure between andriod app and server while playing online poker
  • ngrep
  • Hack your router to get Linux on it
  • Grab stream of info – all plaintext!
  • ipython notebook
  • parsing game, map card values
  • Need live capture data
  • Solution: ssh + ngrep + pipes
  • watch out for buffering
  • grab poker value and hints into lookups tables

Benner Leslie

  • Python and Haskell
  • Embed Haskell code into python
  • Wanted to keep writing python most of the time and only use Haskell where it was needed
  • Combine using foreign C-types

Nico – LatProc and Clockwork

  • Libary for tools process control
  • Controls machine that gets wool samples from bails of wool
  • latproc on github

Duncan Rowe – Some commands I’ve developed over the years

  • pd – keeps recent dirs in stack , allows you to skip to them
  • sfl – searchs for strings in multiple paths
  • bak – backup a file, just renames to filename.bak , various other options

Russell Stuart – PAMPython

  • PAM in python
  • PAM modules normally require C
  • Can do various PAM functions in python
  • Good for one-shot commands
  • Sneaks in under all the programs that depend on PAM

Peter Chubb – When Arduino is not enough

  • Stellaris launchpad just $12
  • RaspberryPi $35
  • Odriod U: quad core 2G RAM, 3W – PC like performance $69

 

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