Linux.conf.au 2014 – Day 2 – Session 2 – Open Programming Miniconf

Coming home: a return to PHP’s roots by Adam Harvey

  • I arrived late for this but he looked like he was having fun
  • He wrote a PHP micro-framework live in the talk
  • Cute

Get your PaaS into gear by Katie Miller

  • An introduction to OpenShift
  • Platform As A Service, include web servers, databases, storage.
  • Iaas -> Paas -> Saas
  • Why?
    • Focus on code, not config
    • Speed of deployment
    • Convenience
    • Scalability
    • effeciency
  • Flavours
    • Origin – Source can be downloaded
    • online – Hosted in Amazon
    • Enterprise – Run you own supported
  • Runs on RHEL
    • Runs in containers
    • Cartridges (programming environment) within the container
  • Tissues!

The Cobblers Children Have No Shoes: Development Tools and the Unix Philosophy by Russell Keith-Magee

  • Django Guy
  • Over last 30 years – My tools have got appreciable worse
    • Libraries, languages and computers better
    • Programming tools have not
    • Some have got worse
    • Not language specific
  • Debugging
    • Borland C – GUI – see where in code you are
    • 1994 gdb
    • 2013 gdb
  • Why?
    • The Unix philosphy – small, seperate tools
    • Cargo Cult
      • Powerful tools only need a CLI
  • Fully featured IDE?
    • Only one tool the GUI
    • Maybe a plugin interface, if you are lucky
  • Keep good bit of Unix philosphy
    • Different Window dressing
  • BeeWare
    • Common problem with bad interface – testing
    • Current test suite outputs little to screen until it finishes.
    • Cricket – runs test suites and lets you look at output while it is running, see progress, what is passing/failing, can browse errors, does just one thing
      • cross platform – uses what Python provides out of the box, uses tk
      • Zero configuration – uses pip and run from command line. Nothing set in tool
      • Integration
    • Duvet – Test coverage tool
    • Why not a web interface
      • Needs to have a server
      • Live updates are still ard
      • Don’t believe web browsers will be superior to native tools and time soon
  • pybee.org

 

A Pseudo-Random Talk on Entropy by Jim Cheetham

  • Random vs Pseudo-Random vs Cryptographically Secure Pseudo-Random
  • Some Pseudo-Random generators not as random as was expected
  • Good PRNG – Mersenne Twister,
  • Blum Blum Shub – Crypto good if you pick right numbers
  • Diehard test spot bad random numbers
  • Random numbers for science – use publish “table” of pre-generated ones
  • /dev/random very random enviromental noise , /dev/urandom not crypto-good
  • /dev/random should block if not enough random bits available
  • RdRand – Source of random data built into chip, measures physical noise, runs through AES, can’t acess original data though
  • Sources from various hardware generators
  • Turbit – reads noise from soundcards
  • OneRNG – Speakers project, Open etc
Share