Author: simon

Open source Documentation –  Lana Brindley

• User Interface + documentation = can get into program
• People don’t think where manuals come from
• Like a black box
• At Redhat use 5 phase waterfall model
• Phase 1 – Information plan – work out dates, audience, sources
• Tools – wiki and ticketing system
• Phase 2 – Decide what goes in – look like, title, abstract, where info, ID Subject matter expert. Google, wikipedia
• Tools – wiki , bug system , master tracker bug
• Phase 3 – create 1st draft of document – reviewed by legal, writers, technical review
• bugs raise against doc, fixed, Quantity Engineering
• Tools – publican, draft to svn,
• Phase 4 – translation and publication
• Up to 26 languages
• Don’t publish dead-tree books, single page html, pdf, paged html, epub
• Phase 5 – Review on process
• Geographically spread out, , phone meetings
• Advice:
• Keep *some* documentation, blogs, wikis, comment code, that tech writers can use
• Get organised
• Choose your voice
• Say what you mean
• Use Short sentences. 15-20 words on paper, 10-15 on a screen
• You’re not at University – there is not an exact word limit
• edit with knife
• each editing pass should make your document 20% shorter
• read what you write, walk away from it so you read what it says not what you think it says. Read it aloud. Read it backwards (v short docs), or each sentence backwards.

The latest and coolest with HTML5 video – Silvia Pfeiffer

• htttp://caniuse.com
• Video Manipulation
• Not just a 2 new tags, combining technologies
• htmlvideoguide.net – updates from Silvia’s book
• new websites should probably user mp4 and webm
• CSS3 transitions
• Javascript API and Media
• SVG – not uniform implementation across the browsers
• SVG filters for video only in FF4 for now
• Canvas better implemented across browsers
• Very interesting demos
• face detection in 5 lines of a web worker
• shared video and audio playing
• Demo of implementing audio visualisation of audio samples in realtime directly in htnl
• Generate music directly ( or via samples) . Part of proposed audio API
• Media accessibility – captions, subtitles, audio descriptions, external text file or in-band
• WebVTT, <track> element , TextTrack API

Linux Graphics Directions – Keith Packard

• Room was so full Linux almost got kicked out
• Linux runs everywhere.
• X runs on desktops, laptops but only on some of the mobile devices
• Open source community not engaged in any graphics that is not X
• Dominates desktop market mainly because GTK and QT use them
• Otherwise nobody runs X
• need to engage these people
• X ended up doing just about all graphics tasks
• Why X? – Lots of mature code for mode setting, have to duplicate
• Why X? – Clipping
• Why X? – Video Memory management
• Window Manager + X Server + compositing manager are all separate, more complicated
• How have things changed? – shared libraries, huge data increase, http/html does remote access, theme-able UI’s , making things fast-enough is easier, screens have colour now
• Re-Integrating the Window System
• Simplify Architecture – integrate compositing, in-app window management, synchronous operations
• What about remote apps? – HTTP, VNC/Rdesktop, WiDi, X as peer application
• Providing broad system architecture support
• mode setting – KMS
• Input device – Evdev
• Rendering/memory management – GEM
• Missing pieces – key mapping – libxkbcommon creates sharable interface
• Missing – Input devices – evdev isn’t sufficient – need user-mode touch devices
• NMissing – Accessibility APIs – mouse keys, sticky keys
• Reducing X specific code apps have to depend on

Florian Haas & Tim Serong

• Not using slides, instead 1 talking and other drawing cartoons in real time
• Centralized backups and storage – snapshots
• over provision of resources, better utilisation
• pre-packages virtual images
• building blocks of a system:
• virtualisation
• central storage
• storage replication, increase reliability
• “If you live in Queensland you’ll agree not everything that comes out a cloud is necessary good”
• high availability
• Existing commercial solutions, vendor lock-in
• SAN stack: commodity boxes for storage -> drbd -> iscsi target -> pacemaker cluster
• Virt Stack: Commodity Box -> Open Iscsi -> KVM
• pacemake looks very nice interface for clustering, Will have to look at it.

Making great conference video on a budget – Ryan Verner and Ben Hutchens

• Guys from team doing lca2011 conference video
• BOF on this later in conference
• 2004 used tapes, hard to scale
• Volunteer AV very different from using pros, skillset limited
• common chellenges from conferences, not LCA specific
• each component relatively simple, very easy to underestimate, many components, many rooms
• incomplete AV workflow, focus primary on tech
• Volunteers – limited manpower, expeience, training
• unforseen tech issues – Small varience in hardware
• workflow – automate as much as possible
• workflow – manage schedule , feedback loop (recording sheets) , rapid post editing, distribute tasks, automate transcoding/.uploading
• mistakes – LCA 400 hours of video, too much to do ANY manual editing, combining vga,main,audio feeds
• vga capture – twinpact 100 – $600
• Basic mixer – mike, usb sound – $300
• Firewire camera – $300
• Laptops running linux, DVDSwitch software mixes into single DV file
• Audio quality – often neglected
• Get a VGA capture device
• 100% test befoe conference, impossible to solve once things start
• Train volenteers
• Managment important, clear roles, delegation of specific tasks
• Clear Documentation
• Examples http://pythin.mirocommunity.org
• http://videokollektiv.org – example of best practices
• DVswitch software – video mixing, recording, streaming
• Designed for free software confs, limited budget
• Ofter used, sometimes without streaming

• Like “test driven development”
• Initially unit test focussed
• business doesn’t care about underlying implementation, just the functional results
• “executable specification” – written in spoken language
• “infrastructure as code”
• code without tests is “bad”
• Taking BDD and adapting to infrastructure development
• Tools – cucumber – write specs, execute/test specs
• cucumber-nagios
• DEMO of cucumber and cucumber-nagios
• example – continuous server builds as you update you config manager
• migration to config management. – Use BDI to test existing, test CM env with same tests to make sure it replicates
• Monitoring System : notify -> test -> repeat
• Current monitoring systems miss many things
• cucumber provides a common specification format that dev and ops can share
• removes duplication of tests
• Libraries being built of commons test (some already in cucumber nagios)

Geoff Huston

• New technologies from the 70s – Unix and Packet switching (TCP/IP)
• Open technologies – anyone can implement
• TCP/IP not better than competing technologies but it’s openness greatly helped it win
• One thing to “be open” , another to “stay open”
• Useful technologies are rarely static
• Technology evolves, uses change (eg growth of wireless), exploitation models change
• Challenges – net neutrality, next generation networks, mobility and mobil service evolution, Triple/Quad play schemes
• The really important thing is “We are running out of addresses”
• 190 m addresses given out in 2009, 248m in 2010
• 300million new things on the network
• 9 million new addresses just in Australia
• 7 /8s left, rate of 1/month
• plan that IPv6 transition would happen before ipv4 ran out
• Only 0.3% hitting google IPv6
• IPv4 will run out during 2011/2012
• Need to transition to ipv6 in 200 days
• Won’t happen, have to muddle thing with ipv4
• NATs are an externalized problem
• ISP NATs, multi-level, within ISP network
• aperture through through which the Internet can be seen and used. Reduced port space
• transition to ipv6. Dual stack requires everybody to have a ipv4 address
• If you run 6to4 15% of connections don’t connect.
• Transition could take 5-40 years
• Making ipv4 addresses last longer, they will cost
• TCP/IP is the network monoculture
• Will openness be lost in the transition?
• Telcos being asking to make big investment in ipv6. No really in their interests to have an open network.
• Similar for large Internet companies like google and amazon
• Delays help the incumbents, open network infrastructure is at risk
• Need to figure out how to motivate big companies to goto ipv6 and open infrastructure

Re-imagining the Internet – Vint Cerf

• 768 million machines and 1966 million users in mid-2010
• Already more chinese on the Internet than americans
• No particular applications in Internet design
• non-national IP address structure
• Open standards, No IP attached to TCP/IP
• Anybody can build a piece of the Internet and connect to it
• Recent developments: ipv6, int domains names, dnssec, rpki, sensor nets, smart grid, mobile devices
• Two factor authentication really needed by everybody
• Security problems on OS, Browser, Interpreter boundaries
• We privacy laws, lax user behavior
• Invasive devices
• Cloud to cloud missing, data between them has to go via user
• List of unsolved, research problems
• Buffer bloat problem might have to mean reduction in buffers

Finding you feet without losing your head – Alison Young

• Tech writer at redhat
• starting a new job
• make sure people know your name, spelling and what you prefer to be called
• drop nickname you don’t like when switch jobs
• find out dress policy
• hopefully have a buddy to get you going
• preferred communication ways at company ( talk vs email vs IRC vs skype ), need to allign with this
• management style. hands off vs micromanagement
• work from home. at Redhat be qualified
• transitions at workplace (dinners, cake days)
• breaks, present-ism, how intently are you expected to work.

We are here, have always been here – Donna Benjamin

• 5 minute history of feminism
• $7000 to digitise “The Dawn” , fund-raising effort
• In past women more common in computing, cheaper to hire skilled workers
• Less common today since women get less computers when young
• examples of Women in Australian computing she uncovered
• “we are not fucking unicorns”
• Challenge to find women for Ada Lovelace day

Roleplaying Session – Val Aurora

• Roleplaying sessions of people doing sexist activity and options for replying

Arjin Lentz – creating the business you want

• – ex mysql
• – left when 500 people
• – growth in company revenue doesn’t always mean good elsewhere in business
• – remote services for mysql
• – no emergencies – time with daughter, sanity
• – started pre-GFC, prices reasonable, published, stuck to.
• – no emergencies = no worries after hours, do oncall infrastructure
• = Pool of people who won’t work weekends
• – biz processes = some cases no *real* reason why it’s done that way, but hard to change if other
• things depend on it.
• – hard to disrupt yourself
• – no borrowing, external funding etc.- big affect on how run. See rules
• – big growth , floating, being bought doesn’t always benifit customers
• – lives below the big companies, keep pricing below them
• – total value of biz-space is too small for “china” to enter
• – value curve, invest in different balance of value for your product than your competitors, feature set
• – nintendo wii, amazon
• – list of cool books
• – bigger clients require different sort of company to service

13 years of LWN – Johnathon Corbet

• – most audience lwn subscribers
• – establish 1998, 3 emplyees, x000 subscrbers, >100 company subs
• – Programmed Cray 1 – #3
• – drifted up to mid-level management in 96/97
• – little correlation between work and reward
• – Starting off “Linux Consulting” company ( eklektix.com ), start website to show how smart we are – not many $
• – we’ll do linux support – became linux support partner – program went away
• – linux training company – crowded market – didn’t work out
• – Maybe online news company
• – lesson – business skills matter
• – lesson where money coming from – pay attention to what customers want
• – be ready and will to change plans
• – acquired by tucows. went for mainly cash
• – seemed like good people, money over pure stock.
• – after dotcom crash, tucows handed back.
• – advertising revenue big drop from pre-crash
• – business very cyclical
• – real customers are the advertisers. Other sites did articles for advertising spend
• – Blocked microsoft.com, hard to block all the other variations for the name
• – other ads for dodgy products, soft core porn, political ads
• – ruins customer experience, javascript, flash, popups
• – hard audience to advertise to
• – donations didn’t work
• – July 2002 put up message that calling it quits
• – $35,000 in tip jar over 1 week. “why don’t you try subscriptions”
• – Nobody pays, Linux users less likely to pay.
• – listen to customers, especially when they are offering money
• – credit card company, reverted donation surge
• – credit cards,; extra feels for: discount rate, transaction fees, “international charges”, affinity charges, some arbitrarily
• – banks nervous about extending long to credit to merchants
• – chargebacks. customer always wins. 5 chargebacks over 10 years
• – credit card security, big dangers, huge potential downsides, pci compliance
• – credit card lessons, keep money from somewhere else
• – alternatives to Cc – 5% of stream, works okay, cost 4%
• – Checks – pain to deal with internationally
• – Corp PO cycle – big pain to deal with, Be patient
• – other services, amazon. Haven’t investigated heavily
• – lesson – have 6 months in the bank
• – where are we now
• – subscribers get access to feature content
• – free after 1-2 weeks
• – ability to disable advertising
• – other features
• – Basic cost $7/month , higher and lower cost alternatives, group subscriptions
• – aligns interests with our readers
• – people want to support us
• – subscriptions are a business expense for most people
• – non-cyclical
• – 2008
• – subs steady
• – adverting dies
• – many competitors die, freelancers writers more avaibale
• – amazon affiliate , not good results and then amazon pulled plug on all of Colorado
• – lots of revenue sources good. biggest business is 5% of revenue
• – why doesn’t it work. audience is too small
• – people don’t want to pay
• – we are terrible at selling
• – pricing is really hard, raised prices by 40%, minimal loss of subscribers
• – “design the business as a functioning system” – hard to do with periodical