LinuxFest Northwest
We are home from the LinuxFest Northwest. We drove up on Friday night and came home this morning after having breakfast in Fairhaven. I had a good time at LinuxFest, this is something like my forth time going. They really put on a good show and manage to-do it without charging anything for admission. This year they had nine tracks running all day Saturday, broken down into five speaking times. When comparing this to the MicroHAMS digital conference, it really seems like they spread things out more, but at the same time rush the speakers. We have seven speaking slots compared to their five and we both keep to the 45 minute presentations. I’m seriously thinking that next year we will drop down to six speakers and shift the day around. (Start later and end a little earlier)
So like most years, there was always at least two talks I wanted to see during each time slot, but this year I never left any talk. This was mainly because the talks were just that good, but also because three of the five talks were so crowded I would never have gotten out. The demo/vendor area was only so-so this year. I was a little annoyed that Amazon was there and handing out more swag then I’ve seen in my three+ years of working there.
Talk 1: World Domination with Free and Open Source Software, Jon “maddog” Hall
This was a really good talk and I ended up taking lots of notes. The talk kind of boiled down to showing the cycle of free software, to commercial software and back to free software again. He made some really good observations about the impact on free software coming out of the dotcom boom and governments dependance on commercial software. (Oh, you didn’t know that half the developers working on Microsoft Windows are not US citizens? Sure glad our government is totally dependent on MS Windows)
The best thing he pointed out was the cost of ownership between large closed source systems and open source solutions. During the first 20-30 years of computers, the difference between the users and developers was really pretty small. But in the last 20 years, the gap has gotten huge and that knowledge gap is going to cause the costs to keep going up so no single company will be able to support it.
Talk 2: VIM by Example: Building your Plaintext Toolkit, Adam Monsen
So this talk probably didn’t teach me much about VIM that I didn’t know, but it did make something really clear to me. In VIM there are at least six different ways of doing anything and all of them are hard to remember. I’ve got a serious crash course in VIM from the devs on my team, they are amazing users of VIM and any of them could have given this talk. But it is so difficult to remember how-to most of that magic. I still have to think hard about how to cut and paste text. Why is that so difficult to remember or make like EVERY OTHER EDITOR?
Lunch
Amazing pulled pork sandwiches this year in addition to the salmon.
Talk 3: Information Security Discovers Physics, Seth Schoen
This was a really cool talk, even though the speakers didn’t look like he was all that comfortable. The room was also TOTALLY full, like no room to even stand. I got there 15 minutes early and was lucky to find a place on the floor in the corner. So Seth did a good jump running down all the types of physical attacks which have been found in the last 10 years or so and pointed out that most “threat modeling” doesn’t even attempt to deal with them.
I had a chance to speak with Seth later in the day, he has a pretty cool job. He works for the EFF and is basically a on staff hacker, although they call him something else. He assists the lawyers with understanding the tech behind the issues they are dealing with and prepares papers.
Talk 4: Open Source Virtual Machines, Derek Simkowiak
This has been an area I’ve been curious about digging into and haven’t quite gone past using Parallels on my laptop for having a Ubuntu and Windows XP installation along side OSX. I was surprised at just how many different solutions existed now and also that they really haven’t gotten to the point of plug and play yet.
Talk 5: Server Sky, Keith Lofstrom
I was going to listen to this talk, but a friend of mine had heard the first half of it and suggested I skip it. I guess the guy was a little to pie in the sky, which combined with the ‘everybody help out and we’ll solve all the problems’ attitude made it pretty boring. So we all bailed and hung out in the sun and talked until the raffle drawing started.