Archive for the 'FOSDEM 2009' Category

FOSDEM 2009: Day 1

Posted February 8, 2009 * Comments(1)

Day 1 of FOSDEM was great fun, and exhausting! I managed to attend the following sessions:

  • Keynote: Mark Surman, Mozilla: Free, Open, Future?
    My favourite keynote of the day. Mark looked at FOSS philosophically, and asked the questions: “what next?” and “how far can free and open source software go?”. He touched on the values of FOSS (study, copy, modify, share) and how it’s shifted the market and changed our world. He predicted the next major development in FOSS as being the mobile platform, and asked “what do we need to do in order to make the mobile platform free and open?”
  • Keynote: Bdale Garbee, Debian
    Bdale gave us a run-down of Debian’s history and the project’s values. The most memorable thing I took from this talk was “never understand the value of values”. He showed us how the Debian project has a very strong community of developers open doors that welcome new contributors, and that it works well because of the clear values the project has (shown in it’s Social Contract to the free software community).
  • XMPP: “PubSub and the Web” by Nathan Fritz and “Integrating XMPP into Web Technologies” by Jack Moffitt.”
    Nathan talked about how his company uses XMPP to power their social networking site, and Nathan shows us through Strophe.js, his extremely robust and optimised XMPP client written 100% in JavaScript.
  • Bazaar: “Why you should use Bazaar for maintaining your OSS project” by Lenz Grimmer
    Lenz works for MySQL (Sun) and explains the reasons why they switched to Bazaar as their VCS last year (finally, a chance to escape the git hype).
  • PostgreSQL: “What’s coming in PostgreSQL 8.4″ by Magnus Hagander, and easily the most interesting session of the day: “Replication, replication, replication” by Simon Riggs.
    There are a lot of fantastic new features coming in PostgreSQL 8.4. I just have to talk about this some more. Some of the changes include:

    • max_fsm_pages and max_fsm_relations are gone! (in favour of dynamic sizing)
    • Improved visibility map. Partial VACUUMs.
    • Parallel restore with multi-threaded pg_restore (multiple connections to the database using multiple cores).
    • Improved pg_stat statistics, useful for debugging applications: pg_stat_user can count the number of calls to functions. pg_stat_statements will now show you the most used statements, include time spent, how many rows returned etc. auto_explain will automatically log query plan slow queries.
    • SSL completely rewritten. Changes to authentication and pg_hba, now with SSL certificate authentication.
    • And most exciting for me: “hot standby” – replication with reads to the slave (may make it in 8.4)

    The replication talk was amazing; it went into a lot of technical detail. Simon took us through streaming replication (which unfortunately won’t make it into 8.4 – it’s around a year away, according to him) and then hot standby.

    Definitely looking forward to seeing this one.

  • Finally, Augeas from Raphaël Pinson
    A talk delivered from an Ubuntu developer in the Fedora/CentOS room on Augeas, the configuration file parser written for Fedora! This one interested me as I’m particularly keen to start using it with Puppet.

Ouf!

Looking forward to tomorrow!

FOSDEM 2009

Posted February 1, 2009 * Comments(0)

Brussels, BelgiumNext week I’ll be heading off to Brussels to attend FOSDEM 2009.

I’m excited to be able to make it to such a popular event like this. I would have claimed that my old home town would never host any distinguished geek events, however, Hobart recently just hosted Linux.conf.au (which I unfortunately missed out on since I’m on the other side of the world).

This year at FOSDEM I’m particularly eager to attend talks on:

I’m also looking forward to seeing some small snippets of Brussels, as it’ll be one of the rare occasions where I actually leave the house on the weekend, and the first time I’ve left London since I arrived here.

Bring on the Belgian beer!