Today is the monday after FOSDEM 2014, and I'm slowly waking up.
Being in charge of the video team, and after having spent a whole
week preparing followed by a whole weekend stressing about, today is a
day of slowly waking up from hibernation and returning gear to various
rental companies.
At FOSDEM 2013, we had recorded five rooms. Even though we did lose a
few talks, I felt pretty good about the whole thing, and I think we did
pretty well then. It had been my plan to increase the number of rooms to
be recorded from 5 to a reasonably higher number say, 10 or
so but
someone convinced me to
do
all of them.
I'll readily admit I was afraid. Scratch that, I was terrified.
Petrified, that we wouldn't be able to pull it off. For previous
editions, we'd kept the number conservative, since video work is a
high-risk business: if something goes wrong with volunteers work (say,
the heralding volunteer doesn't show up), you find a replacement, or you
have a staff member introduce a speaker, and the show will go on.
Not so with video work: if something minor goes wrong, you will most
likely lose content. If something minor goes wrong in one devroom, I'll
deal with it. If something minor goes wrong in 20% of devrooms, that's 4
to 5 devrooms, and I can't deal with it. Moreover, finding enough
volunteers to manage the video for five rooms was a challenge last year;
I couldn't even begin to imagine how to do so for
22 of
them.
We did work out a way that didn't seem
too far-fetched, and
that might work: why not look for volunteers from the devrooms
themselves? But then, they couldn't be expected to have the required
experience, so we'd have to do a lot of handholding.
The week before FOSDEM, four of us sat down in an office in Mechelen,
and started preparing. We had a lot to do; and when you do, more jobs
keep being added to the pile; TODO lists tend to grow longer, not
shorter. Installing servers, testing cameras, setting twinpact
dipswitches, configuring laptops. Changing a few tests in the config
management system, and having to go over the laptops again. Buying extra
gear. Buying yet more extra gear, several times. Buying cardboard boxes
when it appeared that the plastic foldable ones we'd ordered wouldn't
make it in time, and unloading the pallet of them when it did, after
all, so we could load them into the van with all of the other gear.
Laminating instruction sheets. Receiving shipments of rented gear.
Calling another supplier last minute when one of our other suppliers had
contacted us to let us know one of their cameras that they'd promised us
had broken down, and couldn't be repaired in time. Calling that
last-minute supplier
again when we found out that some of the
cameras we'd rented could do HDV only (and not DV), and we needed to
find more than the ones we'd already asked for. Discovering that
his cameras were of the same problematic model and so
also couldn't be used. The feeling of relief when he called me
a few hours later and told me he'd managed to scrounge up enough cameras
to help us out after all.
And then it was time to go to the ULB and start setting up
everything. On friday, we had a little bit of help, but did have to do
most of it ourselves. After setting up everything in every room and
testing as much as possible within the time constraints that we had, we
picked up the most expensive bits of the gear, brought it down to a safe
place, and went home.
On saturday and sunday, for me it was mostly a matter of handing out
gear to various devrooms, running around to fix various issues, and then
in the evening receiving boxes back, using a checklist to ensure
everything expected was in the box (and that things not needed would
remain in the room, or be sent back).
It was exhausting, to the extent that on saturday afternoon, I had to
take a bit of time off so I could go and rest.
I think it's safe to say that something like this hasn't been done
before. FOSDEM is a huge conference; most conferences with multiple
rooms don't have more somewhere between 5 and 10 of them. The fact that
we have so many more,
and the fact that we record
all
of them, puts FOSDEM video work in a class of its own, to the extent
that the professional cameramen I talked to in order to get the right
cameras would incredulously ask "what do you need
that for?"
when I gave them the numbers we needed.
As such, I didn't expect, nor was aiming for, perfection.
Unfortunately, with video work it is close to impossible to attain
perfection; I have told multiple people during the event that I would be
happy if we reached 85% of talks recorded at acceptable quality; and
though it is much too soon to say for certain, my gut feeling tells m
that we've probably achieved that.
One thing we hadn't planned for was streaming. During the past three
years, FOSDEM enlisted the help and sponsorship of flumotion to get
streaming going. Unfortunately, that did not work out this year; and
since we already had far too much on our plates with everything else, we
decided to forego streaming and focus on recording, only.
A few days before the event, however,
Steinar
Gunderson took it upon himself to fix that. While we couldn't
support him a great deal, we could give him access to the secondary
laptops (which weren't otherwise doing much anyway) on which he could
then do his thing. This was mostly transparent to us; we did communicate
to some extent (e.g., when a machine that had been down had fixed and
was working again), but he mostly did his thing while we did ours. Full
details, for those who want it, in the linked blog post.
Today, then, I spent most of my time handling hardware: waiting for
other members of FOSDEM to drive the van up to my office; waiting for
the laptop rental company to retrieve most of the laptops; waiting for
two of the camera rental companies to retrieve their cameras and
tripods; driving over to the final camera rental company to return their
cameras and tripods; and finally, driving up to the ULB to retrieve the
last laptops who had been copying files all night.
As I write this, some video files have already been uploaded to
the FOSDEM video archive. However,
these are extremely low-quality renditions of video snippets that need
to be reviewed; they are not ready yet for public consumption. When
those files exist, expect an announcement through
the main FOSDEM website.
Today was a pretty good day. I've found that I quite enjoyed it. Zoe woke up a
bit early, around 5:30am. She decided that despite the ridiculous heat, she
wanted porridge for breakfast, with cherries in it, so we pitted the cherries
and threw it all into the Thermomix to
cook while she got dressed.
After breakfast and the obligatory bit of TV, we biked over to Playgroup.
Zoe's got a few toys that she's taken a liking to, and immediately sought
them out. She also seems to really enjoy just running the length of the hall
after Playgroup is all done and everything has been packed away and most of
the kids are gone. Today the craft activity was making paper crowns, and she
wanted to that immediately upon arrival. After we got home, while I was
preparing lunch, she blinged it up a bit more with some stuff from home.
She took a 2 hour nap after lunch, and I did some more work on my taxes, and
then, because it was still stupidly hot, we biked over to Colmslie pool for
a swim.
Zoe's swimming progress continues in leaps and bounds. She's had one lesson
at her new level, and she's started with a kickboard and is doing strokes,
so I borrowed a kickboard from the pool, and she did really well with it. We
also just fooled around with the kickboard a bit. I took it to the bottom of
the pool and launched it out of the water with its own buoyancy, and Zoe
tried standing on it under water like a skateboard. The sinkies were also
popular again.
We grabbed a few things for dinner from the Hawthorne Garage on the way
home, and I managed to get Zoe to bed a little bit early. I thought I was
going to have a smooth bedtime, but unfortunately, as is a common occurrence
at the moment, after lights out, she started crying for her mother. It took
about 15 minutes to get her from near-hysterical to calm and drowsy.
I'm starting to think I might need to either shorten or eliminate the
afternoon naps. One of her complaints recently has been that she's had
trouble sleeping at bedtime. That said, she still seems to get to sleep
relatively quickly once she gets into the right frame of mind.
Writing this because there seems to be no correct documentation on the
relevant google websites and it turns out to be non-trivial. Our goal
here is to unsubscribe from a ordinary google group.
Mails from the google group contain the quoted footer:
I will never understand the point of using autotools, cmake or whatever configure system, when later the code uses an hardcoded list of architectures to determine the size of a pointer Unfortunately for porters this pattern is quite common.
Update: As people keep asking, the way to check for the size of a given type is explained in the 
This is the 2nd point release of OpenStack Havana (this is the name of the current stable release of OpenStack). It was out on Thursday (US time), and I uploaded it on Friday (Chinese time). Unfortunately, I realized that the latest python-keystoneclient didn t support the token and endpoint command line options, effectively breaking Keystone itself, and all automated endpoint registration in all core packages. So after fixing Keystone and openstack-pkg-tools, I had to re-upload a 2nd Debian release.
However, after this glitch, the packages passed successfully our CI testing suite: my friends at eNovance and I run the tempest functional test suite each time there s this kind of major update, so that we can validate the packages are working as expected. And all went well after the new keystone command line options were fixed in the postinst scripts.
As a side note, I fail to see consistency on deprecating these interfaces. While we still have the old glance index thing in the Glance client (this is really old), keystoneclient just broke backward compatibility, when keystone is quite recent. So, it looks to me that it wasn t a great idea to just remove token and endpoint this way (though I can understand the need of consistency). Hopefully, this will all be fixed anyway, when we move to the unified python-openstackclient command lines instead of per-project clients.
I realized today that the pkg-openstack team now 
A new release 0.2.11 of
Recently I've been thinking about getting a new laptop. I have this rule that a laptop should last me at least 3 years (ideally more) and my old laptop was bought in September 2010. So for the past few months I've been trying to work out if there's something suitable on the market that is a good replacement (last time I didn't manage to find something that ticked all the boxes, but did pretty well for the price I paid).
To start with I decided to track my laptops over time - largely because one of my concerns was about the size of a replacement, because I have a significant leaning towards subnotebooks. In the end the reason I decided to upgrade was for some extra CPU grunt; my old machine had a tendency to get pretty hot under any sort of load.
Have you ever wondered how new ideas, concepts, artworks etc. get into the Superconscious Collective of the universe, so that they then can be downloaded by exactly the right person who is meant to do something with them? yep, I, too, think that many of these ideas, concepts etc. come from the Great Unknown, where the seeds of limitless ideas and possibilities reside. But a lot of them also come from our own minds, from people who upload these things into the Superconscious Collective of our universe.
Such ideas and concepts can be uploaded in several ways. Some of them are simply uploaded by a person who sources them, connects to the Superconscious Collective of the universe and streams them up. Others are maybe even uploaded by somebody virtually typing an article with their fingertips into the spread out hands or soles of the feet of their loved one, playfully teasing him/her and thereby streaming information into him/her, which s/he then again uploads, mainly subconsciously, into the Superconscious Collective of the universe.
Once uploaded, all these limitless ideas and concepts become available to everyone and every living being, on Earth and throughout the whole universe. The thing is, that most people on Earth don't know how to consciously access information from there. Some do unconsciously and it again shows up in them as entirely new concepts and ideas, which they then spice with the flavor of their own essence and then stream them out into the world, be it as music, as software, as hardware, as artwork, as science and in limitless other ways. But it is also accessed by living beings throughout the whole universe, who also add their own ideas and concepts to the Great Superconscious Collective .
Wanna know how to access this limitless information, ideas, concepts and/or possibilities from the Superconscious Collective? Just breathe, relax, expand ... expand and get into your biggest, greatest, awesomest being of you. Become all that you are, connected to everything. Now, consciously plug into the Great Superconscious Collective, the Great Cosmic Internet. Allow the ideas, information, possibilities stream into you and through you and look which ones you resonate with. Call them, feel them, let them land in you, and ask them what they want you to do with them, as you are the one who can express them in the highest possible way, otherwise they wouldn't have come to you in the first place.
Then do one small thing to make them real in the world and watch them unfold. Or do whatever feels right for you to do, and create the most amazing new thing in the world.
My last update about ongoing development of botch, the bootstrap/build ordering
tool chain, was three months ago with the 
Human nature is hard to change. Very hard. We can talk about it for ages, but mistakes repeat again and again. In the end it's mostly by mistakes how we learn, so I doubt this could ever be changed without losing our own nature. One of these is trying to fix some social issue with a technical measure. Unfortunately, given the technical orientation of most of the developers, this appears from time to time in our Debian private mailing list, and yesterday I realized it's our own version of 
