Category Archives: linux.conf.au

TextSecure – secure SMS for Android

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So… having secure SMS really isn’t hard. Onec upon a time you may have been forgiven to think that your SMS messages weren’t recorded forever by telecommunications companies or various government agencies, but those times have long passed. At the very least you should be concerned about somebody getting hold of your phone and going through all your SMSs (phones no longer just store 20 messages).

TextSecure (Free and Open Source Software up on github) does both local encryption (messages are encrypted on your phone) and over the wire encryption. That’s right kids – you can send encrypted text messages to each other.

It’s a drop-in replacement for the built in Android text messages application, so it all “just works”.

Go install it now.

This is the app that Jacob Appelbaum mentioned in is Keynote at lca2012.

Registered for linux.conf.au

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So, I just registered for linux.conf.au and when ticking all those check boxes for years past, I worked out that this will be my tenth linux.conf.au! Wow… that’s a few of them.

Over the past 9 I’ve attended I’ve gone to great sessions, met interesting people, discovered interesting projects and made good friends.

I wonder what this one will bring….

linux.conf.au 2011 Monday wrap-up

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This year was a lot of fun. My talk was on the Thursday, which meant that there was most of the week spent going “eep” and making sure I was ready for it.

Total hats off to the organisers – you may have heard about a small area of Queensland (about the area of France and Germany combined – or ~ twice that of Texas) was declared a disaster area a couple of weeks before the conference. Honestly, if you didn’t hear about it, you wouldn’t have noticed.

Sunday night we had a gathering of linux.conf.au Ghosts of Conferences Past. We refer to those previously involved in running an LCA “Ghosts” – a wealth of knowledge for future teams. One of the most amusing tales was John Ferlito asking people what would they have done if just less than two weeks out they had to change venues. The consensus: curl up in a corner and cry hoping it would all just go away.

The lca2011 organisers didn’t.

So on the Monday I managed to catch a few good talks. In the morning I seemed to stalk Pia in her two talks: “Applying martial arts to the workplace: your guide to kicking arse” and “Cloud computing: finding the silver lining for government” in the Haeksen and Freedom In The Cloud miniconfs respectively.

If you didn’t manage to catch the martial arts talk, check out Pia’s blog post on it. I also strongly recommend a good martial arts school (contact me if you want).

The big take away for me from the Cloud in Government talk was that I really should go and read the AGIMO Cloud Strategy document. The other take away for me was that while government is looking at using new technology it is not currently thinking at all about individuals rights (such as privacy), security and safety in the cloud.

I have been known to rock up to talks with no real idea of the content but on the hope that it could end up being cool. This was the next one I went to. The title: “Open Source: Saving the World” sounded like a lovely idea and the speaker, Noirin is pretty cool. It turns out there’s some really awesome open source software out there for dealing with natural disasters, incidents of violence and education. Go check out the Lanka software foundation, the SAHANA Disaster Management System, Ushahidi (coming out of Kenya to track incidents of violence) and the Talking Book (a little yellow box that records and plays back audio).

I checked out Aeriana’s talk on overcomplicating home networks… and a bit too much of it was familiar :) I also have ideas.

Daniel Stone’s talk on input in X and everything related was interesting – there is a lot of historical things around and some truly bizarre things. Think: grabs are what grabs all input and makes you sad and OMG Multi-Pointer-X exists and it’s all backwards compatible OMG. I haven’t even mentioned the bits that allow your keyboard to have a key that makes demons fly from the screen and a harpsichord to play tunes while they do.

I managed to catch Matthew Garrett’s talk “License compliance in Open Source business” talk. The fact that the very first store he walked into after arriving in Australia was selling a device that violates his copyright is, well, not a good sign.

At the end of the Monday I managed to catch about the last half of “Training Allies” that was the last session in the Haecksen miniconf. This was a pretty good session with a rather packed room (standing room only). This is rather promising I think.

Monday linux.conf.au 2011 plan

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It’s currently my plan to really try and make it to the following sessions:

The middle of the day will probably become “Stewart goes and panics over talks” kinda time.

Should be an awesome day.

Data Storage miniconf Lightning Talk CFP

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Going to linux.conf.au ?

Use storage, have tales?

Admin storage system, have stories?

Hack on a storage system, have software to promote?

We want your Lightning Talk!

Databases, file systems, cloud storage, network storage, my-insane-mythtv-storage all welcome!

Send me email if you’d like to present (stewart at flamingspork dot com).

Tuesday, from 4:15pm at linux.conf.au

Video editing with Free Software

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Way back when, for linux.conf.au coming to Melbourne in 2008, I edited together a promo video for it. IIRC the raw video was shot by Kelly on DV tape, imported in and I got a CD of some massive 400MB MPEG file of a bunch of questions. Using Cinelerra and some graphics package that I forget (very early Inkscape?), I managed to get this done in 2006. I understand things are a bit less segfaulty these days.

See it on YouTube or download the Ogg Theora video.

Amazingly enough, this is the last time I actually did any video editing.

You should also go to linux.conf.au 2011 in Brisbane this upcoming January.

LCA Miniconf Call for Papers: Data Storage: Databases, Filesystems, Cloud Storage, SQL and NoSQL

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This miniconf aims to cover many of the current methods of data storage and retrieval and attempt to bring order to the universe. We’re aiming to cover what various systems do, what the latest developments are and what you should use for various applications.

We aim for talks from developers of and developers using the software in question.

Aiming for some combination of: PostgreSQL, Drizzle, MySQL, XFS, ext[34], Swift (open source cloud storage, part of OpenStack), memcached, TokyoCabinet, TDB/CTDB, CouchDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, HBase….. and more!

Call for Papers open NOW (Until 22nd October).

HOWTO screw up launching a free software project

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Josh Berkus gave a great talk at linux.conf.au 2010 (the CFP for linux.conf.au 2011 is open until August 7th) entitled “How to destroy your community” (lwn coverage). It was a simple, patented, 10 step program, finely homed over time to have maximum effect. Each step is simple and we can all name a dozen companies that have done at least three of them.

Simon Phipps this past week at OSCON talked about Open Source Continuity in practice – specifically mentioning some open source software projects that were at Sun but have since been abandoned by Oracle and different strategies you can put in place to ensure your software survives, and check lists for software you use to see if it will survive.

So what can you do to not destroy your community, but ensure you never get one to begin with?

Similar to destroying your community, you can just make it hard: “#1 is to make the project depend as much as possible on difficult tools.”

#1 A Contributor License Agreement and Copyright Assignment.

If you happen to be in the unfortunate situation of being employed, this means you get to talk to lawyers. While your employer may well have an excellent Open Source Contribution Policy that lets you hack on GPL software on nights and weekends without a problem – if you’re handing over all the rights to another company – there gets to be lawyer time.

Your 1hr of contribution has now just ballooned. You’re going to use up resources of your employer (hey, lawyers are not cheap), it’s going to suck up your work time talking to them, and if you can get away from this in under several hours over a few weeks, you’re doing amazingly well – especially if you work for a large company.

If you are the kind of person with strong moral convictions, this is a non-starter. It is completely valid to not want to waste your employers’ time and money for a weekend project.

People scratching their own itch, however small is how free software gets to be so awesome.

I think we got this almost right with OpenStack. If you compare the agreement to the Apache License, there’s so much common wording it ends up pretty much saying that you agree you are able to submit things to the project under the Apache license.  This (of course) makes the entire thing pretty redundant as if people are going to be dishonest about submitting things under the Apache licnese there’s no reason they’re not going to be dishonest and sign this too.

You could also never make it about people – just make it about your company.

#2 Make it all about the company, and never about the project

People are not going to show up, do free work for you to make your company big, huge and yourself rich.

People are self serving. They see software they want only a few patches away, they see software that serves their company only a few patches away. They see software that is an excellent starting point for something totally different.

I’m not sure why this is down at number three… it’s possibly the biggest one for danger signs that you’re going to destroy something that doesn’t even yet exist…

#3 Open Core

This pretty much automatically means that you’re not going to accept certain patches for reasons of increasing your own company’s short term profit. i.e. software is no longer judged on technical merits, but rather political ones.

There is enough politics in free software as it is, creating more is not a feature.

So when people ask me about how I think the OpenStack launch went, I really want people to know how amazing it can be to just not fuck it up to begin with. Initial damage is very, very hard to ever undo. The number of Open Source software projects originally coming out of a company that are long running, have a wide variety of contributors and survive the original company are much smaller than you think.

PostgreSQL has survived many companies coming and going around it, and is stronger than ever. MySQL only has a developer community around it almost in spite of the companies that have shepherded the project. With Drizzle I think we’ve been doing okay – I think we need to work on some things, but they’re more generic to teams of people working on software in general rather than anything to do with a company.

linux.conf.au 2011 CFP Open!

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Head on over to http://lca2011.linux.org.au/ and check it out!

You’ve got until August 7th to put in a paper, miniconf, poster or tutorial.

Things I’d like to see come from my kinda world:

  • topics on running large numbers of machines
  • latest in large scale web infrastructure
  • latest going on in the IO space: (SSD, filesystems, SSD as L2 cache)
  • Applications of above technologies and what it means for application performance
  • Scalable and massive tcp daemons (i.e. Eric should come talk on scalestack)
  • exploration of pain points in current technologies and discussion on ways to fix them (from people really in the know)
  • A Hydra tutorial: starting with stock Ubuntu lucid, and exiting the tutorial with some analysis running on my project.
  • Something that completely takes me off guard and is awesome.

I’d love to see people from the MySQL, Drizzle and Rackspace worlds have a decent presence. For those who’ve never heard of/been to an LCA before: we reject at least another whole conference worth of papers. It’s the conference on the calendar that everything else moves around.

linux.conf.au 2009 wrap-up (incl Open Source Databases Mini-conf): Day 0-1

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It’s no secret that I love linux.conf.au. My first was linux.conf.au 2003, in Perth and I’ve been to every one since (there are at least two people who’ve been to every single one, including CALU as it was called in 1999).

I’ve been on the board of Linux Australia for some insane proportion of the years since then (joining in 2003). Linux Australia is the not-for-profit community organisation that puts on linux.conf.au. It’s all volunteers and amazingly enough we have more than one group of people wanting to put on linux.conf.au each year!

This year, we Marched South to Hobart.

Here I detail what I saw, what I wish I saw and whatever else comes to mind.

Sunday – Before the conference

Ran into Bdale while checking in. Short flight down. A million and one people on the plane and on the ground that I knew. It must be linux.conf.au.

Seeing way too many awesome people I know, checking into accommodation (oh my, what a hill), registering for conf, beer and then off to a “ghosts of conferences past” dinner – where a few people who had organised previous linux.conf.au’s were hastily gathered together to chat to part of the 2010 team.

Monday – Open Source Databases Miniconf Day 1

Oh, that’s right – I’m running the OSDB Miniconf :)

First up, Monty Taylor spoke on “NDB/Bindings – Use the MySQL Cluster Direct API from languages you actually like for fun and profit”. Possibly taking the prize for the longest talk title of the conference. The NDB API is not SQL, it’s what the MySQL server (and one day, when Monty and I get around to it, Drizzle) translates SQL into for NDB. That being said, you can (pretty much always) write NDB API code that dramatically outperforms equivilent SQL (for a variety of reasons). Monty maintains the NDB/Bindings project that lets you use languages other than C++ for the NDB API.

At the same time as Monty was speaking, I wish I’d been able to fork() and go and see “Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, Why?” by Paul McKenney and Michael Still talking about MythNetTV (pull RSS feeds of video in as MythTV programs).

After morning tea, we were meant to have “InnoDB scaling up and performance” by Bruce Huang, but he was a no-show. Hint: if you don’t want bad things to be said about you by conference organisers, either show up or let them know you’re not able to make it.

Instead, we led a crazy Q&A type session around the room which was a whole lot of fun. Really a “ask the experts” meets running up-and-down stairs with a microphone.

Next up, Arjen Lentz who runs Open Query spoke on “OurDelta: Builds for MySQL”. The best way to describe OurDelta is a “distribution of MySQL”. It’s the MySQL server plus a bunch of patches provided by various people that haven’t yet made it into the main source tree (for any number of reasons).

At the same time (if you’ve never been to linux.conf.au, you’ll find that you often want to be in at least 3 places at once) I would have really liked to see “MythTV Internals by Nigel Pearson” (I co-wrote Practical MythTV with Michael Still, which is having a “second edition” in wiki form over at http://www.mythtvbook.com/) as well as the panel on geek parenting as this may be something I’m one day faced with.

Up next: Russell Coker filled in for Kaigai (same talk, different speaker) to talk on The Security-Enhanced PostgreSQL – “System-wide consistency” in access controls. I found this quite interesting and different approaches to database security are worth looking at. Modern applications (read: web applications) don’t map their uses to database users at all. There are usually two users on the database server: the super user and the user that the app uses. It would be nice to have a good solution for those who want it.

Again, If I had the ability to be in two places at once, I would have also seen “How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love ACPI” by the extremely handsome Matthew Garrett.

Monty Widenius (blog here – and yes, we have two Monty’s now… which does cause confusion) talking about the Maria storage engine. Maria is based on MyISAM, but adding crash safety and transactions (among other things).

Again, if I was able to be in several places at once I would have also seen Rusty‘s “Large CPUmasks”, Nathan Scott talking about “System level performance management with PCP” and Bdale’s “Collaborating Successfully with large corporations”.

An awesome start to the conference.

linux.conf.au paper review

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<sarcasm>Because I had nothing else on this month.</sarcasm> I’m currently reviewing linux.conf.au papers. This is fun, brutal and hard.

For those of you who submitted: never be disheartened by not having it accepted: there are so many good papers for linux.conf.au we could probably hold two conferences and they’d both be excellent.

We do, however, only have one conference – so good papers get left out.

P.S. since I just bought a house the only forms of bribes currently being accepted are large contributions towards my mortgage.

P.P.S. smaller contributions probably accepted too.

P.P.P.S. I’m not the only reviewer you need to bribe… but if you’ve got a spare few hundred thousand dollars, you probably have enough to bribe enough.

linux.conf.au 2008 Mini-Conf Selection

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So, last night a group of us sat down and went through all the mini-conf proposals for linux.conf.au 2008

There were a lot of proposals. There were also a lot of good ones.

We’re not announcing anything yet… but in the interest of openness… here’s the procedure.

We started out as any responsible group of selectors would…. looking at the proposals over beer:

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a few jokes thrown in… frank discussion and all that. But really, we came to the conclusion that it’d been all done before and we needed to somehow narrow down all the excellent suggestions…

Luckily, the pub we were meeting at had the right facilities!

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And we went about selecting a few more…

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Of course, there are simply some mini-confs that we all agreed were a must have…  although nothing was certain…

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One of the more hilarious suggestions of the evening was to force somebody to organise a PostgreSQL miniconf, convince Marten to hold a MySQL company meeting in Melbourne around Jan 2008 and have all of MySQL AB come and sit in the back of the room for the PostgreSQL miniconf.

Eat My Data: @ luv Tuesday 3rd July

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Tomorrow night (that’s Tuesday the 3rd of July) I’m speaking at LUV (Linux Users of Victoria). I’m presenting “Eat My Data: How Everybody Gets File I/O Wrong“.

This is another one of my (possibly futile) attempts to get people to care more about data integrity when writing software – and the less futile attempt to make users cry*.

* over lost data, not spilt milk.

UPDATE: date is Tuesday the 3rd . Turns out I can’t use /usr/bin/cal

Somebody should blog…

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So, for whatever reason, at about 2am this morning I was finding out what showed up when you googled linux.conf.au for sites in Swedish.

(actually… I do know why.. I was waiting for a a cluster to start so i could run a test)

Somebody should blog (in Swedish) about how awesome the upcoming linux.conf.au in January 2008 (in Melbourne) is coming along.

Melbourne will be much warmer and sunnier than Sweden in January. Promise.

MySQL Conf: Getting Drunk with Eben Moglen

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So Jay Pipes pointed out that Eben Moglen is speaking at the upcoming MySQL Conference in his attention grabbing post: Getting Drunk with Eben Moglen.

I saw Eben speak at linux.conf.au 2005 in Canberra – which was totally totally awesome.

I’m really looking forward to seeing him again – honestly, it’s probably worth the conference admission fee just to see this session.

LCA2007 Photos

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I’ve added a LCA2007 section to my Gallery with a bunch of photos I took at and around the conference. Feel free to have a look. I’ve posted a bunch of these to flickr already, so you’ve likely seen some if you follow my flickr feed.

Note that this gallery install is usually running a top-of-tree mysql cluster install on a box that has a bunch of other load on it… so things may work, may not – whatever :)

Those of you listening in on Planet MySQL – you should be able to spot a few other MySQLers around there, and there’s photos from the MySQL miniconf.