I was over in Sydney this week attending linux.conf.au 2018 and made a short presentation at the Sysadmin miniconf regarding deploying Puppet in cloud environments.
The majority of this talk covers the Puppet autosigning process which is a big potential security headache if misconfigured. If you’re deploying Puppet (or even some other config management system) into the cloud, I recommend checking this one out (~15mins) and making sure your own setup doesn’t have any issues.
I’ve just returned from my annual pilgrimage to linux.conf.au, which was held in Perth this year. It’s the first time I’ve been over to West Australia, it’s a whole 5 hour flight from Sydney – longer than it takes to fly to New Zealand.
Perth’s climate is a very dry heat compared to Sydney, so although it was actually hotter than Sydney for most of the week, it didn’t feel quite as unpleasant – other than the final day which hit 45 degrees and was baking hot…
It’s also a very clean/tidy city, the well maintained nature was very noticeable with the city and gardens being immaculately trimmed – not sure if it’s always been like this, or if it’s a side effect of the mining wealth in the economy allowing the local government to afford it more effectively.
The towering metropolis of mining wealth.
As usual, the conference ran for 5 full days and featured 4-5 concurrent streams of talks during the week. The quality was generally high as always, although I feel that content selection has shifted away from a lot of deep dive technical talks to more high level talks, and that OpenStack (whilst awesome) is taking up far too much of the conference and really deserves it’s own dedicated conference now.
I’ve prepared my personal shortlist of the talks I enjoyed most of all for anyone who wants to spend a bit of time watching some of the recorded sessions.
Interesting New(ish) Software
Evolution of Linux
Walkthroughs and Warstories
Other Cool Stuff
Naturally there have been many other excellent talks – the above is just a selection of the ones that I got the most out from during the conference. Take a look at the full schedule to find other talks that might interest, almost all sessions got recorded during the conference.
Final day of linux.conf.au – I’m about a week behind schedule in posting, but that’s about how long it takes to catch up on life following a week at LCA. ;-)
uuuurgggh need more sleep
I like that guy’s idea!
Friday’s conference keynote was delivered by Tim Berners-Lee, who is widely known as “the inventor of the world wide web”, but is more accurately described as the developer of HTML, the markup language behind all websites. Certainly TBL was an influential player in the internets creation and evolution, but the networking and IP layer of the internet was already being developed by others and is arguably more important than HTML itself, calling anyone the inventor of the internet is wrong for such a collaborative effort.
His talk was enjoyable, although very much a case of preaching to the choir – there wasn’t a lot that would really surprise any linux.conf.au attendee. What *was* more interesting than his talk content, is the aftermath….
TBL was in Australia and New Zealand for just over 1 week, where he gave several talks at different venues, including linux.conf.au as part of the “TBL Down Under Tour“. It turns out that the 1 week tour cost the organisers/sponsors around $200,000 in charges for TBL to speak at these events, a figure I personally consider outrageous for someone to charge non-profits for a speaking event.
I can understand high demand speakers charging to ensure that they have comfortable travel arrangements and even to compensate for lost earnings, but even at an expensive consultant’s charge rate of $1,500 per day, that’s no more than $30,000 for a 1 week trip.
I could understand charging a little more if it’s an expensive commercial conference such as $2k per ticket per day corporate affairs, but I would rather have a passionate technologist who comes for the chance to impart ideas and knowledge at a geeky conference, than someone there to make a profit any day – the $20-40k that Linux Australia contributed would have paid several airfares for some well deserving hackers to come to AU to present.
So whilst I applaud the organisers and particularly Pia Waugh for the efforts spend making this happen, I have to state that I don’t think it was worth it, and seeing the amount TBL charged for this visit to a non-profit entity actually really sours my opinion of the man.
I just hope that seeing a well known figure talking about open data and internet freedom at some of the more public events leads to more positive work in that space in NZ and AU and goes towards making up for this cost.
Outside the conference hall.
Friday had it’s share of interesting talks:
Sadly it turns out Friday is the last day of the conference, so I had to finish it up with the obligatory beer and chat with friends, before we all headed off for another year. ;-)
They’re taking the hobbits to Isengard!
Hopefully not a road-side bomber.
The fuel that powers IT
Incoming!
Another successful day of Linux geeking has passed, this week is going surprisingly quickly…
Some of the days highlights:
The end of time is here! Always trust announcements by a guy wearing a cardboard and robes.
The conference presentations finished up with a surprise talk from Simon Hackett and Robert Llewellyn from Red Dwarf, which was somewhat entertaining, but not highly relevant for me – personally I’d rather have heard more from Simon Hackett on the history and future expectations for the ISP industry in Australia than having them debate their electric cars.
Thursday was the evening of the Penguin Dinner, the (usually) formal dinner held at each LCA, this year rather than the usual sit down 3-course dinner, the conference decided to do a BBQ-style event up at the Observatory on Mount Stromlo.
The Penguin Dinner is always a little pricey at $80, but for a night out, good food, drinks and spending time with friends, it’s usually a fun and enjoyable event. Sadly this year had a few issues that kind of spoilt it, at least for me personally, with some major failings on the food and transport which lead to me spending only 2 hours up the mountain and feeling quite hungry.
At the same time, LCA is a volunteer organised conference and I must thank them for-making the effort, even if it was quite a failure this year – I don’t necessarily know all the behind the scenes factors, although the conflicting/poor communications really didn’t put me in the best mood that night.
Next year there is a professional events coordinator being hired to help with the event, so hopefully this adds value in their experience handling logistics and catering to avoid a repeat of the issue.
On the plus side, for the limited time I spent up the mountain, I got some neat photographs (I *really* need to borrow Lisa’s DSLR rather than using my cellphone for this stuff) and spent some good time discussing life with friends lying on the grass looking at the stars after the sun went down.
Part of the old burnt-out observatory
Sun setting along the ridge.
What is it with geeks and blue LEDs? ;-)
The other perk from the penguin dinner was the AWESOME shirts they gave everyone in the conference as a surprise. Lisa took this photo when I got back to Sydney since she loves it [1] so much.
Paaaartay!
[1] She hates it.
Having reached mid-week, my morning wakeup is getting increasingly difficult from late nights, thankfully there were large amounts of deep fried potato and coffee readily available.
Breakfast of champions – just add cheese and it would be a meal.
Coffee Coffee Coffee Coffee Coffee Coffee Coffee Coffee Coffee
The day had some interesting talks, most of the value I got was out of the web development space:
Open source radio receiver with Android phone coupled.
users: delighted, presenter: smug :-P
Spot the possum!
With all the talks this week, I’m feeling particularly motivated to do some more development this week, starting with writing some new proper landing pages for some of my projects.
Playing with new HTML5/CSS3 effects having been inspired to upskill my web development skills.
The second day of linux.conf.au has been and gone, was another day of interesting miniconf talks and many geeky discussions with old and new friends.
Jethro: Booted, with the power of coffee!
The keynote was a really good talk by Radia Perlman about how engineers approach developing network protocols and an interesting talk of the history of STP and the designed replacement, TRILL. Great to see a really technical female keynote speaker at LCA this year, particularly one as passionate about her topic as Radia.
The conference WiFi is still pretty unhappy this year, I’ve been suffering pretty bad latency and packet loss (30-50%) most of the past few days – if I’ve been able to find an AP – seems they’re only located around the lecture rooms. Yesterday afternoon it seems to have started improving however, so it may be that the networking team have beaten the university APs into submission.
No internet makes sad Jethro sad. :'(
Of course, some of the projectors decided not to play nicely, which seems pretty much business as usual when it comes to projectors and functioning…. it appears that the projector in question would complain about the higher refresh rates provided by DVI and HDMI connected devices, but functioned correctly with VGA.
Someone did an interesting talk a couple of LCA’s ago on the issue, apparently many projectors lie about what their true capabilities are and request resolutions and refresh rates from the computer that are higher than what they can actually support, which really messes with any modern operating system’s auto-detection.
Lending my VGA enabled Thinkpad to @lgnome whist a @chrisjrn observes.
A startled @colmiga approaches!
Geeks listening intently to concurrent programming.
@lgnome pushing some crazy new drugs to all the kiddies
A few of my friends were delivering talks today, so I spent my time between the Browser miniconf and Open Programming miniconf, picked up some interesting new technologies and techniques to look at:
After that, dinner at one of the (many!) Asian restaurants in the area, followed by some delicious beer at the Wig and Pen.
Either I’ve already had too many beers, or there’s a giant stone parcel in my way.
Onwards to delicious geekiness!
Delicious hand pulled pale ale.
The beetroot beer is an interesting idea. But some ideas should just not be attempted. :-/
Native Australian night life! This little fellow was very up close and friendly.
Linux.conf.au native wildlife. ;-)
Another great day, looking forwards to Wednesday and the rest of the week. :-)
First proper day of linux.conf.au today, starting with breakfast and the quest of several hundred geeks to find and consume coffee.
Some of us went a bit overboard to get their exact daily coffee fix….
After acquiring coffee, we started the day with a keynote by the well known Bdale Garbee, talking about a number of (somewhat controversial) thoughts and reflections on Linux and the open source ecosystem in regards to the uptake by commercial companies.
Keynote venue.
Bdale raised some really good points, particularly how GNU/Linux isn’t a sellable idea to OEM vendors on cost – many vendors pay nothing for Microsoft licensing, or even make a profit due to the amount of preloaded crapware they ship with the computers. Vendors are unlikely to ship GNU/Linux unless there is sufficient consumer demand or feature set that makes it so good
My take on the talk was that Bdale was advocating that we aren’t going to win the desktop with a mass popularity – instead of trying to build a desktop for the average joe, we should build desktops that meet our own needs as power uses
It’s an interesting approach – some of the more recent endeavours with desktop developers has lead to environments that newer users like, but power users hate (eg GNOME 3), as a power user, I share this view, I’d rather we develop a really good power user OS, rather than an OS designed for the simplest user. Having said that, the nice thing about open source is that developers can target different audiences and share each other’s work.
Bdale goes on to state that the year of the Linux desktop isn’t relevant, it’s something we’re probably never going to win – but we have won the year of Linux on the mobile, which is going to replace conventional workstations more and more for the average use and become the dominant device used.
It’s something I personally believe as well, I already have some friends who *only* own a phone or tablet, instead of a desktop or tablet, and use it for all their communications. In this space, Android/Linux is selling extremely well.
And although it’s not a conventional GNU/Linux space we know and love and it still has it’s share of problems, a future where Android/Linux is the dominate device OS is much more promising than the current Windows/MacOS duopoly.
The rest of the day had a mix of miniconf talks – there wasn’t anything particularly special for me, but there were some good highlights during the day:
Overall it was a good first day, followed up by some casual drinks and chats with friends – thankfully we even managed to find an open liquor store in Canberra on a public holiday.
Poor @lgnome expresses his pain at yet another closed liquor store.
It’s time for the most important week of the year – linux.conf.au – which is being held in Canberra this year. I’m actually going to try and blog each day this year, unlike last year which still has all my photos in the “too be be blogged folder”. :-)
Ended up taking the bus down from Sydney to Canberra – at only around $60 and a 3 hour trip, it made more sense to take the bus down, rather than go through the hassle of getting to and from the airports and all the security hassles of flying.
Ended up having several other linux.conf.au friends on the bus, which makes for an interesting trip – and having a bus with WiFi and power was certainly handy.
I am geek, hear me roar!
Horrifying wail of the Aucklander!
The road trip down to Canberra wasn’t particularly scenic, most of the route is just dry Australian bush and motorways, generally it seems between city road trips in AU tend not to be wildly scenic unlike most of the ones I take in NZ.
Canberra itself is interesting, my initial thoughts on entering the city was that it’s kind of a cross between Rotorua and post-quake Christchurch – most of the city is low rise- 5-10 story buildings and low density sprawl, and extremely quiet with both the university and parliament on leave. In fact many have already commented it would be a great place to film a zombie movie simply due to it’s eerily deserted nature.
Considering it’s a designed city, I do wonder why they choose such a sprawled design, IMHO it would have been way better to have a very small high density tower CBD which would be easily walk-able and massive park lands around them. Canberra also made the mistake of not putting in light rail, instead relying on buses and cars as primary transport.
Neat fountain in town
The Aussies can never make fun of us Kiwis and sheep again… at least we don’t have THIS in our capital city O_o
Impressively large transmission tower for such a small city.
Once nice side of Canberra, is that with the sprawl, there tends to be a lot of greenery (or what passes for greenery in the aussie heat!) around the town and campus, including a bit of wildlife – so far I’ve seen rabbits, cockatoos, and lizards, which makes a nice change from Sydney’s wildlife viewing of giant rats running over concrete pavements.
Sqwark!
The evening was spent tracking down the best pub options near by, and we were fortunate enough to discover the Wig and Pen, a local British-style brewery/pub, with about 10 of their own beers on hand pulled taps. I’m told that when the conference was here in Canberra in 2005, the attendees drank the pub dry – twice. Hopefully they have more beer on stock this year.
First beer casualty from the conference – laptop being stood vertically to drain, whilst charging a cellphone.
Normally every year the conference provides a swag bag, typically the bag is pretty good and there’s usually a few good bits in there, as well as spammy items like brochures, branded cheap gadgets (USB speakers, reading lights, etc).
This year they’ve cut down hugely on the swag volume, my bag simply had some bathroom supplies (yes, that means there’s no excuse for the geeks to wash this week), a water bottle, some sunblock and the conference t-shirt. I’m a huge fan of this reduction in waste and hope that other conferences continue on with this theme.
Arrrrrr there be some swag me mateys!
The conference accommodation isn’t the best this year – it’s clean and functional, but I’m really not a huge fan of the older shared dorm styles with communal bathroom facilities, particularly the showers with their coffin-style claustrophobic feel.
The plus side of course, is that the accommodation is always cheap and your evenings are filled with awesome conversations and chats with other geeks.
Looking forwards for the actuals talks, going to be lots of interesting cloud and mobile talks this year, as well as the usual kernel, programming and sysadmin streams. :-)
It’s nearing that important time of year that the NZ-AU open source flock congregate that important and time honoured tradition of linux.conf.au. I’ve said plenty about this conference in the past, going to make an effort to write a lot more this year about the conference.
There’s a bit of concern this year that there might not be a team ready to take up the mantle for 2014, unfortunately linux.conf.au is a victim of it’s own success – as each year has grown bigger and better, it’s at the stage where a lot of volunteers consider it too daunting to take it on themselves. Hopefully a team has managed to put together a credible bid for 2014, it would be sad to lose this amazing conference.
As I’m now living in Sydney, I can actually get to this year’s conference via a business class coach service which is way cheaper than flying, and really just as fast once taking the hassles of getting to the airport, going through security and flying into account. Avoiding the security theatre is a good enough reason for me really – I travel a lot, but I actually really hate all the messing about.
If you’re attending the conference and departing from Sydney (or flying into Sydney from NZ to then transfer to Canberra), I’d also suggest this bus service – feel free to join me on my booked bus if you want a chat buddy:
The bus has WiFi and power and extra leg room, so should be pretty good if you want to laptop the whole way in style – for about $35 each way.
At linux.conf.au earlier this year, the guys behind Freetronics gave every attendee a free Leostick Arduino compatible board.
As I predicted at the time, this quickly became the gateway drug – having been given an awesome 8-bit processor that can run off the USB port and can provide any possibility of input/output with both digital and analogue hardware, it was inevitable that I would want to actually acquire some hardware to connect to it!
Beware kids, this is what crack looks like.
My background into actual electronics hasn’t been great, my parents kindly got me a Dick Smith starter kit when I was much younger (remember back in the day when DSE actually sold components! Now I feel old :-/) but I never quite managed to grasp all the concepts and a few attempts since then haven’t been that successful.
Part of the issue for me is I learn by doing and having good resources to refer to, back then it wasn’t so easy, however with internet connectivity and thousands of companies selling components to consumers offering tutorials and circuit design information, it’s never been easier.
Interestingly I found it hard to get a real good “you’re a complete novice with no clue about any of this” guide, but the Arduino learning resources are very good at detailing how their digital circuits work and with a bit of wikipediaing, got me on the right track so far.
Also not having the right tools and components for the job is an issue, so I made a decision to get a proper range of components, tools, hookup wire and some Arduino units to make a few fun projects to learn how to make this stuff work.
I settled on 3 main projects:
These cover a few main areas – to learn how to talk with one wire sensor devices, to earn how to use transistors to act as switches, to learn different forms of serial communication and to learn some new programming languages.
Having next to no current electronic parts (soldering iron, breadboard and my general PC tools were about it) I went down the path of ordering a full set of different bits to make sure I had a good selection of tools and parts to make most circuits I want.
Ended up sourcing most of my electronic components (resister packs, prototyping boards, hookup wire, general capacitors & ICs) from Mindkits in NZ, who also import a lot of Sparkfun stuff giving them a pretty awesome range.
Whilst the Arduinos I ordered supply 5V and 3.3V, I grabbed a separate USB-powered supply kit for projects needing their own feed – much easier running off USB (of which I have an abundance of ports around) than adding yet-another-wallwart transformer. I haven’t tackled it yet, but I’m sure my soldering skills will be horrific and naturally worth blogging about in future to scare any competent electronics geek.
I also grabbed two Dallas 1-wire temperature sensors, which whilst expensive compared to the analog options are so damn simple to work with and can be daisy chained. Freetronics sell a breakout board model all pre-assembled, but they’re pricey and they’re so simple you can just wire the sensors straight back to your Arduino circuit anyway.
Next I decided to order some regular size Arduinos from Freetronics – if I start wanting to make my own shields (expansion boards for the Arduinos), I’d need a regular sized unit rather than the ultrasmall Leostick.
Ended up getting the classic Arduino Eleven/Uno and one of the Arduino USB Droids which provide a USB Host port so they can be used with Android phones to write software than can interface with hardware.
After a bit of time, all my bits have arrived from AU and the US and now I’m already to go – planning to blog my progress as I get on with my electronics discovery – hopefully before long I’ll have some neat circuit designs up on here. :-)
Once I actually have a clue what I’m doing, I’ll probably go and prepare a useful resource on learning from scratch, to cover all the gaps that I found hard to fill, since learning this stuff opens up so many exciting projects once you get past the initial barrier.
Arduino Uno/Eleven making an LED blink. HIGH TECH STUFF ;-)
Push a button to make the LED blink! Sure you can do this with just a battery, switch and LED, but using a whole CPU to read the button state and switch on the LED is much geekier! ;-)
1-wire temperature sensors. Notably with a few more than one wire. ;-)
I’ll keep posting my adventures as I get further into the development of different designs, I expect this is going to become a fun new hobby that ties into my other two main interests – computers and things with blinky lights. :-)