possum | Jethro Carr

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:

Andy Fitzsimon did an interesting presentation on design and how to approach designing applications or websites and the terminologies that developers use.
Sarah Sharp presented on “vampire mice” – essentially a lot of USB devices don’t correctly obey the USB power suspend options, the result is that by enabling USB suspend for all your devices and disconnecting those that don’t obey, considerable power can be saved – one audience member found he could save 4W by sleeping all his USB devices. I also discovered that newer versions of Powertop now provide the ability to select particular USB devices for power-save mode.
There was a really good talk by Joel Stanley, probably one of the most interesting talks that day, on how they designed and built some hardware for doing digital radio transmissions using a radio circuit connected into an Android phone and the challenges encountered of doing hardware integration with Android.
We had an update on IPv6 adoption by Geoff Huston – sadly as expected, we’re dangerously low on IPv4 space, yet IPv6 adoption isn’t taking place particularly quickly either, with Internode still being the only major AU ISP with dual stacked addressing for consumers. On a side note, really awesome to see a former keynote presenter come back as a regular presenter and make a talk, having community engagement really adds to my respect for them.
My friend Adam Harvey did another awesome web development talk, this time presenting on some of the new CSS3 techniques including animation and transitions with some demonstrations on how these can work.

Open source radio reciever with Android phone coupled.

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:

Adam Harvey’s PHP talks were great as usual, always good to get an update on the latest developments in the PHP world.
Francois Marier from Mozilla NZ presented on Content Security Policy, a technique I wasn’t aware of until now. Essentially it allows you to set a header defining which sites should be trusted as sources of CSS, Javascript and image content, allowing a well developed site to be locked down to prevent many forms of XSS (cross site scripting).
Francios also spoke briefly about HTTP Strict Transport Security, a header which can be used by SSL websites to fix the long standing problem of users being intercepted by a bad proxy and served up a hacked HTTP-only version of the website. Essentially this header tells your browser that your site should only ever be accessed by HTTPS – anything that then directs your browser to HTTP will result in a security block, protecting the user, since your browser has been told that the site should only ever be SSL from it’s previous interaction. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great step forwards, as long as the first connection is made on a trusted non-intercepted link, it makes man-in-the-middle attacks impossible.
Daniel Nadasi from Google presented on AngularJS, a modern Javascript framework suitable for building complex applications with features designed to reduce the complexity of developing the required Javascript.

After that, dinner at one of the (many!) Asian restaurants in the area, followed by some delicious beer at the Wig and Pen.