I've been overwhelmed a bit by a head cold that sprung into life on Monday and am thinking at the speed of molasses. Turning lemons in lemonade, I spent today catching up on some reading and video watching (interspersed wtih napping). This meant I got around to watching some of the videos from a functional programming seminar given to Ericsson employee's last month, the full list of which are available on Ulf Wiger's blog.

The video I'd like to draw attention to is Simon Peyton Jones' initial talk (he gave two): Taming Effects - The Next Big Challenge. If you've ever wondered why functional programming might be relevant or why there it seems to be gaining more visibility on websites, this talk should provide some food for thought.

Simon is a fantastic speaker, providing you can keep up with somebody who speaks fairly fast. He always conveys a real enthusiasm for what he's talking about, looks very well prepared and manages to present complex things in a very simple fashion. He's one of the people I'm slowly trying to emulate in my own presentations, although I'm miles away at the moment. Simon's best known as one of the authors of Haskell and maintainer of the main Haskell compiler, GHC. However, you don't have to know Haskell to follow this talk; he introduces the necessary terminology as he goes along (that being said, some familiarity with programming is assumed).

One of the things I like in the introduction to this talk is pointing out that functional programming — results driven by data dependencies, rather than execution order — are actually really familiar to us all. It's how a spreadsheet works! This was also brought up in a presentation I referenced last year and I like the analogy a lot. Even when we're using procedural/imperative programming techniques we can benefit from understanding a functional approach to algorithms. This talk expands one aspect of that point: as we work with larger and larger data sets, we need to be more concerned about unintended and even intended side-effects.

Finally, if you're interested in a fairly fast-paced, but excellent introduction to Haskell, I would also recommend Simon's tutorial from last year's OSCON. Part 1 and Part II. It will take a bit of attention, reading of the slides and possibly some rewinding in places, but it's a very nice introduction to the language for programmers who may be familiar with other languages. Plus, who else uses the basics of an X windows manager as their example application?

Topics: technology/algorithms, conferences, software/haskell

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Things that happened at the conference since I last wrote. I flew back from Melbourne last night, missing out on the Open Day today, so this is only notes from the final day and some overall impressions.

Also, the talks are gradually being encoded and put up on the conference website in both video and audio format. I gather there are plugins around to let Windows users play ogg-style video, although I don't have any experience with it. Not sure if it's a case of "not yet" or a blunder that only half of my "stand up and blather" session is available, but it's hardly the most interesting thing there and it's impressive how fast the videos can be made available.

(For those wondering, "most interesting" might be Bdale Garbee's rocket talk, or Jon Corbet's State of Linux talk, or Stormy Peters' keynote or possible one I haven't managed to watch yet.)

(Read more...)

Topics: software/linux, conferences/linux.conf.au

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Melbourne airport's Qantas Club has free wifi, which is nice. However, all is not entirely sane in the network land:

...
Feb  1 18:24:36 lancre dhclient: bound to W.X.Y.Z -- renewal in 59 seconds.
...
Feb  1 18:25:35 lancre dhclient: bound to W.X.Y.Z -- renewal in 55 seconds.
...

and so on (public IP address changed to protect the innocent). Rinse, wash, repeat. I'm all for not tying up the network with unexpired leases that aren't being used, but 60 seconds seems a little eager. I'm just saying.

Topics: software/linux, conferences/linux.conf.au, technology/sysadmin

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[I'm quite behind on a lot this month, due to a bit of unforseen downtime, but I want to get this down whilst it's fresh.]

Currently at linux.conf.au, feeling a bit rushed, but enjoying it now I'm here.

Have my tutorial this morning and it seemed to go reasonably well. I realise as I was writing the slides last week that, as usual, I'd vastly overestimated the amount of stuff I'd be able to cover in 90 minutes. I miss the three hour tutorial slots we used to have at this conference. Still, enough people showed up that they were sitting in the aisles: always a good stroke for the ego.

My talk was nominally about website server performance and I tried to structure things to give people a sense of the problems they have to identify and face. The entire field is pretty large, so I stayed away from too many specifics and concentrate on the attitude and approach that is required to understand and solve problems. Although the slides won't make a lot of sense if you weren't at the talk, they're available online for those who did attend and want to remember which tools I mentioned.

The talk was video taped and they gave me a microphone this year (vast improvement on last year), so it should be available online eventually.

Somebody asked, quite reasonably, if I blogged about the stuff I was talking about and, indeed, I should do more of that stuff. There are a lot of examples of good problem solving, both pre-emptive and after the post facto changes that sites have made, both large and small. I'll try to write some articles about that sort of thing over the coming months. Sharing experiences in the sysadmin/operations arena seems to be a good way to get the knowledge spread around.

The conference generally has been fun, although I only flew down yesterday (missing the mini-conferences on Monday and Tuesday). It was nice to hear Stormy Peters speak at the keynote this morning. Not sure I entirely agree with her conclusions, but her groundwork was sound and it provided food for thought. Val Henderson's talk on her clusterfs project was worthwhile, too. She's a good presenter and filesystem theory and practice is full of interesting algorithms and data structures.

Oh, I was lucky enough to get an OLPC in the giveaway yesterday, so I now have a nice little XO to play with.

More later.

Topics: software/linux, conferences/linux.conf.au

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I forgot to mention this when I received the notification a few weeks ago: I'll be speaking at linux.conf.au next January, in Melbourne. Apparently (he says, quickly checking submission email) the tutorial is called "Memory-efficient and fast websites — pick two!" The full schedule of talks won't be up on the website until late-September, apparently, but I'll forget to mention it by then.

This keeps alive my 100% record of having submissions accepted for this particular conference(or maybe it's more than that, since I accidentally had a paper accepted for Brisbane in 2002, when I couldn't attend). :)

It's always a fun gathering, regardless of if I feel like attending lots of talks or just sitting around talking to people I've never met, or only get to see once a year. This year (in Sydney) i went to fewer talks than other years, but still had a great time because I got to talk to more people and learn stuff that way. If you're in the area, it's not a bad way to spend a week.

For people considering attending, there is also a nice collection of mini-conferences shaping up. These are one- or two-day ad hoc events held just prior to the main conference. Worth making time for if you're also coming to the main conference.

Topics: conferences/linux.conf.au

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(This a follow-up to this item, which may not have been syndicated to all the same places, since it isn't in exactly the same categories.)

Selected moments from the last couple of days of OSCON:

• The Python BOF on Wednesday night. Excellently moderated by David Goodger. Probably around 20 or so people there. Many being fairly experienced Python users. A general consensus that selling Python to the PHB level of management is still senselessly hard. It's almost an argument for certification. All involved in the hiring process seemed to agree that wouldn't change the way they hired, though. Teaching Python to good people is easy and Python's the type of language where you can get a good feeling about an existing developer's work in a number of ways. A piece of paper won't change that. Other topics including code organisation, other languages used, promoting certain packages as reference implementations were all interesting. Over two hours of good conversation (and beers).

• The Django BOF on the following night was well attended, too. Around 18 people, ranging from a few who were just starting out to some who were using it in high profile site. Conversation mostly driven by the more experienced users. I came away with a list of about 15 things that we can look at that I need to write up as an email to django-dev over the next day or two. Hallway conversation after the hour-long BOF went for another 90 minutes with a different group of people.

• A talk on 37signals' experiences with using Amazon's S3 for mass storage was interesting. Mostly it was a litany of woes about "what can go wrong will", but it provided some very constructive lessons learnt about the extra work you have to do and expectations if you're going to hitch your business implementation to something like S3.

• r0ml is a very entertaining speaker and I enjoy hearing him talk. Always something to learn about presentation. However, his point and generally excellent arguments are sometimes obscured by his entertainment style and this is a shame. It took a lot of work to sort wheat from chaff in his Preventing Code presentation.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman's talk on the state of the Linux kernel in 2007 will be useful as data for the future. He's done a lot of crunching of numbers with regards to number of contributors (including nice chart), number of lines of code, proportion of change in various subsystems, and so forth. The simple conclusion is that anybody trying to maintain a parallel branch of the kernel is looking impossibility in the face. Pushing things into the mainline is the only way to go, because it's just too frantic. And yet, the system mostly works. The kernel remains healthy and solid.

• Having contact with other Django developers and users during the day was very motivating. I got a lot of coding done during downtime between talks and in the evening back at the hotel. Some big ticket items, too (since the little ticket stuff tends to take care of itself).

The last few days have been a bit of a blur, so there might be an OSCON, part III post once my brain settles down and organises things.

Mostly recovering today and doing very little. Off to New York City tomorrow to enjoy ... I don't know ... stuff. Weather. Central Park. Manhattan Restaurants. Things like that.

Topics: software/django, conferences/OSCon, travel

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OSCON has been a blast so far. Been good to meet up with a few people I only see once a year or so, as well as meet some people who were previously only names on mailing lists.

Had a few good conversations with Jacob, Simon and Jeremy (Dunck), amongst others about some broader Django issues and design things. So much easier to thrash out the early details face-to-face before writing up a more reasoned presentation for the mailing list.

Entering the US was not the most pleasant part of the trip. Took an inordinate amount of time to complete the queue-and-shuffle dance through immigration. Increased terror scare levels or something. Lots of questions about my intentions, return date, etc — and it wasn't just me; everybody was getting the extra attention, so it took a lot longer than normal.

Still... here now. Recovered (mostly) from the trip. Enjoying the food, conversations and company. Lots of fun. :-)

Topics: conferences/OSCon, travel

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For a couple of weeks, I've been trying to decide whether to attend OSCON this year. Combining air travel, conference fee, hotel, food, etc, it's by no means a cheap gig. On the other hand, most of my Open Source work is with people in other countries and conferences like this are a rare chance to catch up with old friends and meet new people doing interesting things.

Today was Make A Decision day and the decision is "go"!

No backing out now: conference attendance is booked. So, July 23 - 27 I will be joining all the other crazies in Portland for hopefully a good time.

Topics: conferences/OSCon

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The proceedings of a 2005 conference, "Open Content Licensing: Cultivating The Creative Commons", held at Queensland University of Technology are now available.

I've only read a few articles so far, but the contents look interesting and read well. I originally noticed this via Glynn Moody's "open..." blog and he made a throwaway remark wondering why it took so long to produce. These are well-edited articles. Given the caliber of the speakers (some law professors, judges, lawyers, ...), it's not surprising they are busy people, so a bit of time for the back-and-forth is not unexpected. The results seem worth the wait.

One thing I did note about the list of speakers, though: nobody that I recognised as representing the Australian Open Source community. Yes, Open Source development is not the same as Creative Commons production, but Open Source contributors do generate both a lot of Creative Commons content and tools for working with said content. They aren't completely disjoint fields.

Topics: law/Australia, conferences

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Been enjoying attending linux.conf.au this week, in between a few other commitments.

As I wrote about previously, the conference organisers made a few changes to the traditional schedule this year, moving some of the keynotes to odd days and putting the tutorials in the midst of the talks. By and large, the changes have worked, although for any organiser reading this, I have some feedback to send in tomorrow.

Gave my Django tutorial today. It was not the greatest tutorial I have ever given, but it wasn't too bad in the end. I would have preferred more than just 90 minutes, since giving a real tutorial (rather than just a quick overview) can take some time. Feedback from the audience afterwards (just chatting to people in the afternoon) was positive and it seems like I've encouraged a few more people to take the plunge and see what we're doing in Django land.

For those who attended the talk, I have, as promised, put up the slides and example code. Those slides probably won't make a lot of sense to people not at the talk; I have grown tired of putting everything on the slide and prefer to be able to talk and wave my hands around a bit to get the message across. The tutorial was recorded to DVD, although there was no microphone at my podium, so I'm not sure if the sound carried to the camera microphone. If the video does turn out to be reasonable, I'll post a link here. Nothing really special was presented, since this was a beginner/introductory tutorial, but we had some fun and nobody threw fruit.

Been going mad taking photographs. Some of the more acceptable efforts are now in a Flickr set.

For other photos from the conference, look for the lca2007 tag on Flickr. More blog postings from attendees at Planet linux.conf.au.

Topics: software/django, conferences/linux.conf.au

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