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Darrick Wong: From Cake Wrecks:
I want me an edible car! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwBE1l6QexU
Val Henson: Liquid advice
I no longer bother taking my liquids out of my suitcase when going through security, and no one hassles me. The official word is that the TSA will gradually relax rules on liquids in carry-on baggage through 2010:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/28/liquid_restrictions_lifted/
But my friends and I have repeatedly gone through security with liquids (a) still in the bag, not in a separate bin, (b) larger than 3 oz. My suspicion is that the TSA just doesn't want to appear stupid for having made a huge fuss about liquids for no reason, so they've told screeners not to worry about them any more while keeping the official policy intact.
Standards probably still vary depending on the airport, but I've done this at SFO, Oakland, Las Vegas, and Islip, and I'm about to try Madison. Ooh, the suspense!!!
--Your friendly travel advice columnist.
Linux Plumbers Conf: Keynote Video Available
The Linux Plumbers Conference keynote address by Greg Kroah-Hartman is now available on Google Video. Greg’s introduction by James Bottomley is also available.
Other recordings were attempted during the conference but were unsuccessful due to a number of technical problems.
by Brandon Philips at November 11, 2008 06:52 AM
Val Henson: valhenson @ 2008-11-09T11:57:00
Inspired by Dave Miller's discovery of git-stash, I decided to make an effort to learn more about git, instead of learning just the bare minimum to get work done and holding the rest of it out at arm's length like a dead skunk. I found that git actually does a lot of the things I have been doing by hand with patch and diff on top of git, sometimes even in a more convenient and safer way! I still have a wish-list of features, but I feel confident that (a) they exist, and (b) someone (perhaps you!) will tell me how to use them.
I've found that my natural mental model for revisions is a stack of patches, and that I like the parts of git that just map directly to what I used to do by hand with patches or quilt (e.g., git-stash). This seems like a pointless tautology ("git is like automated patch management! Because source control is automated patch management!"), but it is meaningful because when I've used other source control systems, my mental model looked more like branches and sequential changesets and merges, whereas patches can be broken up, applied in different orders, etc.. Another handy patch-related feature I like (but haven't used yet) is git-add in interactive mode, which lets you mark only certain chunks of patches for commit instead of all the changes in a file. I can't say I'll miss hand-editing patches.
git-rebase is another feature I really, really needed, since I was going back and fixing in bugs in old commits so that I could then figure out where I'd introduced other bugs. Rebasing involves several different commands, all of which I simply copy verbatim from some random git HOWTO page. Something that causes me major stress during a rebase is that the elapsed time between the initial checkout and the rebase command is fairly long, and the only way I know what commit ID to start the rebase with is by searching my bash history (via Ctrl-R) for my last checkout command (and hoping that I am checking the right shell instance).
Another thing I couldn't figure out how to do efficiently during my commit grooming is to checkout the next patch ahead in the branch. So say you have commits A, B, C, D on this branch, where D is the HEAD, and you checkout B and run your regression test on it and it's fine, so then you want to checkout C next. The way I ended up doing this is checking out HEAD again, looking through the commit log, finding the commit I'd just checked out, finding the commit following, and checking out that commit id again. At one point, I thought I would be all smart and keep the output of a git-log in another window so I wouldn't have to do the checkout-HEAD part, but then I did a rebase and checked out a commit from the unrebased tree and spent a few minutes panicking over where my changes had disappeared to. Anyway, what I want is "git-checkout NEXT" - all the HEAD^^^ business wasn't working for me because I was about 10 patches deep, and then I have to count carets in my head, when I don't want to count, I just want the next patch in the sequence. (This is where I hope someone will leave a comment telling me how to do this while implying that I am a moron for not knowing already. Thanks in advance!) (Update: Yes, I know about the HEAD~5 syntax. No, it doesn't do what I want, I want NEXT.)
While I'm at it, WTF is with git-checkout and git-branch? git-checkout deals with checking out files, except when it deals with branches, and git-branch doesn't do everything you want to do with branches (in particular, checking them out). I still type "git-branch ", get an error, and just automatically retry with "git-checkout ", and vice versa.
After all this, I have to report that in general, using git still feels like wielding a 50-hp chain saw with no blade guard, except not as safe. And of course, this speaks for itself:
evilcat:~ val$ git-[TAB][TAB] Display all 137 possibilities? (y or n)*shudder*
Darrick Wong: Mundungus42 Please Read
:-D
http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/2008/11/ive-heard-of-death-taking-holiday-but.html
Twitter: @brampitoyo That is how the Linux Plumbers Conf worked- we called them micro-confs- and it was a fairly successful way of working. by philips (Brandon Philips)
Twitter: @brampitoyo That is how the Linux Plumbers Conf worked- we called them micro-confs- and it was a fairly successful way of working. by philips (Brandon Philips)
Sri Ramkrishna: Voted… last week :-)
Thanks to Oregon’s vote by mail system.. I turned in my vote early. This is an especially great election as this is the first time my wife will be able to vote in a presidential election. We had a great time picking what we wanted to vote yes or no to in the various bills. Oregon makes it so easy to do that.
I spent quite a bit of time canvassing for my president of choice. I don’t precisely do it to support my candidate, but like the candidates themselves I learn something about the people we share our country with. I get to listen to their stories, their hardships, their lives. It’s very inspiring especially when they open up and tell me why their voting. I talked to someone recently, a grandmother who was working at a hospital across town and has to get up at 5am so she can make it on time. She’s about 72 years old and she tells me she’s doing it so that she can support her grandson in med school and that’s why she’s sending money but can’t volunteer.
It’s my first time getting involved in a campaign. (I’m purposely not telling you who it is because it’ll detract from what I’m trying to say) and it feels good to be involved and informed. I’m proud to live here. Oregonians rock.
It’s been raining continously for the past couple of days. Today it was blue skies and sunshine. It’s going to be a beautiful day. Cheers.
by sri at November 04, 2008 06:31 PM
Andy Grover: Wow.
I watched this three times. Brilliant.
Originally published at Groveronline. Please leave any comments there.
Andy Grover: test
test crosspost to LJ?
Originally published at Groveronline. Please leave any comments there.
Greg KH: bti: tweets from the command line
A while ago I talked about piping all of my bash commands to twitter.com. I've kind of stopped doing that now, after I maxed out at over 14000 updates in about 2 weeks, but it was fun while it lasted.
But in order to do this kind of thing nicely, I ended up writing a command line program to make it easier. Some people have noticed it at times, by poking around in my kernel.org home directory, so I might as well announce the thing publicly.
So, consider this an announcement of the tool, bti. It allows you to send tweets to twitter.com or identi.ca directly from the command line from any Linux machine. It probably works on other systems as well, but you will have to tweak the Makefile yourself.
The latest version can always be found here.
The development for the tool is done in git, and the tree can be found on the ever-awesome github.com in this repository.
Stephen Hemminger: Netfilter workshop day 1
At netfilter workshop, Patrick McHardy described an exciting new feature implementation of netfilter firewalling called nftables. This has the promise of reducing 100's of netfilter modules down to a smaller kernel footprint, and allow for optimization of rulesets. Eric Leblond's blog has more information.
by Linux Network Plumber (noreply@blogger.com) at October 01, 2008 09:07 AM
Brandon Philips: FreedomHEC Taipei - November 20-21, 2008
Hot on the heals of LPC is another event I am helping to organize. 
If you are involved in Linux driver development please consider giving a talk at FreedomHEC Taipei.
FreedomHEC Taipei
FreedomHEC Taipei brings together experts in the Linux community with developers wanting to write Linux drivers for their hardware products. Taiwan is a leader in hardware component development and teams based in the country are building headlining devices such as the EeePC. Helping Taiwan developers learn the Linux development process will improve future hardware support in Linux.
- Who: Hardware engineers, driver developers, you.
- What: High-intensity learning, networking and Linux driver development unconference
- Where: Technical Service Building (14F., No.133, Sec. 4, Minsheng E. Rd., Taipei City 105, Taiwan, R.O.C. )
- When: November 20-21, 2008
- Why: Take control of your own destiny and make your hardware valuable to the Linux market.
The event is hosted by the Institute for Information Industry with support from the Linux Foundation.
by Brandon Philips at September 25, 2008 04:53 PM
Sri Ramkrishna: GNOME 2.24 release!!
GNOME 2.24 - teh Awesome!
Congratulations to everyone who worked so hard to get this release out. Especially the release team. You guys rock!!
Had a busy couple of weeks, putting on Linux Plumbers Conference An exciting time and it was great to meet old friends and new ones. I think we were able to get all the goals we wanted. It was amazing watching something from conception to execution. We didn’t have a lot of problems.
We’re hoping to plan next years soon and see if we can top what we had. Those of you I got to meet last week, it was great hanging out and I hope we get to do it again! Our community rocks! 
by sri at September 25, 2008 04:52 AM
Linux Plumbers Conf: Linux Plumbers Conf- huge success and looking to 2009
Linux Plumbers Conf was a huge success due to the huge effort put forth by the organizers and the great turnout of attendees. Thanks everyone!
For those who weren’t able to make it LWN has a collection of good wrap-up articles on the front page. Also, we will be posting videos of select talks in the next few days- keep an eye on this blog for details.
Looking towards LPC 2009
Next year we would like to get other people involved in the conference organization and planning. If you are interested in helping please register for the 2008 WRAP PARTY / 2009 Kickoff taking place this Friday September 26th from 6:00 pm - 10:00 pm at Portland’s Andina’s Restaurant - 2nd floor (above the restaurant).
by Brandon Philips at September 24, 2008 10:37 PM
Brandon Philips: Linux Plumbers Conf- huge success and looking to 2009
Linux Plumbers Conf was a huge success due to the huge amount of effort put forth by the organizers and the great turnout of attendees. Thanks to everyone!
A highlight of the conference, for me, was meeting some of the folks in the DVB/V4L community. This was the first time that this many core video developers were together in the same place and a lot was accomplished. There was discussion about the new DVB API for supporting new protocols, libv4l’s progress, routing APIs for future devices, and my discussion about a V4L server. Also, I found out that Mauro now works for Red Hat- which is great news for the subsystem.
For those who weren’t able to make it LWN has a collection of good wrap-up articles on the front page. Also, Sri is working on getting videos of the keynote and some other events up on the web. Keep an eye on LinuxPlumbersConf.org for those.
Looking to LPC 2009
Next year we would like to get other people involved in the conference organization and planning. If you are interested in helping please register for the 2008 WRAP PARTY / 2009 Kickoff this Friday September 26th from 6:00 pm - 10:00 pm at Andina’s Restaurant - 2nd floor (above the restaurant)
by Brandon Philips at September 24, 2008 06:27 PM
Greg KH: avi to ogg?
As many people have pointed out to me, the posting of the Linux Plumbers Conference keynote on Google Video makes it kind of hard to watch using "free" software. So I tried to work out how to convert the original file to .OGG format.
And I failed.
So, any hints? Someone did this last time around for me for my talk at Google, which can be seen in the fancy new "media" directory on kernel.org right here. I'll be glad to put up the keynote talk, and some other videos that I have of talks if I can get them converted.
Update: Lots of people have pointed me to the excellent ffmpeg2theora tool, which I'm now using to convert the videos. Thanks for all of the help, I really appreciate it. I'll have copies of the videos up soon...
Kristen Accardi: Mission Accomplished
for real.
I couldn’t have been happier with how the Linux Plumbers Conference went last week. I went back and looked at the original proposal that we had Arjan, Greg, and Randy present to the Linux Foundation, and we seem to have hit all our original goals. From conception we wanted this to be a “working” conference - and from the conversations in the hallways that I overheard, to the discussions in the microconfs that went on, I could see that people were indeed getting together, discussing issues and solving problems. Conferences require a lot of time, effort, and money to do right, and it’s gratifying to feel that something useful will come out of this.
I think that now I can go back to blogging about duck poo and vegetables.
by Kristen at September 22, 2008 09:50 PM
Stephen Hemminger: Open Source is alive and well in PDX thank you
I really should stop reading the Oregonian, they do such a poor job of covering high tech and the business section is especially weak. The recent piece about OSCON moving to Silly Valley overlooked so many obvious things like the Linux Plumber's Conference next week, the Kernel Summit not to mention the Open Source technology center, Oracle office in Portland, Portland State, and Free Geek. So the loss of one conference which is mostly attended by out of town people is really no impact on the local open source infrastructure.
by Linux Network Plumber (noreply@blogger.com) at September 12, 2008 04:28 PM
Sarah A Sharp: Student Day at Linux Plumbers Conference
For the past couple of months, I've been helping organize a student mini-conference for LPC, which will take place on September 16th. So far we only have 9 people registered for student day. We would like at least 15 students to make the student mini-conference a full-day event, and this week is the deadline for conference organizers to decide whether they need to scale back.
If you're a student, and you're even remotely interested in open source development, I suggest you take a look at the Linux Plumbers Conference Student Day page and register for the event.
Why is this event cool? As one project manager at IBM's Linux Technology Center said, "I would have killed for an experience like this as an undergrad. Students get to talk one-on-one with open source developers for a whole day, and then they get to go to Linux Plumbers Conference too! How could you pass that up?"
To some students, it may sound daunting. A whole conference full of professional open source developers? I was nervous when I went to my first Linux conference too. It was a small conference called FreedomHEC. I was really shy, but I (a lowly undergrad at Portland State) got to talk to Greg Kroah-Hartman (subsystem maintainer for USB and PCI) face to face. That's when I realized that open source developers are people too, and I could actually, like, talk to them.
Student registration is $50. (My friend Brandon, when asked if $50 was too expensive for students, said, "$50 is a new video game or a really hot Friday night date. It's not that much.") Registration is open to part-time and full-time undergraduates and graduate students, along with advanced high school students. (Trust me on the registration requirements, some portions of the LPC site haven't been updated with the new requirements yet.)
So you have no excuse not to attend! If you have any questions, feel free to email me personally. Otherwise, go register!
Zach Brown: propose a talk for LPC, come enjoy Portland
This weekend marks the deadline for submitting speaker proposals for the Linux Plumbers Conf. I figure that CRFS falls under the category of future Linux storage so I submitted a proposal to talk about it. If you have something that you'd like to discuss with your peers, and which falls ...
Sarah A Sharp: Dispelling a Linux Myth
Over the past week, I've run into two different people who expressed the same thought, "Linux lacks support for a lot of devices." I told them that this was a myth, and the Linux Driver Project has proven it is a myth.
Today I had an idea for a way to dispel this myth. I think someone should post a video of them walking into Circuit City, buying a random device, and walking out to their car. The video shows them configuring it on a Linux box and testing it. Then they would return the device and buy a new device. Buy, configure, return; repeat as necessary. The devices and configuration notes could be posted on the Linux Drivers Project wiki.
Now to find a decent videographer, buy a GSM data phone plan (for downloading packages and drivers in the car), and find some funding for devices that are non-returnable. In my copious spare time, of course.
Kristen Accardi: What is a Plumbers Conference?
After spending a few days manning the Plumbers booth at OSCON, I thought I’d post the answer to the question that everyone seemed to want to know - What is a Linux Plumbers Conference? We came up with the word “Plumbing” to describe the low level infrastructure of a Linux System. This includes the Kernel, desktop infrastructure like X and graphics libraries, system utilities like udev and hal, as well as essential libraries like glibc and friends. These components interface with each other at times - some better than others. We hope to provide a forum for people from these types of projects to get together and try to solve problems that are system wide or cross multiple project boundaries.
In addition to the topics to be discussed in the microconfs and the general talks (see http://linuxplumbersconf.org/program/schedule/), we will have “unconference” style talks. We have several smaller rooms available for people to get together and work out specifics, talk about something they didn’t get on the schedule, or have a group hug. These rooms can be reserved at the start of the conference.
August 18th the registration fee for Plumbers will increase to $300. If you haven’t already registered, what are you waiting for?
