Daily Archives: November 8, 2010

Network, Web

Future transports

On Sunday morning during FSCONS 2010, in the room “Torg 4 South” I did a 30 minute talk about a few future, potentially coming network protocols for transport. A quick look at the current state, some problems of today and 4 different technologies that have been and are being developed to solve the problem.

I got a fair amount of questions and several persons approached me afterwards to make sure they got a copy of my slides.

The video recording is hopefully going to be made available later on, but until then you can read the slides below and imagine my Swedish  accent talking about these matters!

Future transports

You can also download the slides directly as a PDF.
IT Politics, Open Source

FSCONS 2010 day 2

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[continued from FSCONS 2010 day 1]

With the previous night’s social event ending fairly late and involving a fair amount of good beers, it was nice to be able to sleep in a bit and have one of those great hotel breakfasts in a slow and relaxed manner.

I then checked out from the hotel and walked over to the venue, this time not as mislead by google maps’ directions as I was yesterday.

The economics of open innovation and FOSS. was the first session I attended and the talker Karthik Jayaraman did a good job of explaining and showing how things can happen fast and why and he did some interesting predictions of the future.

I followed Kathik’s talk in the same room with my 30 minute session Future transports in which I discussed and explained a bit about transport protocols today and what might come tomorrow.

Glyn Moody is a bit of a celebrity (he has for example written several books) and you can tell he’s done this before. He’s an excellent speaker and as he’s a native English person he has a bit of an edge compared to most speakers at this conference. Mr Moody got the biggest room at FSCONS filled up to the last available chair and there were still a bunch who had to sit on the floor.

Glyn talked about Ethical Monopolies, the history of patents and copyright and how they have changed and how they today no longer are even close to having the purposes they were created for.

He advocates that we stop talking about “Intellectual Properties” but instead refer to them as “Intellectual government-granted monopolies” as that is a much better use of words when these subjects are brought up. The ordinary person thinks people should be able to keep properties, but would in many cases object to (more) monopolies.

The last session I got to enjoy this year was Mikael von Knorring’s “Who are the free users” which did present a good view of things but I wasn’t very focused during the talk so I’ll refrain from judging it in any direction.

I took a last stroll over to the cafeteria area where I found some friends, said hello and good bye and then I took off towards the train station and my 3+ hours train ride back to Stockholm on the other coast of Sweden. (It could be noted that I left early, there were at least two session slots that I missed.)

My head is packed with impressions. I met lots of great people and friends, both old and many new ones. We had awesome discussions and I hope at least some of the ideas that were brought up will be turned into reality. I will post more about those here if/when they happen.

The future for Free Software (in the Nordic region) is bright!

cURL and libcurl, Network

Scalable application layer transfers

At FSCONS 2010 I had the pleasure to do a talk about how to make your client-side networking applications really scale when upping the number of simultaneous connections. Including some details that libcurl will support you all the way!

My talk was named “Scalable application layer transfers” and the slides from it is available online. See below. Hopefully the video recording of it will appear later and I’ll post a  follow-up then. A little extra bonus material as background would be my poll vs select vs event-based article.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the room was shock full when I started preparing my equipment for the talk since the session before me was a keynote, but by the time I actually starter presenting there were only the limited set of hardcore geeks left.

In the FSCONS program there were several talks over the weekend about women in FOSS and so on, while I on the other hand certainly only contributed to enforcing the stereotypes by being white, male, middle-aged, very techy and I delivered my two speeches for audiences in which I believe not a single woman attended. Whether I am part of the problem or the solution we can discuss in a separate post later on… 🙂

Scalable application layer transfers

Open Source

FSCONS 2010 day 1

07:02: The alarm of my mobile never rang, because I was already up. I got to play with my two kids a while before the taxi arrived to pick me up at 07:30.

The X2000 train from Stockholm to Göteborg took off exactly on schedule and we were off. I learned that the on-board Internet service wasn’t possible to sign on to with Chrome but I had to fire up my good old Firefox for it. Going with first class X2000 offer free Internet all the way, and free coffee. Two of my favorite frees.

The train arrived only 10 minutes late in Gothenburg. I took a taxi over to my hotel, checked in, put my smaller laptop in my backpack and walked over to the FSCONS venue.

After having had lunch and caught up with some friends, I sat down in the big audience listening to the presentation about the Inhana project, by Kyrah. Interactive storytelling and about helping female artists in Syria to play/work with technology in the form av Arduino boards.

Kyrah had the room full. Not that many remained when I entered the stage after her and did my talk on scalable application layer transfers.

I followed up with a cup of coffee after some private discussions on SCTP and how to do fast transfers in the Tor project and then I headed towards the talk about data structures in the Linux kernel by Allesandro Rubini.

Mr Rubini is a long-time involved Linux kernel hacker (and well known co-author of the Linux Device Drivers bible) and in a very casual and effective style he taught us how we can use regular Linux code for lists and trees in a GPL licensed project and how the clever container_of macro works. To me, its biggest drawback is that it relies on a gcc-specific feature: typeof(), but otherwise it is a beautiful craftsmanship.

Allesandro brought down the biggest spontaneous applause when he responded to someone’s question “but couldn’t you also do this using templates in C++?” by suitably and appropriately bashing C++…

.Allesandro Rubini

Anders Arnholm followed along in the embedded track and he talked about using Linux in the automotive world and I think many of us thought the best part of his talk was the numbers and comparisons he had when trying different flash file systems to increase boot performance and really cut down startup time to a minimum. The initial kernel startup time was 6 something seconds when using JFFS2 and they managed to get down to below 200 milliseconds with the use of the AXFS (Advanced XIP Filesystem, where XIP is short for execute in place).

Anders Arnholm

boot-times-axfs

… after Anders’ talk I followed the crowds, got a seat in a bus and we were transported over to the social event. I mentioned a little bit about that in my previous post, the award for me.

My FSCONS 2010 day 2 entry will be posted within shortly.