Tag Archives: talk

cURL and libcurl, Network, Open Source

Daladevelop hackathon

On Saturday the 13th of September, I took part in a hackathon in Falun Sweden organized by Daladevelop.

20-something hacker enthusiasts gathered in a rather large and comfortable room in this place, an almost three hour drive from my home. A number of talks and lectures were held through the day and the difficulty level ranged from newbie to more advanced. My own contribution was a talk about curl followed by one about HTTP/2. Blabbermouth as I am, I exhausted the friendly audience by talking a good total of almost 90 minutes straight. I got a whole range of clever and educated questions and I think and hope we all had a good time as a result.

The organizers ran a quiz for two-person teams. I teamed up with Andreas Olsson in team Emacs, and after having identified x86 assembly, written binary, spotted perl, named Ada Lovelace, used the term lightfoot and provided about 15 more answers we managed to get first prize and the honor of having beaten the others. Great fun!

Linux, Open Source

Rpi night in GBG

pelagicore logo

Daniel talking So I flew down to and participated at yet another embedded Linux hacking event that was also co-organized by me, that took place yesterday (November 20th 2013) in Gothenburg Sweden.

The event was hosted by Pelagicore in their nice downtown facilities and it was fully signed up with some 28 attendees.

I held a talk about the current situation of real-time and low latency in the Linux kernel, a variation of a talk I’ve done before and even if I have modified it since before you can still get the gist of it on this old slideshare upload. As you can see on the photo I can do hand-wavy gestures while talking! When I finally shut up, we were fed tasty sandwiches and there was some time to socialize and actually hack on some stuff.

Embedded Linux hackers in GBG

I then continued my tradition and held a contest. This time I did raise the complexity level a bit as I decided I wanted a game with more challenges and something that feels less like a quiz and more like a game or a maze. See my separate post for full details and for your chance to test your skills.

This event was also nicely synced in time with the recent introduction of the foss-gbg mailing list, which is an effort to gather people in the area that have an interest in Free and Open Source Software. Much in the same way foss-sthlm was made a couple of years ago.

Pelagicore also handed out 9 Raspberry Pis at the event to lucky attendees.

IT Politics, Open Source

RMS in Sthlm

2 Comments

Claes and I started the foss-sthlm initiative a while ago, back in 2009. I’m sure I’ve mentioned that before. We’ve since then done a series of events where we’ve gathered foss hackers from the Stockholm region to speak about Free Software and Open Source for people interested in these issues. We’ve had 100+ persons attend to every event and I’ve considered them successful beyond our wildest expectations. Me and Claes originally expected to gather around 30 persons or so…

Interested?

So out of the blue I got a question from Giuseppe (who were talking to RMS at the time) if foss-sthlm/me would be interested in organizing an event in Stockholm with mr Stallman. It turned out mr Stallman was already considering coming to FSCONS in Gothenburg and when doing so he was looking around to see if he could do some more talks while in Sweden. Given this chance, I simply couldn’t turn it down!

We coordinated with our pals behind FSCONS (the lovely crew at FFKP) so that we would jointly fund the event. We would split the bill for getting mr Stallman here and onward again to his subsequent gig, and the cost for his travel between Stockholm and Gothenburg.

How many?

Ironically, we already before had talked about not getting one of these super celebs to foss-sthlm events simply because of their immense popularity and the problem to get facilities to host events with them. How many would come to an RMS talk? I guessed at least 300 since among our previous events the most popular one got around 150 visitors.

How to get a place?

Commercial rooms for at least 300 people are expensive and luckily we quite soon got in touch with friends at KTH in Sweden – The Royal Institute of Technology, and they graciously offered to sponsor a room for 500. Awesome, we were on our way!

Sponsors?

South Pole didn’t hesitate when I asked them (you rock, Jakob!), but immediately said they’d help us to sponsor the event. With them on board, we had all the financial stuff we needed covered and we could say “full steam ahead!” to everyone involved .

Fiddle like crazy

FSCONS had a fixed date for their conference already, but when would RMS come to Stockholm? After FSCONS or before? When would we be able to reserve the room and how would it all fit into RMS’s schedule of other things. Several times we thought we had nailed it when something changed and we had to redo it all again. It took a good amount of emails back and forth until we finally scheduled and decided that he’d be in Stockholm first and then go FSCONS.

Open for registrations!

We went public about RMS coming to Sweden coordinated with FSCONS so that none of us would take advantage of this on the others’ expense. On September 27th 13:22 we told everyone about it, and within less than eleven (11) hours all 500 seats in the room had been reserved!

Oops, full already

Wow. That was a bit overwhelming and not quite what I had expected. A bit tough, but well our room only fits 500 so…

Find a new place

Friendly people on the foss-sthlm list very soon mentioned a new, much larger, facility that perhaps could be possible to host Stallman’s talk. The huge Aula Magna room. I was a bit pessimistic about it, as I was just so happy already with having gotten a fine sponsorship for that first room.

New place, new sponsor

What are friends for? I can hardly describe it, but we have good friends in good places and wow, not many days passed until I got the excellent news that the Stockholm University‘s department for Computer and System’s Sciences would help us get the room and pay the bill for it. This massive room fits 1194 sitting visitors. (Thanks Beatrice, you’re awesome!)

More tickets

Amazingly enough, it was just a matter of time until we ran out of tickets again. Sure, this time there were tickets available for a longer time but well over a week before the RMS talk there were again no tickets available. The demand was still clearly very high. When the event was just a few days away, we sent out reminder emails and we got lots of ticket cancellations, perhaps 60-70 of them, and the tickets that were returned were immediately made available again on the ticket site and were soon signed up for again by other lucky souls.

When we closed the registration, there were just a few tickets still available. 1180 or so had been registered to listen to Richard M Stallman talk in Stockholm, a dull and grey November day 2011.

The speech

Richard is a charismatic person. He can speak to a huge audience for almost two hours, with no slides and no images and no script and still keep us all alert and interested. He mixes in dry humor and reflects back and recites episodes from previous speeches from time to time.

The topic was of course Free Software. About doing the right thing. About freedom and how you need to be prepared to sacrifice some things in order to gain and fight for freedom. For mr Stallman things are often black/white. It is either free and therefore right and fine, or it isn’t free and therefore morally wrong and a bad idea. He also spent quite a lot of time explaining why calling it GNU/Linux is the right thing and how mr Torvalds doesn’t care about the ethics and about doing the right thing for humanity.

I’ve been involved in Free Software (and in Open Source too, a term that RMS despises and encourages us all not to use) for many years but this was actually the first time I heard RMS talk live.

Thanks

This would not have been such a smooth ride with the efforts of Giuseppe, Claes and the eager help and assistance from all friends in #foss-sthlm. Thank you!

(The pictures in this blog entry are all CC-BY-SA licensed and are taken by Kjell Ericson)

Network

Hear me talk at FSCONS 2011

1 Comment

First, allow me to mention that I like FSCONS. I’ve been there several years, I’ve spoken there every year I’ve been there and I know and like a bunch of the persons in the team putting it together. Good stuff!

I wasn’t supposed to do any talk at FSCONS this year, and I did feel a little empty and lost because of it.

FSCONS… then an empty slot appeared, a question was asked, a subject was suggested and suddenly I ended up having agreed to do a talk and the void has been filled again. I’m glad. I hope someone else will be too and I will try to excite the audience with a talk titled “SPDY: An experimental protocol for a faster web” or something like that. It will have to do for now. It is currently planned to take place at 17:15 on Saturday 12th of November.

My thinking is to explain SPDY in detail, explain the reasoning behind it, the problems that have lead up to its creation and I’ll try to shed the lights on the alternatives and make some guesses what I think the future will hold in terms of web transports and what we will NOT see… I might even manage to acquire further insights of this from my ventures into libspdy.

If you have any related thoughts or questions, feel free to ask me ahead of time and I might be able to adjust my talk for it.

Open Source

RMS to Stockholm – November 8th

1 Comment

On November 8th 2011, foss-sthlm has the honors of welcoming Richard M Stallman to Stockholm and we invite you all to come and listen to what he has to say. RMS, as he is commonly known, is of course the founding father of both GNU and FSF and he has served his role of non-compromising believer in and the torch-bearer of the Free Software movement ever since he started it.

Date: November 8
Time: 18:00
Where: Aula Magna at Stockholm University

To get to enjoy this talk, and to be able to perhaps ask a question of your own, you must register and book your seat. You do this by going to the foss-sthlm nov2011 web page and reading the instructions.

We have this required booking concept for this only to make sure that we don’t overbook the room. Please make sure that you “return” tickets that you won’t use. Please help us pull this event through in an excellent manner.

This event is made possible thanks to our sponsors South Pole AB and DSV. We arrange this in cooperation with the great FSCONS team.

Update: we switched to a much bigger place!

Network

Future transports, the video

The talk I did at FSCONS 2010 titled “Future Transports” has now been made available online and you can see the whole thing. It is split up in three separate video snippets. Click on the picture below to get started:

fscons2010-futuretransports

I originally put the videos embedded here on my blog, but it turned out to be a really certain way to kill Firefox so it turned out to be annoying. Now you’ll instead get handed over to the video on vimeo’s site.

cURL and libcurl, libssh2, Network

Fosdem 2011: my libcurl talk on video

1 Comment

Kai Engert was good enough to capture all the talks in the security devroom at Fosdem 2011, and while I’m seeding the full torrent I’ve made my own talk available as a direct download from here:

Fosdem 2011: security-room at 14:15 by Daniel Stenberg

The thing is about 107MB big, 640×480 resolution and is roughly 26 minutes playing time. WebM format.