First ASUS day of OpenTechSummit Taipei

As I might have indicated before, I have the pleasure of being invited to the OpenTechSummit 2008 in Taiwan. Two days ago, I was at the opening dinner. The problem of that dinner was the lack of attendees. There were loads of delicious (free, sponsored) food, but not even remotely enough people to eat it.

Today I had a bit of a problem finding the ASUS venue, since it was said to be at "exit 2" of the MRT station. Unfortunately it had two exits of that name, one on each side of the station :)

One presentation there I found particularly embarrassing was the one about the eePC SDK. First of all, I will ignore my thoughts about why you actually need such an SDK if it really is nothing more than a customized Debian Linux with Eclipse. But even then, why fly in a foreing speaker to do a click-by-click walk-thhrough on how to create a 'hell world' Qt program using eclipse?

My favourite of the day was definitely the presentation on the OpenPattern router board.

Review of DORS/CLUC 2008 in Zagreb, Croatia

I've spent the last five days in beautiful Croatia - most of the time in its capital Zagreb. The local conference DORS/CLUC has been around for a couple of years, and in fact I've been at a previous incarnation three years ago.

It's a nice, small but great event. And in fact, for the invited speakers as myself it feels more like an all-inclusive holiday than a conference. The organizers went out of their way to make us feel at home, including a trip to the waterfalls of Plitvice national park (photos will be available shortly at my public photo album.

It was also great to spend some time with Alan Cox again, who to my surprise was also attending the event with two lectures. Hope his luggage didn't get lost again on his way home...

Thoughts on FOSDEM 2008

I really have been disappointed quite a bit with my visit to FOSDEM this year. In fact, many of my observations might actually apply to Brussels as a whole, I really don't know.

It all started with arriving at Bruxelles Central station on friday, where the entire station was so crowded it took me ages to fight my way through the crowds. Then something like only the fourth idle cab driver was willing to actually take us to the hotel. The others for whatever reason didn't want to earn those 15 EUR. Aren't there some regulations forcing them to transport paying passengers?

Then, let's talk about the social event on friday. How can you hold such an event in a place that's about one third of the required size, and which has a music volume level that effectively prevents any form of communication. I left after about 10 minutes there, since there just was no point at all. One wonders what happens if there is a fire. Aren't there some kind of regulations of the max number of people you are allowed to cram into tiny places like that pub?

At the conference venue the problem seemed to re-occur. All the rooms are significantly too small. Combined with the lack of ventilation and the lack of a PA system it was not possible to stand more than a single talk in the X.org devroom, before I had to get out to get fresh air.

Getting in and out of the DevRooms is also a challenge by itself, since the hallways are over-crowded and full of noisy and loud conversations. Opening the door for even a small amount of time is barely impossible, since that would expose the talk on the inside to the enormous noise levels on the hallway. Especially since the DevRooms don't have any PA system, it's already quite a challenge to understand the speaker inside the room. Somebody opening the door just completely kills the communication flow

The entire idea of putting up all the projects with tables in the hallways seems questionable to me. They do nothing but block the path for other people (also blocking emergency escape paths). Furthermore, cold air gets in all the time since many people have to use the doors in order to walk between the different buildings. It would make much more sense to keep the hallways for what they are: Ways where people walk between rooms. The project tables should be inside rooms. Those rooms would self-contain the noise generated by the tables, be more comfortable (warm, no wind) and keep the hallways free for people to walk on.

The same problem exists for the "BAR" where you get food and drinks. It's too small, too crowded, and absolutely not comfortable at all (cold wind coming in through the permanently open doors, ...)

And then consider the public transport "performance" on weekends. It took me regularly more than an hour for something that was a 2.6km distance between hotel and venue. That's quite ridiculous. Given how crammed those few trams are that actually run, it doesn't seem to be a shortage of passengers that makes them operate so few trains per hour.

All in all, I could not do anything else but to attribute FOSDEM 2008 as something like "the most inefficient event", i.e. where I wasted a lot of time for reasons stated above, rather than actually attending lectures.

Day one of FOSS.in

It was a great first day at FOSS.in 2007. It's been surprisingly quiet at the venue today, compared with the previous incarnations of the event. This is due to the changed structure, in which the first two days are focused "project days" and the main conference only starts on day three.

This does by no means imply that the project days are less important, or that the lower number of people is bad. Quality matters, not quantity. And since the event is about contributions, project days are a very important addition to FOSS.in

I spent most of the day talking to Rusty and James. It has been quite nice and I now have learned about Rustys new exciting CCAN project. As a long-time perl developer (I have leanred Perl before C!), I definitely understand the beauty of something like CPAN. With C however, the hardest issue will be resolving the namespace problem. Unfortunately I am currently not in the mood of adding even more unfinished things to my task list.

Looking forward to FOSS.in

In a few days FOSS.in 2007 will start. I'm departing from Germany on Monday next week. I have a ton of things to do until then, including a trip to my family in Nuernberg on Friday,, visiting a industrial festival in Chemnitz on Saturday and packing my suitcases on Sunday ;)

So this will be the fifth year in a row that I visit Bangalore in late November/early December for the event formerly known as Linux Bangalore. What once started like a crazy reason for visiting India the first time (after enjoying Indian food and bollywood music from Germany for a couple of years), has turned into a regular mark in every years' calendar for me.

I've been told that FOSS.in this year will be very different from all the previous events. The focus has been shifted from doing just another round of 'this is free software and this is how to use it' event, the focus is now entirely on the community developer.

India still has, to my deep regret, shown relatively few significant contributors to Free Software - especially if you relate it to the size of the IT industry and the number of people working as software engineers in that country. Thus, I very much welcome any effort to nurture and foster the active, contributing part of the FOSS community there.

Meanwhile, the Schedule has been published by the organizers. Looking at the speakers and topics covered, it definitely looks more than promising!

Also: My openmoko-induced absence to the major Linux events in Europe and Canada have resulted in a way too long time since I've last met Rusty and James, my former fellow netfilter/iptables hackers :) Make sure you don't miss any of Rusty's talk. It's going to be fun :) And be prepared to switch your brain's English parser into high-speed mode :)

As a final side note: I'm happy to learn today that my application for a five year visa to India has been granted. During the last five years, I had to obtain a total of seven 6months visas - sufficient evidence to support my argument in favor of a 5 year visa.

FOSS.in 2007 Call for Participation

The Call for Participation of this years incarnation [it's in India, after all] of FOSS.in has just been released.

This is great news. I've cut down on all other events this year: I haven't visited at OLS, LinuxConf Europe, linux.conf.au, ... Only FOSS.in I really cannot miss ;)

I haven't yet decided on the exact title of the lecture that I'm interested to submit, but it seems like I'll have to decide soon. It will be OpenMoko related, that's for sure ;)

If you have worked on something exciting in the FOSS world, please don't hesitate and submit it to the FOSS.in/2007 CfP. It's a great event with a very technical audience. And an ideal opportunity to catch a glimpse of India :)

Secure Linux Administration Conference

Just one day after returning from India, I'll be one of the first speakers on the first day of Secure Linux Administration Conference (SLAC), where I'll be talking about hardware selection and low-level tuning for achieving best Linux networking performance.

Stupid extreme AC has made me sick again

Just like the 2003/2004, the insane amount of air condition at J N Tata Auditorium has made me catch a cold once again. This is not a surprise, considering that I had a hard time typing while sitting in there, having to regularly warm up my fingers by sitting on my hands.

This is just something that I will never understand. When there's a reasonable, comfortable temperature outside (let's say 25 degrees Celsius), why would you ever do more than just exchange the air inside the hall (e.g. just blow air from the outside into the room, and remove 'used air')? Of what use is it to chill the room down to sub-20 degrees?

Interestingly, a lot of Indian people seem to be used to it, since they were wearing short-sleeved shirts, while we were freezing even wearing t-shirt plus long-sleeved shirt...

This consumes _a lot_ of energy. The AC in the main hall is at least in the order of 30..50 kW, if not more. No wonder that India wants more nuclear power plants. I don't want to imagine the amount of power consumption by ACs nationwide.

Some ventilation is more than efficient in many cases. Even during two weeks of Kerala in March this year, I was using the AC only once at a single hotel.

Please, think twice before using an AC or even turning it to ridiculous amounts. Is the energy waste and increased health risks (think of not regularly cleaned filters, etc) really worth a slight increase in comfort? How weak have we become if we can't even tolerate temperatures up to, let's say, 30 centigrade?

Sorry

I want to say sorry to the many people whom I had almost no chance to talk to during my FOSS.in visit. I know it's no excuse, but believe me, I'm just too involved with way too many things at the same time. For any rational reason, I should not have attended the conference, because I cannot afford that amount of time. I have even skipped OLS in Ottawa earlier this year, Linuxtag and Linux Kongreess in Germany, as well as I have turned down an invitation from linux.conf.au in early 2007. I always was (and still am) a big fan of lb/FOSS.in, that's why I thought I got to be there, even this time.

My work schedule of the last couple of months has been optimized to work at least 12 hour per day, seven days a week, with no external interruptions and almost no interaction with the outside world apart from checking the most important emails about twice per day. No going out to clubs, no parties, no movies, no TV, and close to zero meeting with friends either. Not even time for filing tax declarations in time.

Now being at the conference, I'm suffering severely since my backlog of work is basically growing by one day every day I'm here. This is very stressful, and I apologize if I cannot respond adequately to those who actually are interested in my work, or even want to offer help. I know this is not helpful, but please accept that this time I just can't help it. My reactions have come down to self-defense. If you ask me anything, even the smallest thing that I'd have to add to my TODO list, you will trigger a defensive reaction, rather than a polite and helpful one.

I hereby ask you for your understanding. I am at the absolute limit. Give me a break. Thanks.

First impressions from day1 of foss.in

The first impressions of FOSS.in/2006 are very positive. Not only were the security guards clueful enough to not have everyone open their bags at the entrance, but also the WiFi network was fully operational even before the opening ceremony started.

So far, everything is running verry smooth and pleasant.

On my way to FOSS.in 2006

I'm now in the final stage of packing my suitcase for my third trip to India this year. The schedule mainly consists of attending the FOSS.in 2006 conference and meeting some potential business partners regarding OpenPCD and OpenBeacon (which is another open RFID related project that isn't really public yet).

This time there will be a five-person "Berlin delegation" at FOSS.in, which is quite impressive. First, there's Tim Pritlove of CCC fame. Next Brita + Milosch of bitmanufaktur, and finally Sarah and myself.

I'm looking forward to see how this years incarnation of FOSS.in turns out. It's again in the IISC J.N. Tata Auditorium, where the organizers (and the event) suffered quite a bit a couple of years back. But this time, everything shall be fine.

Linux World Expo in Utrecht, The Netherlands

Due to Armijn (of gpl-violations.org) involvement in the programme committee of the linuxworldexpo.nl 2006, I have been invited to do a session called "Free Software Master Class" together with Georg Greve from the Free Software Foundation Europe. Georg presented on "the business value of Free Software", whereas I was talking about "how to be GPL compliant".

The presentation went quite fine, and there were good questions coming from the audience. Hoewver, you could clearly tell that the organizers didn't really have any experience with holding conference/seminars, but just trade shows.

First of all, the seminar area was not reasonably shielded from the background noise of the trade show. Therefore the volume of the PA had to be quite high to combat that background noise.

Secondly, the light situation was way too bright for the audience to be able to read the image projected by the LCD projector. I mean, there were dozens of neon lights (that couldn't be switched off) directly above the screen, that just cannot work.

My third point of criticism was the organization of speaker travel and accomodation. If it wasn't for me meeting with Armijn at the night of arrival, I wouldn't have known to which hotel to go to. Furthermore, the hotel was located in a different town (so you couldn't just go back to the hotel during the day, to drop some stuff, or change clothes, or whateer). Then that hotel was undergoing a complete reconstruction. I could only take the question "do you need a wake up call" by the receptionist as an ironic joke. At 7.45am the power drilling started - way after all the other noise that started about half an hour earlier.

Luckily I had arranged for my own travel. Georg has received his ticket information only on Monday afternoon (and was leaving on tuesday!). This is not exactly how you professionally organize any kind of event.

I don't want to overly complain, but I just want to give motivation to improve that situation the next time.

FOSS.in Call for Papers still open until Oct. 08

Many of you know that for the last three years I enjoy the conference for Linux, Free and Open Source Software formerly known as linux-bangalore, but now known as FOSS.in.

Compared with other big international events, FOSS.in call for papers is always tremendously late, which means that it actually is only some 10 weeks in advance of the event. The same goes for the event website. Please don't consider this as a sign of weak organization. It's just like this, it has been like this, and it worked well. This 'late start' has never compromised the vitality and success of the actual event.

If you have some interesting and technical topic in the Free and Open Source software which you want to talk about, I suggest submitting a proposal with the FOSS.in speaker registration website. Expect an excited audience of up to 3,000 attendees.

netconf'06 over

Three days in fast-fowrard, this is how you could probably best describe how netconf was. In-depth technical talks, just like it is supposed to be. And I have to admit that even though I've basically paused my kernel network development in early 2006 (will be back next year!), I could still follow everything, so the risk of loosing track quickly is apparently not that high.

There are many exciting areas of work (and even more with interesting design ideas/discussions), so it's just too sad that I'll have to stick with other work for the rest of this year... embedded Linux, RFID and GPL enforcement :(

As usual at the end of the event, we had to think of where and when to hold the next one. After northern America (twice) and Asia/Pacific (once), it's definitely time for Europe next year. We haven't yet decided on whether to go to Sweden, Germany or Switzerland. I'll try to locate some scenic venue and sponsoring, maybe we can hold it in Germany after all.

At the dinner today both JamesM and myself did our best to promote FOSS.in 2006 among the networking crowd. It seems like Rusty, Jamal and Yoshifuji got hooked ;)

In other news, I couldn't resist but to buy one of those ultra-small notebooks that are only available in Japan but nowhere else. Specifically, it is a Panasonic R5, featuring 24.2 x 18cm size, exactly one kilogram of weight, 60GB hard disk, 10.4" screen, 512MB RAM (needs to be upgraded) and a ultra-low-power U1300 Intel CPU.

I've managed to install Debian unstable during the last sessions of netconf, up till now basically everything is running and I'm happily typing this blog into my usual vim-in-uxterm-in-ion3 setup. Let's hope this new notebook will end the suffering of my legs due to the exctremely hot (and power-consuming) Turion64 based MSI laptop.

First time in Japan, visiting netconf 2006

I've just arrived in Japan for netconf 2006. It's quite a pity that I'll only stay one week, but my current business-related schedule doesn't allow for anything more (actually, it wouldn't even allow for netconf, but some events are just too important...).

So here's my report on the first couple of impressions:

• Everywhere (airport, train stations, inside trains, ...) it is extremely quiet. Almost nobody talks - and if, then very silently. This is extremely convenient, and I would love to see this to a similar degree in other places...
• At the airport, there was somebody "defragmenting" the luggage on the conveyor belt, i.e. assuring that the maximum number of suitcases fit onto it, rather than causing a queue of incoming luggage because of an apparent "full" belt.
• At the immigration, an extremely long queue formed. At some point a baby started crying. Immediately one of the immigration officers left his booth, made his way through the queue to escort father + baby (mom was not in the queue) directly to his booth, giving them preference. I'm impressed.
• At the airport train station, a ticket vending machine ate my 1000 Yen bill and responded with some buzzing and the very descriptive "Not Ready" error message. While I was still undecided whether that is a malfunction, or the machine is just checking that bill very thoroughly, some JR staff member was running towards me, apologised, and disappeared in some small service room. Two minutes later, he opened a small window next to the ticket vending machine, where he handed me back the bill. I'm even more impressed!
• Japan seems to be the only place (at least as far as I can tell) where "The Coca-Cola Company" has managed to produce soft-drinks that do not contain ridiculous amounts of sugar or artificial sweetener. (and I don't even know how it's called because there is only a Japanese name on it)
• At the airport I used WiFi. This is the first time that I used a public hotspot that did actually use stateless IPv6 auto-configuration to give you a valid IPv6 address. I praise those responsible for that... stunning!
• The only negative aspect so far is the lack of a GSM network here. Too sad...

Off for two weeks of India (GPLv3 Conference Bangalore, plus some Mumbai)

I'm off for two weeks of India. The first hop will be the 4th GPLv3 Conference held in Bangalore. After that, I'll be relaxing for a few days at my friend Atul's place, only to go for some business appointment in Mumbai, before finally returning on Sept 3rd.

As usual. I'll be working "on the road", but expect delay in email replies.

GPLv3 and Steve Ballmer's blood pressure

I'm currently having the pleasure of being part of the GPLv3 Conference Europe. It's been a pleasure to meet folks like Georg Greve (FSF Europe), David Turner (FSF GPL compliance lab), Eben Moglen (FSF, SFLC) again.

There seems to be significant progress in the GPLv3 process since my latest status updates at the 2nd international conference in Porto Alegre (Brasil) some months ago.

To one part, the second draft of the license is supposed to be published in roughly one month from now. As Richard Stallman pointed out, the most significant changes that we're likely to see are:

• Renaming of the "liberty or death" clause to "no surrendering others freedom"
• More precise wordings on the frequently-misinterpreted DRM clause, removing the section on provision for "unencrypted output". The latter clause is basically superfluous, since if you have access to the full source, and a means to install a modified version of the source, you can easily remove any encryption routines for the output.
• Probably an option that if you only distribute binaries, then it's sufficient to provide the source code on a network server, rather than having to provide it per mail order. This still requires some feedback. I personally disagree with this, sine there really are many [both real and potential] users of Free Software who live in low-bandwidth areas. Yes, there might be services which download software from the net and write CD-R's for you, but do we know that such services exist (and will continue to exist) in all those areas?
• There was some necessity to rewrite the explicit patent license. There is no change in function.
• Introduce some new wording such as the concept of "conveying a copy" rather than using the term propagation (or even the old US-centric "distribution"). This wording tries to depart from any US legal terms and rather defines some own terms. As a side-effect, it cleanly solves cases such like peer-to-peer sharing networks (where every downloading user also distributes [partial] copies to other users.

Also, as I figured from conversations with Eben and David, to my personal pleasure and acknowledgement, the wording of the "60 days clause" has been changed in a way to make its intent quite a bit more clear.

Another interesting point was the fact that I learned about a detail in GPLv2. Apparently the Section 3b (accompany object code with a written offer to provide the source code later on a physical storage medium) was never intended for online distribution. This paragraph was only meant for physical distribution. All online object code distribution should actually also have online source code distribution. Unfortunately this intent didn't actually become visible in the license, and now we have cases like Buffalo, where the vendor tries to actually make it as hard as possible to obtain source code (only one product source code per cd, have user send a CD-R with return envelope, plus some fee for copying, for each version of the firmware).

Oh, and how does Steve Ballmer's blood pressure fit into the picture? Eben Moglen gave one of his most eloquent and visionary presentations, in which he interpreted recent and current events in and around Microsoft as the signs of the eve of the downfall, and that Free Software will be keeping Mr. Ballmers blood pressure at high levels ;)

Invited to participate in panel on GPLv3 at Barcelona event

Later this month, the FSF+FSFE will be hosting the 3rd international GPLv3 conference. I have the honour to be invited to participate in panels on enforcement and DRM related issues.

Returning from OSCON Vienna

I've just returned from my tree day trip to OSCON Vienna. LINBIT took great care of me during my stay, and I enjoyed it quite a lot.

The most obscure thing encountered during that trip was the word Liftkarmiesen. Austrians have all these (to us Germans) ancient and strange words in their variant of German. Anyway, it even took three native Austrians until somebody actually knew what it was ;) If you're now curious, try to research it on your own. It's related to curtains ;)

NLUUG Linux meet

During my short visit to Amsterdam, I was invited to speak at a small NLUUG event. I presented on recent, current and future netfilter/iptables development, and the presentation was very well received. Unfortunately I didn't have time to listen to the other two lectures, since I had a meeting scheduled with Armijn Hemel, the person who's currently helping me the most with gpl-violations.org.

Invited as keynote speaker to OSCON Vienna

Recently I've been invited to give the keynote at OSCON Vienna (please note that this conference, to the best of my knowledge, has absolutely no relation with the O'Reilley OSCON events).

I'm honored and I'll gladly accept this invitation. AFAIR this is the first time I'll be giving the keynote at any FOSS related conference. The subject was up to me to determine, and I decided about something that is both one of the most important subjects for FOSS today, and well within the subject of the conference: "Kommerz und Community: Schnittstelle zwischen den Welten". It's about the interface between FOSS community and the commercial IT industry.

There are many suboptimalities at this interface. I personally believe that optimization of this interface would greatly benefit FOSS as a whole. Which issues am I talking about? Well, first of all, there are lots of GPL/licensing related issues. But even more importantly, there is the lack of support from the hardware community. As long as hardware vendors will actively hamper FOSS development by not releasing documentation, locking down their products, claiming they "support" Linux with their proprietary binary-only drivers.

For many of these issues, there's a big communication and furthermore cultural problem. That's what I want to address in that keynote.

There's another good point to the OSCON invitation: The trip to Vienna will also help me to improve my bad luck and stupidity while doing photography in Vienna / June 2005.

Who offered me travel sponsorship for FISL7 on IRC?

Some time ago, probably in November 2005, somebody on IRC offered me travel sponsorship for FISL 7. Unfortunately I don't keep IRC logs, and neither do I remember who it was.

If you are the person I'm talking about, and you're reading this: Please contact me immediately. I'm about to take care of my travel preparations and need to know whether that sponsorship will actually happen or not.

Thanks a lot!

Papers accepted at FISL

Out of my four proposed papers at FISL 7.0, three have been accepted. To my big surprise, the paper on gpl-violations.org was turned down. I would rather have dropped one of the other papers than this one :(

Anyway, as indicated before on this blog, I'm more than happy to be able to visit Brazil again.

FOSS.in is over

I'm not going to write any more about FOSS.in, since everyone else has already written about anything that there is to say. If you want to read all of it, go to planet.foss.in.

One fact that hasn't very much publicized [yet?] though, is the financial trouble that the event formerly known as Linux Bangalore is going through this year. This apparently is almost exclusively to blame at the sponsors (or lack thereof).

Apparently in India it's quite normal that even if you start talking with Sponsors more than half a year in advance, they will not commit until a few days before the event starts. This is also the reason why the conference programme is announced before the sponsors show up on the website (if you checked it before the event, all the sponsor banners were empty).

Due to this strange culture, it could happen that a large Indian IT company dropped their sponsoring commitment almost immediately before the event - that is _after_ the organizers having committed to all the expenses. I don't think that given those conditions, any organizer could have managed without a big large gaping hole in the budget :(

In addition to that, it is is a pity that none of the internationally recognized (and also locally quite present) "open source" companies Novell/SuSE and RedHat didn't show up on the sponsors list at all.

Report from FOSS.in 2005

This is the third day of FOSS.in 2005, for me it's the second day, since I arrived one day late.

I'm having a good time, and the conference has come quite some way since last years Linux Bangalore. To highlight some of the changes:

• Wireless Access almost everywhere on the venue!
• Enough halls (actually: tents!) to host BOF sessions and the like
• Lecture halls large enough to accommodate the whole audience
• A much wider scope, Free/Open Source software in general, rather than just Linux
• Lots of interesting presentations
• Way better quality of food (even though it wasn't really bad before)
• Sensible temperature instead of ridiculous amount of AC in lecture halls

Also, since the same amount of attendees are distributed over a wide area and more lecture halls, it is less crammed/crowded than the previous year. At least for people from a western country it therefore is way more relaxing, since there is more space between you and the people immediately surrounding you ;)

FOSS.in schedule

I've just done a quick browse through the FOSS.in schedule. I'm honored to give my two presentations in the "Stallmann Hall".

There's also an OpenSolaris track. I'm probably going to join that, since I know close to nothing about it (yet).

Will I be able to visit Brazil again?

There are chances that I'll be able to make it to FISL 7.0, the 2006 incarnation of the Forum Internacional Software Livre.

This is not just any other conference visit. This is the possibility to visit Brazil for the first time after my departure from Conectiva in 2001. This means I'll be able to meet all those cool guys again (folive, lclaudio, matsuoka, epx, ... you know who you are). Only few of them are still at Conectiva, but to the best of my knowledge still somewhere in Curitiba or Porto Alegre ;) or Rio Grande do Sul

Anyway, I'd better organize my schedule in a way that permits me to spend some three weeks in Brasil next year :)

My flight to Bangalore was scrapped.

Northwest Airlines has been heavily advertising their Seattle-Amsterdam-Bangalore flight, including special offers. And what do they do two days before starting that flight? They postpone it indefinitely.

This is certainly the right thing to do if you want to piss off new customers. There was only one reason for me to go for NWA: Because they have a direct flight to Bangalore, with no stopover in Mumbai or Delhi. Now that reason has vanished. And since there's now only four weeks before departure, there's even no chance I could get some other direct ticket for a decent price.

I'm yet waiting with my travel agent getting back to me. Apparently NWA first informs the press, and then slowly their customers at some later point.

FOSS.in/2005: Linux Bangalore outgrowing itself!

Today, FOSS.in (the event formerly known as Linux Bangalore) has released their first list of confirmed international speakers.

I could hardly believe my eyes, it is truly amazing. Is this the event that I've been to in 2003, as one of the only two non-Indian (and non-Indian origin) speakers?

Now they have a line-up including Jonathan Corbet, Brian Behlendorf, Jeremy Zawodny - and last but not least Alan Cox!

Please don't misunderstand me, there is no 'quality ranking' of conferences based on their number of foreign speakers. But this at least proves that FOSS.in has become an equal event in the line of Linux Kongress, UKUUG or even OLS.

As of now, the number of Indian Free Software developers, maintainers or even project leaders is still very small. This especially holds true when you consider the size of the Indian IT industry today...

So getting together the FOSS enthusiasts in India, and the international "FOSS veterans" should create a very creative environment and provide an excellent opportunity for lots of people to get motivated, to get involved, to write code, to join the Free Software community.

Hanging out at 0sec in Bern

0sec 1.0 (the first incarnation of a security conference / hacker meet-up in Berne, Switzerland) has concluded today. Despite spending an enormous amount of time writing new netfilter and librfid code, I've had some interesting discussions and met a number of interesting people.

What I found especially interesting is all the work on syscall proxying that Uberwall are doing. I need to look into that stuff in more detail.

Linux Kongress

After my delayed trip back from Seville, I'm now in Hamburg for Linux Kongress. This turns out to be an extremely busy event, I have two 'regular' presentations, one full-day tutorial, and also have to host a number of sessions as "session chair" on behalf of the organization committee.

This means that there is practically no progress in either the usbdevio fix nor in the current x_tables work. However, I found some time to fix a couple of 14443B related problems in librfid.

Somehow I have the feeling that Linux Kongress has lost some of it's spirit over the last couple of years, which is sad. Especially sad, since the first Linux Kongress 12 years ago was the first time that Linux Kernel hackers have ever met.

Tomorrow I'll be leaving for 0sec in Bern/Switzerland, which I'm looking forward to.

Stuck in Seville

Iberia decided to reschedule my flight without informing me, even though that change was executed more than one month ago. They claim to have informed my travel agent. Not surprisingly, my travel agent claims never to have received such information.

This means that I'm stuck for one more day in Seville, since the next flight is only leaving at 7am tomorrow morning. Since Iberia claims it was not their fault, they're also not willing to cover any accommodation expenses.

Pablo Neira was friendly enough to invite me to stay at his place for the extra night, which means I don't have to fight with Iberia and the travel agent for any expenses.

Unfortunately I was scheduled to travel to Hamburg tomorrow, so I have to alter my train reservation and somehow make sure I'll still be in Hamburg at Linux Kongress for my tutorial.

I'm starting to get sick of those travel irregularities. This means I'm again back to my (old) plan of cutting down the number of conferences next year.

Heading off to workshop.netfilter.org

Tomorrow morning at 8am, I'll be leaving for workshop.netfilter.org, the annual netfilter developer workshop.

For the first year, we actually have presentations that are intended for sysadmins (aka 'users'). I'm missing the first day of this user event, but am obviously present for the two day workshop/discussions and the two days of hacking following up the official workshop.

I want to publicly thank Pablo Neira for organizing this years event. We've now had workshops every year since 2002. They've been very low-profile and small so far. But look at this year's event. It actually has a homepage that's worth mentioning, and the sponsors seem to be literally lining up..

Looking forward to meet lots of fellow hackers, especially those whom I haven't met since last years workshop.

Planet FOSS.in has opened

The organizers of FOSS.in have put together a planet site at planet.foss.in, featuring the weblogs of all speakers. Incidentally that includes this blog ;)

If you have trouble resolving the foss.in domain, that's probably due to broken nameserver responses from their current domain hosting provider. At least my bind9 cannot parse their responses... I've now set up a set of 'real' name servers, and Atul is trying to get the whois data updated... sorry for any inconvenience.

Netfilter workshop dates

Pablo is working on workshop.netfilter.org. But at least the dates are fixed now:

• Oct 4th: some unofficial user-related event with the local lug
• Oct 5th-6th: The workshop itself. discussions, presentations.
• Oct 7th-9th: Hacking on code.

Expect more news soon...

I'll be in Bangalore again :)

Well, according to the organizers it's just a formality, but "just for the record", I've now officially been invited to the-conference-formerly-known-as-Linux-Bangalore. It will happen Nov 29 to Dec 02, but due to timing overlap, I'll probably only be there from the 30th onwards.

I've already tried to raise awareness for this fabulous event with almost everybody I met during my vivid conference travel. Let's hope I have managed to convince a number of high-quality Linux hackers to consider submitting a paper (and let's hope the CfP will be published really soon now).

Back home in Berlin

After one day for travel and sleeping-over-the-jetlag, I'm finally back on track at my home in Berlin.

I just decided to skip WTH, since it would require me to leave again in only two days (and I have another travel coming up on 1st August. So I'd rather spend the time to continue my current netfilter projects, taking care of accounting and tax declaration, etc.

Unfortunately I'm bound to using slower/older machines and my notebook, since the warranty replacement for my workstations' liquid cooling system has not yet arrived :(

OLS: Wireless Kernel Configuration BOF

James Ketrenos (the ipw2xxx maintainer) was running a BOF to get input on ideas for a new wireless kernel configuration API from the Linux community.

Due to excessive coding (see in some different entry of this journal), Patrick and me came in a bit late. We tried to convince the audience that netlink was the way to go, and that the current ioctl() interface could be served by some compatibility layer that converts the ioctl's to netlink messages.

Also, I raised the requirement for integrating this config interface with a unified userspace interface for association and authentication (i.e. management frames).

Unfortunately James had to leave quite early, so we couldn't finish the discussion in a more detailed way in a smaller group.

OLS Day 1

I didn't actually visit any of the talks, but instead read some of the papers in the written proceedings, hacking lots of code and talking to various people.

I've also managed to convince GregKH that support for async URB submission from userspace needs CONFIG_BROKEN. libusb doesn't use it anyway, and the number of users of this interface is limited. Unfortunately one of my customers is one of the users, so I might be forced to implement a cleaner interface for the same purpose.

First day of netconf

The first day of netconf went quite fine, but we basically lost quite some amount of time waiting. First waiting for free tables at breakfast, then waiting for the bloated enrollment procedures of the Security Guards at the Ericsson venue...

Added with technical issues with the 800x600-only projector and the amount of time spent travelling from the hotel to the venue, we lost a lot of time and therefore actually didn't have the time to fit all talks into their respective slot, but only 60%.

The most cool work I've seen at this first day is Thomas Graf's work on a unified Linux kernel networking configuration and statistics tool...