GUADEC 2023

I was lucky enough to attend the 2023 edition of GUADEC in Riga, Latvia.

In a way GUADEC is more fun each year because each time I know more people, have more things to talk about, and also it’s 4 years since my last in-person GNOME event so this one was particularly special.

Where else can you have in-depth conversations about the future of GObject, for example? (The future sounds interesting, by the way).

My main focus was getting everyone interested in end-to-end testing using openQA, which met with quite some success, although there is still some way to go before we can declare the end-to-end testing “production ready”. I will keep working on the remaining tasks in my 1-2 hrs a week that I am sometimes able to spend on it; as always, things will go much faster if and when more folk get involved in the effort. We are in #gnome-os if you want to join in.

You can watch my talk about end-to-end testing with openQA here.

We had a BoF session about desktop search, which was one of the most useful discussions I remember having on this topic, we covered topics all across the GNOME desktop rather than focusing on specific components, breaking free for once from Conway’s Law. I wrote up some of the outcomes here. It’s a good time to get involved in search!

After GUADEC was done I sailed from Liepaja to Lübeck, then had some vacation time around Germany and Italy, including a memorable gig watching the Slackers near lake Garda, finishing at midnight and somehow arriving back to Santiago about 10 hours later via various car, plane, train, etc. Luckily we missed most of the heatwave during the trip. I am only now getting back to work.

Many thanks to the local team who did a great job organising the event (I know first-hand how difficult it is :-), and good luck to Cassidy and the team organising GUADEC 2024 in Denver, USA.

It’s too early to know if I’ll make it to Denver but it’s only fair that us Europeans sometimes do a bit of long haul travelling and dealing with hostile border control authorities, stuff that some GUADEC attendees have to do every single year 🙂

Status update, 16/06/2023

This blog is about what’s on my mind, and recently I’ve been thinking about aeroplane flights, and limiting how many I take every year.

I’m not trying to make anyone feel impressed or ashamed here, or create rules that I insist everyone needs to live by. And I am no expert in climate science, but we need to start talking about this stuff more – as you probably spotted, the climate is uncomfortably hot now, caused mainly by all the “greenhouse gases” that we keep producing in our industrious human civilization.

Commercial aviation accounts for 3.5% of global warming today, according to the 3rd result in a web search I just did. So planes aren’t the biggest issue – the biggest issue is a massive methane leak from an oil well in Turkmenistan, and I guess the best contribution I could make to avoid further heating would be to plug up that hole somehow. From here though, it seems more realistic for me to look at reducing how much money I give to airlines and oil companies.

Plane spotting

In 2020 I didn’t go anywhere due to the COVID pandemic. so lets start with 2021.

• 2021: 3 flights, 6 hours total. (Including work stuff, family visits for Christmas).
• 2022: 10 flights, 25 hours total (Including work stuff, family visits, Linux App Summit, OSSEU, the Audio Developer Conference, and an incredible climbing trip in Canarias)
• 2023: So far, 6 flights, 6 hours total (the usual, plus FOSDEM and an incredible bike holiday in Wales)

My current goal is that 2023 will have no more flights than 2022. I’ve started tracking them in a spreadsheet to make me think harder about avoiding them. It’s easy to get excited about a holiday, conference, concert etc. and forget about the broader goal of not taking flights all the time. It’s also very hard to avoid them all – I’m sure I will take a flight to GUADEC in Latvia next month, which is basically as far away from me as you can get without leaving Europe. (I am hoping I can take a boat to the UK afterwards though, let’s see).

Everybody’s circumstances are different of course. I chose to live 2000km from my family, which implies extra travel. Some folk live 20,000km from their family, which implies even more. There’s no point judging people for how their life turned out. (Although it is good to judge billionaires and politicians flying everywhere in private planes – fuck those guys!!!).

My last trip from the UK supposedly avoided 4% of emissions of one passenger by using “sustainable fuel”, so that’s about 0.03% of the total emissions, and they emailed me this nice certificate.

The aviation industry claim that flying is actually great anyway, soon aeroplanes will be powered solely by wildflowers and insect wings, etc. etc. This is exactly what a business that sells plane tickets would say, so I am skeptical, and there is plenty of evidence of “greenwashing” such as this recent “Science Based Target Initiative“. Ultimately its hard for airline managers to turn down a fat targets-related bonus just to try and help the future of civilization … a sort of “prisoners dilemma”.

Rambling about trains

Many people assume you can take a boat between the UK and Spain, and you can do but the boat takes over 25 hours and leaves you in either Santander or Portsmouth, neither of which are very well-connected.

High speed trains are a better option, and they already exist for most of the trip: Santiago – Barcelona is less than 8 hours (not bad to travel 1000km); and Paris -> Manchester is also only 6 hrs door to door (to go 800km). The missing piece for me is Barcelona to Paris.

There’s no sleeper train option between Spain to France, since the Spanish government decided to remove it in 2012. During the day there about 2 trains, which take 6 hours each, unfortunately 8 hrs + 6 hrs + 6 hrs makes 20 hrs means you can’t do this trip in a single day. You need an expensive hotel either in Barcelona or Paris to make the trip in addition to that expensive express train to Paris. So I’ve only taken this route once so far, and it involved a few days in the French Pyrenees. (As an aside, that would be an option for every trip if it wasn’t for the restrictions of my job! In fact most of these issues would be more tractable if I could work less days a week or just take days offline sometimes.)

The French government have seen sense already and run excellent night trains from the border up to Paris, but the Spanish government have not seen any sense at all, and the connections from Barcelona are hopeless. There is some hope though, from the European Sleeper cooperative who are working on a Barcelona -> Brussels night train, due some time in 2024/2025. That could make the Santiago -> Manchester trip feasible overland in around 24 hours – which would be incredible!! They are running a share offer at the moment, if you find that sort of thing interesting.

So that’s what’s on my mind as the hot summer weather picks up across Europe.

As I said above – I’m not posting this in order to feel superior to folk who travel more by aeroplane, nor to show off about being part of the lucky 20% of people who are able to travel by aeroplane at all.

But I would like to see more people talking openly about the future and the climate crisis. When you have a problem, usually the hardest thing is to talk about it. It requires you to admit that there is a real problem which is not much fun. A lot of oil companies would prefer that we stay in denial. (They are happy making record profits!). Stay safe out in the heat.

Status update, 17/02/2023

This month I attended FOSDEM for the first time since 2017. In addition to eating 4 delicious waffles, I had the honour of presenting two talks, the first in the Testing & Automation devroom on Setting up OpenQA testing for GNOME.

GNOME’s initial OpenQA testing is mostly implemented now and it’s already found its first real bug. The next step is getting more folk interested within GNOME, so we can ensure ongoing maintenance of the tests and infra, and ensure a bus factor of > 1. If you see me at GUADEC then I will probably talk to you about OpenQA, be prepared!! 🙂

My second talk was in the Python devroom, on DIY music recommendations. I intermittently develop a set of playlist generation tools named Calliope, and this talk was mostly aiming to inspire people to start similar fun & small projects, using simple AI techniques that you can learn in a weekend, and taking advantage of the amazing resource that is Musicbrainz. It seemed to indeed inspire some of the audience and led to an interesting chat with Rob Kaye of the Metabrainz Foundation – there is more cool stuff on the way from them.

Here’s a fantastic sketch of the talk by Jeroen Heijmans:

^{Talk summary sketch, CC BY-SA 4.0}

I didn’t link to this in the talk, but apropos of nothing here’s an interesting video entitled Why Spotify Will Eventually Fail.

On the Saturday I met up with Carlos Garnacho and gatecrashed the GNOME docs hackfest, discussing various improvements around search in GNOME. Most of these are now waiting for developer time as they are too large to be done in occasional moments of evening and weekend downtime, get in touch if you want to find out more!

I must also shout out Marco Trevisan for showing me where to get a decent meal near Madrid Chamartín station on the way home.

Meanwhile at Codethink I have been getting more involved in marketing. Its a company that exists in two worlds, commercial software services on one side and community-driven open source software on the other, often trying our best to build bridges between the two. There aren’t many marketing graduates who are experts in open source, and neither many experienced software developers who want to work fulltime on managing social media, so we are still figuring out the details…

Anyway, the initial outcome is that Codethink is now on the Fediverse – follow us here! @codethink@social.codethink.co.uk

Status update, 19/11/2022

Audio Developer Conference

I was at ADC 2022 last week – thanks to Codethink as always for covering the cost and allowing me 2 days time off to attend. It was my first time attending in person, and besides the amazing talks (which will appear online here around the end of this month), I had somehow never realized how many players in the music tech world are British. Perhaps because I always hang out in Manchester and further north while all the activity is happening in Cambridge and London.

Indeed the creator of the famous JUCE Framework is a Brit and was busy at the conference announcing a new(ish) language designed for DSP pipelines and plugins, cleverly named Cmajor.

ADC has no lightning talks but instead an “Open mic night”. I naively pictured a concert in a pub somewhere and signed up to play, but in practice it was closer to lightning talks and there were no instruments to play. For better or worse I had the session for Maharajah on a laptop and did an improvised 5 minute version with judicious (or not) or use of timestretching to speed through the slow parts. Even more fun than regular lightning talks.

I highly recommend the event! Despite the surfeit of Mac users!

Microblogging

Every article published during November 2022 must mention the Twitter meltdown and this is no exception! I’ve personally enjoyed using reading Twitter for years, always without Infinite Scroll and with “Latest tweets” instead of “Home” (i.e. content from people I follow, not entertaining clickbait for my monkey-brain). The sites only value was always its enourmous userbase and now there’s a real wave of migration to Mastodon, like, celebrities and all, I’m spending more time as @vladimirchicken@mastodon.art.

I made that account a while back, initially just for half-baked song ideas, and I will try to keep it more playful and positive than my old Twitter account. For work-related content I already have a very serious blog, after all. (That’s this blog!)

Nushell

At work I’m still spending every day deep in JSON and CSV data dumps and using Nushell to make sense of it all.

It’s really good for exploring data, and you can immediately make a guess at what this Nushell pipeline might do:

fetch http://date.jsontest.com/ | get date

I find the syntax a lot easier than jq, where even basic filters quickly start to look like K or Brainfuck.

I wrote my first Nushell scripts, which is is also very nice, shell functions (“custom commands”) can have type annotations for arguments, default values and each script can have a main function where you define the commandline arguments. 400% nicer than Bash scripts.

I don’t have time to get involved enough in the project right now to open useful bug reports, so I’m going to post a list of gripes here instead. Hopefully its useful for other folk evaluating Nushell so you can get an idea of what’s still missing as of version 0.70:

• Writing a long line (one that wraps to the next line) makes cursor movement increasingly slow… at least on WSL
• where can compare a column to a value, e.g. where date < 11-19-2020, but you can’t compare two columns, which is weird, SQL where can do that.
• The CTRL+C behaviour sucks. Run 100 slow python scripts in a loop, and you have to ctrl+c out of every single one.

Status update 21/09/22

Last week I attended OSSEU 2022 in Dublin, gave a talk about BuildStream 2.0 and the REAPI, and saw some new and old faces. Good times apart from the common cold I picked up on the way — I was glad that the event mandated face-masks for everyone so I could cover my own face without being the “odd one out”. (And so that we were safer from the 3+ COVID-19 cases reported at the event).

Being in the same room as Javier allowed some progress on our slightly “skunkworks” project to bring OpenQA testing to upstream GNOME. There was enough time to fix the big regressions that had halted testing completely since last year, one being an expired API key and the other, removal of virtio VGA support in upstream’s openqa_worker container. We prefer using the upstream container over maintaining our own fork, in the hope that our limited available time can go on maintaining tests instead, but the containers are provided on a “best effort” basis and since our tests are different to openqa.opensuse.org, regressions like this are to be expected.

I am also hoping to move the tests out of gnome-build-meta into a separate openqa-tests repo. We initially put them in gnome-build-meta because ultimately we’d like to be able to do pre-merge testing of gnome-build-meta branches, but since it takes hours to produce an ISO image from a given commit, it is painfully slow to create and update the OpenQA tests themselves. Now that Gitlab supports child pipelines, we can hopefully satisfy both use cases: one pipeline that quickly runs tests against the prebuilt “s3-image” from os.gnome.org, and a second that is triggered for a specific gnome-build-meta build pipeline and validates that.

First though, we need to update all the existing tests for the visual changes that occurred in the meantime, which are mostly due to gnome-initial-setup now using GTK4. That’s still a slow process as there are many existing needles (screenshots), and each time the tests are run, the Web UI allows updating only the first one to fail. That’s something else we’ll need to figure out before this could be called “production ready”, as any non-trivial style change to Adwaita would imply rerunning this whole update process.

All in all, for now openqa.gnome.org remains an interesting experiment. Perhaps by GUADEC next year there may be something more useful to report.

Team Codethink in the OSSEU 2022 lobby

My main fascination this month besides work has been exploring “AI” image generation. It’s amazing how quickly this technology has spread – it seems we had a big appetite for generative digital images.

I am really interested in the discussion about whether such things are “art”, because I this discussion is soon going to encompass music as well. We know that both OpenAI and Spotify are researching machine-generated music, and it’s particularly convenient for Spotify if they can continue to charge you £10 a month while progressively serving you more music that they generated in-house – and therefore reducing their royalty payments to record labels.

There are two related questions: whether AI-generated content is art, and whether something generated by an AI has the same monetary value as something a human made “by hand”. In my mind the answer is clear, but at the same time not quantifiable. Art is a form of human communication. Whether you use a neural network, a synthesizer, a microphone or a wax cylinder to produce that art is not relevant. Whether you use DALL-E 2 or a paintbrush is not relevant. Whether your art is any good depends on how it makes people feel.

I’ve been using Stable Diffusion to try and illustrate some of sound worlds from my songs, and my favourite results so far are for Don’t Go Into The Zone:

And finally, a teaser for an upcoming song release…

Linux App Summit 2022

Engineers at Codethink get some time and money each year to attend conferences, and part of the deal is we have to write a report afterwards. Having written the report I thought… this could be a bit more widely shared! So, excuse the slightly formal tone of this report, but here are some thoughts on LAS 2022.

Talk highlights

1. Energy Conservation and Energy Efficiency with Free Software – Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss

Video, Abstract

If you follow climate science you’ll know we have some major problems coming. Solving these will take big societal changes towards degrowth, which was not the topic of this talk at all. This talk was rather about what Free Software developers might do to help out in the wider context of reducing energy use.

I recommend watching in full as it was well delivered and interesting. Here are some of the points I noted:

• Aviation is estimated to cause 2.5% of CO² emissions in 2017, and “ICT” between 1.5-2.8%.
  • Speaker didn’t know if that number includes Bitcoin or other “proof-of-work” things
  • This number does include Bitcoin. (Thanks to Joseph for clarifying 🙂
  • Two things that make the number high: short-lifespan electronic devices, video streaming/conferencing
• Software projects could be more transparent about how much energy they use.
  • Imagine 3 word processors which each provide a Github badge showing energy consumption for specific use cases, so you can choose the one which uses least power
• KDE’s PDF reader (Okular) recently achieved the Blauer Angel eco-certification
• There is an ongoing initiative in KDE to measure and improve energy consumption of software – a “measurement party” in Berlin is the next step.
  • Their method of measuring power consumption requires a desktop PC and a special plug that can measure power at reasonably frequency.
• Free software already has a good story here (as we are often the ones keeping old hardware alive after manufacturers drop support), and there’s an open letter asking the EU to legislate such that manufacturers have to give this option.

2. Flathub – now and next

Video, Abstract
There is big growth in number of users. The talk had various graphs including a download chart of something like 10PB of data downloaded.

The goal of Flathub is not to package other people’s apps, rather to reduce barriers to Linux app developers. One remaining barrier is money – as there’s no simple way to finance development of a Linux app at present. So together with Codethink, GNOME and Flathub are working on a way that app users can make donations to app authors.

Notes

There was a larger presence from Canonical than I am used to, and it seems they are once again growing their desktop team, and bringing back the face-to-face Ubuntu Developer Summit (rebranded Ubuntu Summit). All good news.

COVID safety:

• all participants expect speaker were masked during talks
• the seats were spaced and our “green pass” (vaccine or -ve test) was checked on day 1
• in the social events the masks all came off, these were mostly in the outside terrace area.

Online participation:

• maybe 30% of talks were online and these worked well, in fact the Flathub talk had one speaker on stage and one projected behind him as a giant head, and it worked well.
• the online attendees were effectively invisible in the venue, it would be better if there was a screen projecting the online chat so we could have some interaction with them.

The organisation was top notch, the local team did a great job and the venue was also perfect for this kind of event. Personally I met more folks from KDE than I ever have and felt like a lot of important desktop-related knowledge sharing took place. Definitely recommend the conference for anyone with an interest in this area.

I don’t have any good photos to share, but check https://twitter.com/hashtag/las2022 for the latest. Hope to see you there next year!

Blog about what you do!

Am I the first to blog from GUADEC 2019? It has been a great conference: huge respect to the organization team for volunteering significant time and energy to make it all run smoothly.

The most interesting thing at GUADEC is talking to community members old and new. I discovered that I don’t know much about what people are doing in GNOME. I discovered Antonio is doing user support / bug triage and more in Nautilus. I discovered that Bastian is posting GNOME-related questions and answers on StackOverflow. I discovered Britt is promoting us on Twitter and moderating discussions on Reddit. I discovered Felipe is starting to do direct user support for Boxes. I wouldn’t know any of this if I hadn’t been to GUADEC.

So here’s my plea — if you contribute to GNOME, please blog about it! If everyone reading this wrote just one blog post a year… I’d have a much better idea of what you’re all doing!

Don’t forget: Planet GNOME is not only for announcing cool new projects and features – it’s “a window into the world, work and lives of GNOME hackers and contributors.” Blog about anything GNOME related, and be yourself — we’re not a corporation, we’re an underground network with a global, diverse, free thinking membership and that’s our strength.

Remember that there’s much more to GNOME than software development — read this long list of skillsets that you’re probably using. Write about translations, user support, testing, documentation, packaging, outreach, foundation work, event organization, bug triage, product management, release management, design, infrastructure operations. Write about why you enjoy contributing to GNOME, write about why it’s important to you. Write about what you did yesterday, or what you did last month. Write about your friends in GNOME. Make some graphs about your project to show how much work you do. Write short posts, write them quickly. Don’t worry about minor errors — it’s a blog, not a magazine article. Don’t be scared that readers won’t be interested — we are! We’re a distributed team and we need to keep each other posted about what we’re doing. Show links, screenshots, discussions, photos, graphs, anything. Don’t write reports, write stories.

If you contribute to GNOME but don’t have a blog… please start one! Write some nice posts about what you do. Become a Foundation member if you haven’t already*, and ask to join Planet GNOME.

And even if you forget all that, remember this: positive feedback for contributions encourages more contributions. Writing a blog post, like any other form of contribution, can sometimes feel shouting into an abyss. If you read an interesting post, leave a positive comment & thank the author for taking the time to write it.

* The people using and reviewing your contributions will be happy to vouch for you, don’t worry about that!

GUADEC 2018 Videos: All Done

All the editing & uploading for the GUADEC videos is now finished. The videos were all uploaded to YouTube some time ago, and they are all now available on http://videos.guadec.org/2018 as well.

Thanks to everyone who helped with the editing: Alexis Diavatis, Bin Li, Garrett LeSage, Alexandre Franke (who also did a lot of the work of uploading to YouTube), and Hubert Figuiere (who managed to edit so many that I’m suspicious he might be some kind of robot in disguise).

edit: If you are hungry for more videos to edit, some footage from GUADEC 2002 has been unearthed. It’d be great to have some of this history from fifteen years ago up on YouTube! If you’re interested, reply to the mail or speak up in #guadec on GIMPnet and we can coordinate efforts.

GUADEC 2018 Videos: Help Wanted

At this year’s GUADEC in Almería we had a team of volunteers recording the talks in the second room. This was organized very last minute as initially the University were going to do this, but thanks to various efforts (thanks in particular to Adrien Plazas and Bin Li) we managed to record nearly all the talks. There were some issues with sound on both the Friday and Saturday, which Britt Yazel has done his best to overcome using science, and we are now ready to edit and upload the 19 talks that took place in the 2nd room.

To bring you the videos from last year we had a team of 5 volunteers from the local team who spent our whole weekend in the Codethink offices. (Although none of us had much prior video editing experience so the morning of the first day was largely spent trying out different video editors to see which had the features we needed and could run without crashing too often… and the afternoon was mostly figuring out how transitions worked in Kdenlive).

This year, we don’t have such a resource and so we are looking to distribute the editing.  If you can, please get involved so we can share the videos as soon as possible!

The list of videos and a step-by-step guide on how to edit them is available at https://wiki.gnome.org/GUADEC/2018/Video. The guide is written for people who have never done video editing before and recommends that you use Kdenlive; if you’re already familiar with a different tool then of course feel free to use that instead and just use the process as a guideline. The first video is already up, so you can also use this as a guide to follow.

If you want to know more, get in touch on the GUADEC mailing list, or the #guadec IRC channel.

GUADEC 2017: timeline

After the statistics perhaps you are interested in reading a timeline of GUADEC 2017! In particular you can compare it to the burn down chart from the GUADEC HowTo and see how that interacts with reality.

Of course lots of details are excised from this overview but it gives a general sense of the timings. In some follow up posts I’ll go in more detail about what I think went well and what didn’t. We also welcome your feedback on the event (if you can still remember it 🙂

Summer 2014: At some point during GUADEC 2014 I start going on about doing a Manchester edition.

August 2015: Alberto and Allan both float the idea of doing a Manchester bid with me; it seems like there’s just about enough of a team to go for it. I was already planning to be away in summer 2016 at this point so we decided to target 2017.

Alberto has a friend working at MIDAS who gives us a good start and we end up meeting with the Marketing Manchester conference bureau, the University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University.

The meeting with University of Manchester was discouraging (to be honest, they seemed to be geared up only for corporate conferences rather than volunteer-driven events) but Manchester Metropolitan were much more promising.

Winter 2015: We lost touch with MMU for a few months (presumably as University started back up), but we eventually got a proper contact in the conferences department and started moving forwards with the bid.

Spring 2016: Our bid is produced, with Marketing Manchester doing most of the content and layout (as you might be able to tell). Normally I would worry to see only one GUADEEC bid on the table but, having been thinking about our bid for almost a year already I was also glad that it looked like we’d be the main option.

Summer 2016: GUADEC 2016 in Karlsruhe; Manchester is selected as the location for 2017. Much rejoicing (although I am on a 9000 mile road trip at the time).

August 2016: Talks begin with venue drawing up contracts for venue and accommodation. The venue was reasonably painless to sort out but we spent lots of time figuring out accommodation; the University townhouses required final numbers and payment 6 months in advance of the event, so we spent a lot of time looking into other options (but ended up deciding that the townhouses would be best even though we would inevitably lose a bit money on them).

September 2016: We begin holding monthly-ish meetings with myself, Alberto, Allan and Javier present. Work begins on sponsorship brochure (which complicated by needing to coordinate with GNOME.Asia and potentially LAS), talks continue with venue.

December 2016: Contracts finally signed for venue and accommodation (4 months later!), conference dates finalized. We apply for a UK bank account as an “unincorporated association”. Discussion begins about the website, we decide to hold off on announcing the dates until we have some kind of website in place.

January 2017: Basic website finished, dates announced. Lots of work on getting the registration system ready. We begin meeting each week on a Monday evening. Initial logo made by Jakub and Allan.

February 2017: Trip to FOSDEM, where we put up a few GUADEC posters. Summer still seems a long way off. Codethink sponsorship confirmed. We start thinking about keynote speakers. Javier and Lene look into social event venues, including somewhere for the 20th birthday party(with hearts already set on MOSI). The search for new Executive Director for GNOME finally comes to a close with Neil McGovern being hired, and he soon starts joining the GUADEC calls and helping out (in particular with the search for sponsors, which up til now has been nearly all Alberto’s work).

March 2017: After 4 months of bureaucracy, our bank account finally approved. After much hacking and design work, we can finally open registration and the call for papers. We have to finalize room numbers at the University already, although most rooms are still unbooked. Investigation into getting GNOME Beer brewed (which ended up going nowhere, sadly). Requests for visa invites begin to arrive.

April 2017: Lots of planning for social events, the talk days and the unconference days. PIA sponsorship confirmed. Posters being designed. Call for papers closes, voting begins and Kat starts putting together the talks schedule.

May 2017: Birthday planning with help from the engagement team (in particular Nuritzi). The University temporarily decide that we’ll have to pay staff costs of £500 per day to have the canteen open; we do a bunch of research into alternatives but then we go back to the previous agreement of having the canteen open with just a minimum spend. Planning of video recording and design. Schedule and social events planning.

June and July 2017: Continual planning and discussion of everything. More sponsors confirmed. Allan does prodigious amounts of graphic design and organizing printing. Travel sponsorship finally confirmed and lots of visa invitation requests start to arrive. Accommodation bookings continue to come in, along with an increasing amount of queries, changes and cancellations that become quite time-consuming to keep track of and respond to. Evening events being booked and finalized, including more planning of the birthday party with Nuritzi. Discussions of how to make sure the conference is inclusive to newcomers. Water bottles, cake and T-shirts ordered. Registrations keep coming in until we actually hit and go over 200 registrations. We contact volunteers and come up with a timetable.

Finally, the day before GUADEC we collect the last of the printing, bring everything to the venue and hole up in a room on the 2nd floor ready to pre-print names on badges and stuff the lanyard pouches with gift bags. We discover two major issues: firstly the ink on the badges gets completely smudged when we run it through the printer to print a name on it; and secondly the emergency telephone number that we’ve printed on the badges has actually been recycled as the SIM card was inactive for a while and now goes through to some poor unsuspecting 3rd party.

We lay out all the badges to try and dry the ink out but 3 hours later the smudging is still happening. We realise that the names will just have to be drawn on with marker pens. As for the emergency telephone… if you look closely at a GUADEC 2017 badge you’ll notice that there’s a sticky label with the correct number covering up the old number on the badge. Each one of these was printed onto stickyback paper and lovingly chopped out and stuck on by hand. You’re welcome! (Nobody actually called the emergency phone during the event).

Javier pointed out that we should be at the registration event at least an hour early (it started at 18:00). I said this was nonsense because most people wouldn’t get there til later anyway. How wrong I was !!! I’m used to organizing music events where people arrive about an hour after you tell them to, but we got to Kro Bar about 17:45 and it was already full to bursting with eager GNOME contributors, many of whom of course hadn’t seen each other for months. This was not the ideal environment to try and set up a registration desk for the first time and I mostly just stood around looking at boxes feeling confused and occasionally moving things around. Thankfully Kat and Benjamin soon arrived and made registration a reality leaving me free to drink a beer and remain confused.

And the rest is history!

GUADEC 2017 by numbers

I’m finally getting around to doing a bit of a post-mortem for the 2017 edition of GUADEC that we held in Manchester this year. Let’s start with some statistics!

GUADEC 2017 had…

• 264 registrations (up from 186 last year)
• 209 attendees (up from 160 last year)
• 72 people staying at the University (30 of whom had sponsorship awarded by the travel committee)
• 7 people who were sadly unable to attend because their visa application was refused at the last minute

We put four optional questions on the registration form asking for your country of residence, your age, your gender identity and how you first heard about GUADEC. The full set of responses (anonymous, of course) is available here.

I don’t plan to do much data mining of this, but here are some interesting stats:

• 61 attendees said they are resident in the UK, roughly 32%.
• The most common age of attendees was 35 (the full age range was between 11 years and 65 years)
• 14 attendees said they heard about the conference through working at Codethink

We asked for an optional, “pay as you feel” donation towards the costs of the conference at registration time and we suggested payments of £15/€15 for students, £40/€40 for hobbyists and £150/€150 for professionals.

• 47 attendees (22%) chose to donate nothing
• 29 attendees (13%) chose 1-15
• 75 attendees (36%) chose 16-40
• 51 attendees (24%) chose >40
• 7 attendees somehow chose “NULL” (I think these were on-site registrations, which followed a different process)

Note that we told Codethink staff that they shouldn’t feel required to donate from their company-provided conference budget as Codethink was already sponsoring at Platinum level, which should account for 15 or more of the people who chose to donate nothing with their registration.

The financial side of things is tricky for me to summarize as the sponsor money and registration donations mostly went straight to the Foundation’s bank account, which I don’t have access to. The fluctionation of GBP against the US dollar makes my own budget spreadsheet even less reliable,but I estimate that we raised around $10,000 USD for the GNOME Foundation from GUADEC 2017. This is of course only possible due to the generosity of our sponsors, and through the great work that Alberto and Neil did in this area.

My van did 94 miles around Manchester during the week of GUADEC. My house is only 4 miles from the centre so this is surprisingly high!

 

GUADEC Talks Schedule Now Available

As mentioned on the GUADEC 2017 blog, we’ve just published the talks schedule for this year’s edition.

Thanks to everyone who submitted a talk this year, we think there’s a fantastic mix of interesting topics on each day. We sadly had to make some tough decisions and turn down some great submissions as well – we received around 70 talk submissions this year which is a lot to fit into a 3 day, 2 track conference.

It’s now less than 6 weeks until the conference starts! If you’re planning on attending and haven’t yet registered, please register now at registration.guadec.org. It will be possible to register on the day, but we have to finalize room allocations, party venues and food orders way in advance so it will cause problems if everyone waits until the last minute to sign up.

If you’ve not yet booked a room, we have a number of rooms still available at the conference venue. You can book these when you register, or if you already registered then just log into registration.guadec.org and click ‘Edit registration’.

We also have hotel rooms available at fixed prices through Visit Manchester’s hotel booking service. The deadline for booking these rooms is Thursday 29th June.

Thanks to everyone who has opted to volunteer during the conference using the “Keep me informed” box on the registration form. We will be in touch with you very soon to discuss how you can get involved. There’s still time to edit your registration to tick this box if you’ve decided you want to help out on the day!

GUADEC call for talks ends this Sunday, 23rd April

GUADEC 2017 is just over three months away, which is a very long time in the future and leaves lots of time to organise everything (at least that’s what I keep telling myself).

However, the call for papers is closing this Sunday so if you have something you want to talk about in front of the GNOME community and you haven’t already submitted a talk then please head to the registration site and do so!

Once the call for papers closes, the Papers Committee will fetch their ceremonial robes and make their way to a cave deep in the Peak District for two weeks. There they will drink fresh spring water, hunt grouse on the moors and study your talk submissions in great detail. When two weeks is up, their votes are communicated back to Manchester using smoke signals and by Sunday 7th May you’ll be notified by email if your talk was accepted. From there we can organise travel sponsorship and finalize the schedule of the first 3 days of the conference, which should be available late next month.

We’ll put a separate call out for BoF sessions, workshops, and tutorial sessions to take place during the second half of GUADEC — the 23rd April deadline only applies to talks.

GUADEC accommodation

At this year’s GUADEC in Manchester we have rooms available for you right at the venue in lovely modern student townhouses. As I write this there are still some available to book along with your registration. In a couple of days we have to give final numbers to the University for how many rooms we want, so it would help us out if all the folk who want a room there could register and book one now if you haven’t already done so! We’ll have some available for later booking but we have to pay up front for them now so we can’t reserve too many.

Rooms for sponsored attendees are reserved separately so you don’t need to book now if your attendance depends on travel sponsorship.

If you are looking for a hotel, we have a hotel booking service run by Visit Manchester where you can get the best rates from various hotels right up til June 2017. (If you need to arrive before Thursday 27th July then you can to contact Visit Manchester directly for your booking at abs@visitmanchester.com).

We have had some great talk submissions already but there is room for plenty more, so make sure you also submit your idea for a talk before 23rd April!

GUADEC 2017: Friday 28th July to Wednesday 2nd August in Manchester, UK

The GUADEC 2017 team is happy to officially announce the dates and location of this year’s conference.

GUADEC 2017 will run from Friday 28th July to Wednesday 2nd August. The first three days will include talks and social events, as well as the GNOME Foundation’s AGM. This part of the conference will also include a 20th anniversary celebration for the GNOME project.

The second 3 days (from Monday 31st July to Wednesday 2nd August) are unconference-style and will include space for hacking, project BoF sessions and possibly training workshops.

The conference days will be at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Brooks Building. The unconference days will be in a nearby University building named The Shed.

Registration and a call for papers will be open later this month. More details, including travel and accommodation tips, are available now at the conference website: https://2017.guadec.org/

We are interested in running training workshops on Monday 31st July but nothing is planned yet. We would like to hear from anyone who interested in helping to organise a training workshop.

Inside view of MMU Brooks Building

 

GUADEC 2017 accommodation survey

We are looking at accommodation options for GUADEC 2017 in Manchester and we would like some feedback from everyone who is hoping to attend!

Manchester’s hotels fill up quickly in summer so we are going to do one or more group bookings now to ensure we have enough rooms for everyone.

There are 3 potential locations we’ve found. I’ve put some details about each place here: https://wiki.gnome.org/GUADEC/2017/Accommodation

If you are hoping to attend next year’s GUADEC, please take a minute to fill the survey here: https://goo.gl/forms/DYcnQLiBBZSSQlH23. If you prefer not to use Google Forms, reply to this mail on guadec-list@gnome.org instead (the questions are listed in the email).

If anyone has data from previous years that could inform our group booking for 2017 then please share it with us. I think the last time GUADEC did pre-booking of accommodation was in A Coruña back in 2012, so if anyone has numbers on how many rooms were taken and how many nights each person stayed for that year, or any before, it would help us a lot.

Here are the options in brief (see the wiki for more details):

Youth hostel 4-bed dorms £33 per night Breakfast £1.95 extra (must be quite a small breakfast 🙂 1.2 miles from venue Near the city centre
University ‘townhouse’ residences Single bedrooms with 12 bedrooms in each house £43 a night, or £52 including buffet breakfast Right next to the venue, about a mile from the city centre
Jury’s Inn Hotel Hotel with single/double and twin rooms ~£94 per night for a single, ~£51 each if you can double up. Breakfast £10 extra. 0.6 miles from the venue and right in the city centre.

Please fill out the survey to have your say on which accommodation you’d prefer to have!

Tracker talk slides from GUADEC 2015

I did a talk entitled “Tracker: Introduction and Reflection” at GUADEC 2015. The slides are available from http://afuera.me.uk/talks/tracker-talk-2015.pdf. I don’t know if they will make much sense without the words but at least there are some nice photos in there.

The Hypercall API of the Rump Kernel project

Today I’m at the New Directions In Operating Systems conference in Shoreditch in London. It’s a cool thing about working for Codethink that they let you go to conferences like these and even pay for the extortionate hotel and train fares involved!

There is fascinating stuff being talked about, I think Robert Watson summed up the theme well as “diagrams with boxes pointing at each other” which is pretty much what we seem to do.

One of the more dramatic rearrangements of the traditional diagram of an operating system is the rump kernel concept, which a couple of people spoke about. Broadly there are some great implications, such as that you run and debug kernel drivers from user space. In practice right now you are limited to NetBSD kernel drivers so it’s not so immediately relevant to me (but perhaps it’ll make NetBSD more relevant to me in future, who knows…!).

The other implication of a rump kernel is you can add a libc and an “application” and you’ve created a really minimal kind of container. Other talks at the conference seemed to be expanding the concept of the “application” to encompass large, distributed networks of systems, but here the “application” needs to be something simple enough to not even need fork().

I wanted to make this fuzzy “container” concept a bit more concrete. All of the diagrams in Antti’s talk slides labelled the bit between the rump kernel and whatever it’s running on as the “hypercall API”, but didn’t dig into the concept. I did a little digging myself and found:

• Online version of the documentation
• Prototypes in rumpuser.h
• librumpuser implementation on top of POSIX syscalls

Other implentations exist for bare metal and Xen. I think the Hypercall interface is one of the key insights of the Rump Kernel project: it’s the most minimal definition of what could be called a type of ‘container’ that I’ve seen. All the applications that can run on top of a NetBSD rump kernel can ultimately boil down to that.

There seems to be one big rabbit hole in it:

int rumpuser_open(const char *name, int mode, int *fdp)

Open name for I/O and associate a file descriptor with it.  Notably,
there needs to be no mapping between name and the host's file system
namespace.  For example, it is possible to associate the file descriptor
with device I/O registers for special values of name.

That’s basically your communication channel with the world. What if you want to talk to a graphics device? I guess if the ‘hypercall host’ wants to let you, it can let you rumpuser_open() it and send data…

If this is a type of container interface we can compare it with the container interface used by Docker: that is to say, a fairly large subset of the enourmous Linux syscall API. Whatever the future holds for the rump kernel project and its ‘hypercall’ API, it’s unlikely to grow as large as Linux! By developing an app that targets the Hypercall interface (whether this involves the NetBSD anykernel or something else doesn’t really matter) you reduce the attack surface between the application and the host OS to a very small amount of code: there’s currently 9,248 sLOC in the POSIX implementation of librumpuser, for example.

This whole concept is still fairly cloudy in my head and I doubt it’s something I’m going to work with any time soon. All the information above may be totally wrong and misleading, too, please help by correcting my understanding you are able!

Je vais GUADEC 2014 !