The life of a CA Copenhagen Campus Connection

Last week (in the beginning of May) a couple of developers successfully ported Virtualbox for FreeBSD. This is substantial because there isn't currently any proper virtualization software for FreeBSD, so within the FreeBSD community - this is deemed even bigger than the porting of ZFS to FreeBSD.

The Virtualbox people has made a nice draft on how to port Virtualbox, if you feel inspired to look at the procedure.

The original announcement-mail to the Virtualbox developer mailliste can be found here. 

Wedensday I was attending Talk-IT at Copenhagen Business School. Granted - the program was not technical oriented, but it gave a good overview of the current state of open source in Scandinavia. It was also a Norwegian 101 language-course, since 2 of the three speakers were from Norway:

• Per Andersen, CEO IDC Nordic
• Heidi Austlid, CEO Nasjonalt Kompetansesenter for Friprogramvare
• Lasse Andresen, CTO Central & Northern Europe Sun Microsystems

Per started out with a couple of statistics. Fx. the use of open source in services, which is on the rise, fueled by the economic recession, but still only holding a small percentage of the overall service market. There is room and potential for growth in this sector.

Heidi Austlid was the second speaker. Giving us an overview of the state of open source in Norway as seen from her chair. On some points Norway is far ahead of Denmark, when it comes to initiatives regarding open source in the public sector fx. schools and municipalities (local authorities). Here the economic recession is also speeding up the adoption of open source in the public sector - local authorities want to use the tax money actively on welfare instead of passively on fx. licenses.



Also Nasjonalt Kompetansecenter for Friprogramvare is the main initiator of the Norwegian open source conference GoOpen, which had about 550 participants last year. GoOpen 2009 is scheduled for 16th -17th April. This year it is co-hosted along with the Nordic Perl Workshop and Sun Microsystems plan to have a small Nordic CommunityOne conference on the day before. From what I heard from the organizers, they have a strong lineup of speakers ready - so check out the program - it should be released any day now.

Last on the program, was Lasse Andresen, CTO of Central & Northern Europe from Sun Microsystems - and he was the main reason I was attending Talk-IT. David and Rikke from CommunityBuilder was nice enough to introduce me during the break, and I had a nice chat with Lasse, who was a very down-to-earth-kindda-guy (like most other Sun folks I've talked to) despite the fancy title.



Lasse's main focus of his talk was not OpenSolaris but the entire stack of open source software from top to bottom that Sun is capable of delivering. In fact I think he's opening remark was something like "This is NOT going to be about Linux" - which was very much in line with Per's notions on the growth of the open source service market. Sun Microsystems is right now one of the worlds biggest contributors to open source, only beaten by a very well known university (University of California/Berkley).

All-in-all it was a really good experience to participate in Talk-IT, and if you can find the time - the first Wedensday in every month from 15.00-17.00 @ CBS, you should attend.

 

Lately I've been reading up on concurrency. 

I started out with Allen B. Downeys Little book of semaphores, went on to Edward A. Lee's classic article The problem with threads, which has the most fantastic language. Stumbled upon Brian Goetz talk from InfoQ on Concurrency: Past and Present and found a link to the golden article The free lunch is over: a fundamental turn toward concurrency in software by Herb Sutter, which depicts today computing environments.

Made a mental note on reading the chapter Beautiful Concurrency by Simon Peyton Jones in the Book Beautiful Code and concluded the brain walk with the new article in ACM Queue Real-World concurrency by Bryan Cantrill and Jeff Bonwick. But first read Bryans excellent blog-entry explaining the background for the article.

Unfortunately I don't have the answer to the classic question - so I leave the question up to you:
Is the free lunch over? Or is the buffet bigger and cheaper than ever?

Sun has officially chosen to support Software Freedom Day 2008 - on September 20th.

I guess that means, I'll be doing some SFD planning again this year .

It was a really nice announcement, to receive now that the CA program is starting up again after the summer holidays. My only problem - what should we do different this year? I've been doing SFD for 3 years (2004, 2005 and 2006) and I don't want to do the same thing all over again - fx. handing out CD's at the main street of Copenhagen - that was fun back in 2005 - handing out 800 CDs in under 2 hours.

Maybe I should organize a couple of inspirational open source talks?

If you have any ideas - let me know. 

"Hello - my name is Damian. I'm from the future"...with these words my Day 2 at YAPC::Europe 2008 started, when Damian Conway gave his keynote "A.B.C.D.E.F.G" about Contextual::Return in the morning. Btw - it was amazing what that module could actually do - does it brew coffee and tie my shoelaces as well?

Larry Wall - perl hacker extraordinare

At Day 1, I didn't manage to see more than the keynote by Larry Wall, because we were really busy handing out t-shirts at the registration desk, but at Day 2 - I attended 3 interesting talks appart from the morning keynote.

• Lars Jørgensen - Making Large Legacy Systems Beautiful

I know Lars from DIKU where we wrote a couple of projects together. He now works for the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge UK, doing loads of perl hacking on their old legacy systems, and deciding on a daily basis what to recycle and what to refactor. The talk gave his personal view on how to handle legacy systems in a fairly big research environment. His final observations were pretty good, but he was a bit shy giving the presentation. Anyway it was good to see him again  

• Adam Kennedy - Tiny

Peter Makholm (I think) dragged me into this talk, telling me what a good speaker Adam Kennedy is - and I wasn't disappointed. But for a talk about tiny perl modules there was an enomous amount of big machinery involved!

• Léon Brocard - Working in the cloud

Léon is an amazing guy, having loads of modules on CPAN and doing loads of community work in London.pm and starting other Perl Monger groups. His talk was about cloud computing and how to put your business in the cloud and using the cloud services available to make your computing systems scalable. The talk was intended to be a discussion, but it was held in the biggest auditorium - and it seemed a bit hard to get people to interact in a BoF (birds of a feather) way.

This is what 300 lunchbags looks like

On Day 3 Damian started out by giving his second keynote "Beautiful Perl" and man you can do some serious ugly coding in Perl if you want to! On Day 3 I also heard 3 talks:

• Jonathan Rockway - Moose Introduction

I simply HAD to hear this one, because everywhere I went in the hallway people were saying Moose in every other sentence - and I had no idea what Moose was. I got wiser Appart from being an international greeting - its also a module making Perl more object-oriented and enabling a lot of the cool Perl 6 stuff into Perl 5.10.

• Phillippe Bruhat - Messing with git history using Git::FastExport

This talk was a bit dissapointing. The talker couldn't get his laptop to work with the projector and suddenly he was 15 min. behind schedule and unfortunately the talk got a little amputated by that.

• Chia-Liang Kao (CL) - Branch Management with SVK

So I stayed in the same room, after the git talk, to start the video-cam, but got stuck in a really interesting talk by CL, who works for Best Practical who also makes Request Tracker. The talk was about SVK - a tool to do offline editing in your subversion repository. Its also available as an Eclipse plugin. Boy that was a REALLY nice talk!

CL himself

I was really glad I finally got around to attending a YAPC - it was definately worth while. If not for the talks - then for the auction at the end. I've never before heard people paying 1.700 DKK to get Damian Conway to NOT rip up his book Perl Best Practices.... also don't be alarmed if you suddenly see the domain ihate.cpan.org  - it was auctioned off for a fair price

There's pictures on Flickr - search for yapceu2008 or ye2008.

I'll cross my fingers and hope I can get around to it - to go to Lisbon in 2009. The theme for next years YAPC::Europe is Corporate Perl.

I can't wait - its tomorrow! Time to relax, sit back and listen and talk to old friends I havn't seen in ages. The camera battery is fully charged, the laptop likewise. Its my first YAPC - so maybe I should start out by listening to the talk "How to get the most out of YAPC".

I have agreed to lend a helping hand to the organizers, so I don't know how many talks I will attend, but I am looking forward to the keynotes by Larry Wall and Damian Conway.

There'll be pre-registration beer @ the Globe tonight from around 18.00. 

See you in the hallway track

At DIKU we have a very old print server (vaftrudner), that uses the LPRng project along with some really wierd homemade Postscript2-written stuff encapsulated in Perl, which should have died a long time ago, but didn't. Needless to say - its been on our wish list for quite some time, to set up a new print server based on CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) and Kerberos for authentication.

Our computing environment has changed drastically over the past few years. Where as a couple of years ago all students would use the Sunray based terminal rooms, now days they all mostly bring their own laptop. So - what is the best way to provide printing services in this environment, where you have zero control over the students laptop? So far our solution has been to provide a CUPS-ssh backend (made by my collegue Martin Parm) which works on both OS X and Linux clients.

But CUPS provides support for Kerberos authentication from version 1.3 and the internet printing protocol (ipp) works on most platforms. Mac OS X, Linux and BSD is easily done, but Windows has for some time posed a problem. For some reason unknown to me Microsoft has only added ipp 1.0 support - but not ipp 1.1 support, and unfortunately the 0.1 version difference holds the authentication additions.

Fortunately a little piece of open source software gave us a solution to this problem: Redmon - A Redirection Monitor. Redmon install a new printer port on the Windows system, which can be redirected to another port and another program. So basically you install a new local printer, and instead of for instance a cable connecting the printer, you choose the redicretion port, which grabs the job and pipes it out through ssh. This is almost the same way our CUPS ssh-backend works today. If you have Kerberos, you can choose to use the Kerberized version of ssh and you can pass your credentials through ssh.

If you are a printer sysadmin, and provide a printing environment which includes a printing solution for Mac OS X, Linux, *BSD and Windows clients, I'd like to know how you set it up and if you have a better solution than the one I described above.

There I was - in the server room, staring at the shiny new T5220 machine, which DIKU got through the Sun Try 'n Buy program ready to install Solaris 10, but my Macbook Pro had no serial interface. After a little googling around I found the PL2303 USB to serial driver (they are hosted on SourceForge), which worked as a charm.

I also downloaded Zterm, and a little while later the installation was well under way.

Now the machine is running MiG (Minimum Intrusion Grid)

Minimum intrusion Grid is an attempt to design a new platform for Grid computing which is driven by a stand-alone approach to Grid, rather than integration with existing systems. The goal of the MiG project is to provide Grid infrastructure where the requirements on users and resources alike is as small as possible (minimum intrusion). MiG strives for minimum intrusion but will seek to provide a feature rich and dependable Grid solution.

Like the common geek family we host the family photos on our home webserver through Apache::Gallery. Apache::Gallery creates an thumbnail index of each directory and allows viewing pictures in different resolutions. Pictures are resized on the fly and cached. Apache::Gallery is coded by the Danish Perl Monger extra-ordinare Michael Legart and will be released in version 1.0 any-day-now.

Now Apache::Gallery is pretty cool in itself, but the newest version adds support for the firefox browser plug-in PicLens, that lets you browse the pictures almost like you do albums on your ipod.

über cool combination! Unfortunately its only supported on Windows and OS X so far

Oh - and if you are wondering - YAPC::Europe 2008 (Yet Another Perl Conference) will be hosted in Copenhagen Denmark, August 13th-15th - the theme is "beautiful perl". Rumor has it, that both Larry Wall AND Damian Conway will be giving keynotes.

I was looking for a tool to monitor the visitors to my blog - and Angad Singh a fellow campus ambassador recommended the following 4 tools:

1. Google Analytics - unlimited logs, geographically pinpointing where your readers come from - and also a very cool overlay feature, which lets you walk in the footprint of your readers.
   
2. Statcounter.com - neat tool, but limited to 500 log-entries for the free version
   
3. Sitemeter.com - good tool - especially on the referrer part - so you can track how your readers came to your site.
   
4. Something self-hosted fx. awstats (perl-based) or mint - "pick your poison"
   

Its been a while since I last played with webstats, so I went for option 1. Its allways fun to check out new Google beta tools. I started out by watching a couple of YouTube videos featuring Avinash Kaushik, Google Analytics Evangelist, explaining how the analytics tool works.

And I admit it, I'm sold - statistics just got a whole lot more fun again.

Firefox has come up with a new idea to spread the new Firefox 3 to the masses - a Guinness World Record Download Day! They want to make a record for most downloads in 24 hours.

You can sign up at http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/. 

They've even set up a pledge and reminder system, so you'll be notified. All I use these days is Firefox and Safari - so if someone deserves a World Record for a job well done - its Firefox!

Lets set a record

 

Yesterday I read an article on a business website, talking about the difference between outsourcing and crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a task which is traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsource it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. Typically by publically inviting the public to help develop some sort of new technology. The word was originally coined by Jeff Howe in Wired in 2006.

It remined me of Eric Raymonds wise words in The cathedral and the bazaar:

Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

and he continues:

Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.

- see the similarities between crowdsourcing and open sourcing?

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet

Photo by RichardAM