Unfortunately I was not able to attend debconf this year but thanks to the
awesome video team the all the talks are available for your viewing pleasure.
In order to recreate an authentic Portland experience, I took my laptop into the shower along with a vegan donut and had my children stand outside yelling excerpts from salon.com in whiny Canadianesque accents. Here are
some notes I took as I watched the talks.
Welcome Talk
- Why is everyone on stage wearing shorts? Is this a thing now?
- Langasek is pronounced with a 'sh' I did not know that.
- Kees is pronounced 'case' I also did not know that.
- Steve missed a good opportunity for a "Who moved my cheese?" joke. (Hey its
not any more obscure than the "white Chevy Nova" joke.)
- A well-deserved award to Russ Allbery from some of the UK people for being
the voice of reason on the mailing lists. See Vincent Sanders blog for details.
Debian in the Dark Ages of Free software - Stefan Zacchiroli
- More shorts. I am starting to feel overdressed.
- Stefan reminisces about how he got involved in Free Software and
his philosophy of the same. A good introduction for anyone wondering what
makes a Debian hacker tick.
- We should be concerned about software freedom in the new "cloud" environments.
Debian can play an important role in this by making it really simple for
users to set up their own cloud environments. My take: the focus should
be on free standards and protocols. The power that Google, Facebook etc.
have is drastically reduced if it is easy to jump ship.
Weapons of the Geek - Gabriella Coleman
- pro: no shorts con: womens slacks
- Intriguing anthropological investigation into Anonymous and how it/they relate
to Free Software.
- Coc acknowledged then ignored. Why do we need it again?
- "Anonymous has cabals ... [that] make the cabals within Debian look like childs play."
bugs.debian.org -- Database Ho! - Don Armstrong
- I would settle for a lungi at this point but noooo shorts again. (plaid to boot.)
- The return of my yearly guilt about undertaking to Don to add RSS support to
debbugs way back at debconf 10 and not following up on it. Damn it, I am going to get this done now.
- Sadly, the initial part of the stream is missing and it begans right in the
middle of Don saying something interesting.
- "I have to admit my primary motivation for giving a talk was to try to force
myself into actually doing the work I'm talking about."
- Stats porn. The BTS is growing at a phenomenal rate. bugs opened 142/day. But only 95/day closed.
Grub Ancient and Modern - Colin and Watson
- pro: no shorts con: kilt
- I was interested in this talk because one of these days I want to get GRUB 2
running on Debian Minix but a lot went over my head so I'll have to do some
more research first.
One year of fedmsg in Debian - Nicolas Dandrimont
- trouser status: undetermined
- Problem: There are many different services providing information in Debian
but they do not interop very well.
- fedmsg is a unified message bus originally developed by Fedora who were
facing a similar problem.
- It has now been implemented in Debian.
Coming of Age: My Life with Debian - Christine Spang
- trouser sta- oh the hell with this.
- Another talk which is more biographical than technical. Again, useful to
help understand the motivations of hackers.
- What interests me is that for younger generations it was open source which
was a novel idea whereas for those of who grew up in the 8-bit era, having
to hack on a computer was expected (whether you wanted to or not and it was
proprietary software you couldn't share which was considered new and strange.
Status report of the Debian Printing Team - Didier Raboud
- Ou est les pantalons? Je ne sais pas. (Apologies to Mme Terzini.)
- Kudos to Didier for taking up this augean task mostly on his own. Despite
the long-promised "paperless" office I need to be able to print and I was
pleasantly surprised that my new xerox all-in-one worked under Debian with
very little hassle.
- Brother sucks. Don't buy their printers. Ditto for Epson and Samsung.
- Buy HP instead.