Debian MiniConf, ARM, Cambridge 11/11/16 - Day 2 post 2

It's raining cats and dogs in Cambridge.

Just listening to Lars Wirzenius - who shared an office with Linus Torvalds, owned the computer that first ran Linux, founded the Linux Documentation Project. Living history in more than one sense :)

Live streaming is also happening.

Building work is also happening - so there may be random noise happening occasionally.

Debian Miniconf ARM Cambridge - 11/11/16 - Day 2 post 1

Lots of chatting at various points  - a couple of extra folk have joined us today.

I've been fighting UEFI network booting: found inconsistencies on various Wiki pages - then found that the laptop I was intending to boot was just too old to support UEFI properly. In the meantime, the person I was intending to help has moved on and hit something else ...

Release team have managed to hammer out a couple of points: various other progress from the video team. It's all going fairly well.

Lunch - and coffee - excellent once again.

Thanks to front desk folks - and ARM folks - who are tolerating the end of their working week being invaded by Debian folk.

Debian Miniconf ARM, Cambridge 10/11/16 - Post 4

As we left at about 1740, Wookey was still working on the Cubietruck I'd left him with but had made progress.

Dispersed to various pubs and eateries: we all ended up talking a great deal, much as last year. Tsk, tsk - you hardly see people for 20 years then you see the same people twice in two years :)

Though I didn't see that much of them through the day, thanks to Jo, Lucy and all who kept front desk running as ever and thanks to all the various ARM staff who were helpful with opening doors for the visitors and all the little things around administration - wifi access, badges and all that goes with hosting.

And why, O why, did I not notice that I'd subconsciously typed 10/11/12 not once but three times

Debian Miniconf, ARM Cambridge 10/11/16 - post 3

Quiet room with occasional outbursts of talking. One of my problems with radio gear down to broken cable so that's OK-ish - I have spares.

And suddenly it's 1720 and we need to leave at about 1730.

2 x radio receivers tried: 2 x transmitters working ready for talk on Saturday.

Spare huge bag of cables appreciated by others - it's amazing how often you find someone else needs stuff :)

Debian Miniconf ARM, Cambridge 10/11/16 - post 2

Now about 30 people here: the video team are chasing down power leads and cables in readiness for the weekend.

One large open plan room with about 30 small quadrilateral tables - two make a hexagon. Very quiet for open plan: periodically the room falls completely silent - lots of developers quietly coding / reading screens.

Lunch was very good curry: ARM caterers feed us very well indeed :D

The radio I'm trying to program refuses to play with the software: the maintainer is at the back of the room and has offered to sort out a backport to Debian stable. Debian can occasionally seem like a dysfunctional family but it's good to be a member.

The Cubietruck I bought last year is sitting with another developer as I speak - he's going to try adding multiple disks for a RAID array on a machine that only draws 5W or so.

Debian Miniconf, ARM, Cambridge 10/11/16 - Post 1

More or less just getting going: there are eight of us here.

Release team are round one desk and a couple of others of us are on adjacent tables. Coffee is good, as ever :)

ARM very helpful as ever: they have been able to provide a disabled space for me though parking here is really, really tight

Who wrote Hello world

Who wrote "Hello, world" ?

Rereading Kernighan and Ritchie's classic book on C - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language - almost the first thing you find is the listing for hello world. The comments make it clear that this is a commonplace - the sort of program that every programmer writes as a first test - the new computer works, the compiler / interpreter produces useful output and so on. It' s the classic, canonical thing to do.

A long time back, I got asked whether programming was an art or a science: it's both, but most of all it's only good insofar as it's shared and built on. I used hello world as an example: you can write hello world. You decide to add different text - a greeting (Hej! / ni hao / Bonjour tout le monde! )for friends. 

You discover at / cron / anacron - now you can schedule reminders "It's midnight - do you know where your code is?" "Go to bed, you have school tomorrow"

You can discover how to code for a graphical environment: how to build a test framework around it to check that it _only_ prints hello world and doesn't corrupt other memory ... the uses are endless if it sparks creativity.

If you feel like it, you can share your version - and learn from others. Write it in different languages - there's the analogous 99 bottles of beer site showing how to count and use different languages at www.99-bottles-of-beer.net

Not everyone will get it: not everyone will see it but everyone needs the opportunity 

Everyone needs the chance to share and make use of the commons, needs to be able to feel part of this 

Needs to be included: needs to feel that this is part of common heritage.

 

If you work for an employer: get them to contribute code / money / resources - even if it's as a charitable donation or to offset against taxes

If you work for a government: get them to use Free/Libre/Open Source products

If you work for a hosting company / ISP - get them to donate bandwidth for schools/coding clubs.

Give your time, effort, expertise to help: you gained from others, help others gain

If you work for an IT manufacturer - get them to think of FLOSS as the norm, not the exception