fudcon

Just got back from Fudcon Blacksburg. As always, it was a great time. Arrived after driving down (10 hrs) Thursday evening and crashed quickly after checking into my accommodations (The Inn at Virginia Tech). Friday, the first day, was hackfests, I attended the Fedora Infrastructure meeting and held a few sessions around Aeolus where I talked with passer by's about the project, my Snap subproject and what people were looking for out of an open source IaaS cloud abstraction platform. Specifically at FUDCon I aimed to find out how people wanted to interface w/ the cloud on the Fedora desktop and how they wanted to use the Aeolus stack. We ended up modifying Snap a little to add some command line options and began
messing around w/ mycloud a c level cloud computing API I started throwing together to meet people's needs. Dinner that night was at a good indian place.

The second day was the barcamp sessions, I volunteered to do another session on Aeolus, which went well, there were plenty of newcomers interested in the projects and I was able to share what was in development and upcoming things on the platform. After lunch several of us from the ruby-sig met to hold the now traditional ruby-sig meeting at FUDCon (we held one in Toronto, one was held in Milan, and now this was the third at Blacksburg). We got alot done including:

• tested out the new Ruby 1.9.3 repository (messed around w/ getting Aeolus working on MRI 1.9.3)
• discussed updates to the new packaging guidelines, and updates to the the ruby stack
• looked into possibly using macros to assist w/ building gems for multiple ruby interpreters on Fedora (jeroen volunteered to start investigating thing one, this would be a feature coming furthur down the pipeline)
• discussed the rvm / bundler ecosystems, and again how to drive and market the Fedora philosophy of a single supported stack while delivering the ultimate development platform for the ruby-community
• looked into continuing building tools and applications which to enhance the Ruby experience on Fedora, I volunteered to build a isitfedoraruby website (akin to itisruby19.org) to demo and highlight fedora on ruby and to start reaching out to the cloud-sig and other Fedora communities to promote and highlight the product/platform.
• continuing to extend / expand / improve gem2rpm, polisher, and other gem/rpm interoperability tools

Next I attended the session on OpenStack, a popular build-your-own-cloud platform (one of the platforms supported by deltacloud) and learned a bit more about the internals and how it is constructed. Finally the lightning talks session was the last on Saturday, and a must for any FUDCon attendee. There were many pitches, including several for new fedora components including hosted instances of mock infra apps, a discussion on what motivates and how to drive open source contributions, a demonstration on how to inject code into running Python processes using "parasite" by lmacken, an overview of foss@rit by remmy dekaukusburg and the narcissus web visualizations by ralph bean. I ended up pitching mycloud and snap again as well as my own Nethack Encyclopedia project, inviting fellow explorers of the mazes of menace to bring the guide :-)

FUDPub was fun, as always a good time, featuring bowling and lots of tastey food and held at the Blacksburg student center this time around.

I'm writing this from my hotel room Sunday morning as I pack up and prepare for the 10hr drive hack. Overall a great time, have plenty to keep me busy going forward, and am looking forward to the next FUDCon!

I had such a great time at the last FUDCon I attended, Toronto '09 that I decided to return for Blacksburg '12 this upcoming January 13th-15th in Blacksburg, Virgina. Some of you may recall, during the last FUDCon, I gave a presentation on deltacloud, the core component of Aeolus the Open Source Cloud Computing API.

Alot of great work has went into the project over the last couple of years, and I've decided to submit a few hackfest proposals around using some of the tooling in unique ways. With the first proposal, I aim to go over the various projects that exist under the Aeolus umbrella, and use them to build some simple tools to deploy and monitor cloud provider instances in interesting ways. With my second proposal, I intend to take my subproject Snap (the modular system snapshotter for Fedora/Ubuntu/Windows/etc) and expand it with more custom snapshot targets. I have a bunch in mind, but I'm more than eager to help anyone write a plugin to take a snapshot of their own custom software (these are very easy to write and integrate into the project).

In any case, the conference should be a really fun time as always, and I'm really looking forward to it! Hope to see you all there!

Just got back from the Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) in Toronto ON this past weekend. There I gave an introductory talk on the field of Cloud Computing and discussed the current project I'm hacking on @RH, deltacloud. The presentation went well and I got alot of great feedback / garnered some more interest in the project. I uploaded the slides here for anyone that's interested.

The weekend flew by, I drove up on Friday and back tonight (4hr each way). I attended alot of great talks and there were many that I wanted to go to but couldn't due to presentation overlaps. Regardless the ones I attended were all excellent and included

• J5's talk on AMQP. As it was an introduction to the topic and since I've done a bit of work using qpid in oVirt and Simrpc, I was familiar w/ a some of the material and but it still was very interesting and I picked alot of stuff up, such as the semantics of the different message transfer/event protocols, queue security / access control, and thoughts on the direction of AMQP/QPID and integrating it w/ community projects.
• An excellent talk on some of the new features in the GNU Debugger (GDB) including thread support, pretty printing (huzzah!), and C++ expression and namespace handling. When working on Romic and Manic and various other C++ projects I used the GDB debugger extensively and ran into many of the issues fixed with this versions. :-)
• Mairin Duffy's talk on UI mockups for developers using Inkscape. A great presentation on the Inkscape application, geared towards making a wireframe / simple UI mocks for review very quickly so that you can easily spot design problems before you write your first line of code, and so reviews are not as apprehensive about giving you honest feedback (as they would be if you invested a ton of time implementing the UI of your application before asking for a review)
• Luke Macken's presentation of his project, Moksha a real time webapp platform. Luke and I have discussed Moksha in the past, but usually from a high level "what does it do" point of view, and it was nice to see a detailed analysis of the framework and all the components, and see some live examples in action pertaining to using it. Its really powerful stuff, I recommend everyone check it out.
• A round table discussion about the future of Ruby in Fedora. Ruby's a great language but there are some problems in the current affairs of Ruby such as the incompatibilities between 1.8.6 / 1.8.7 point releases, which might to break alot of software if not handled properly (and thats just forgetting about Ruby 1.9 which is now the 'main' Ruby version). I understand major API changes between main versions (eg 1.8 -> 1.9) but a point release should _never_ have any major core API changes except in the most extreme / rare cases (eg security fixes, but those usually don't entail API changes). This is going to be somewhat problematic for Fedora/Ruby as we now need to support those different versions. Regardless the problem has come up before w/ other interpreted languages that have their own package management systems. Thanks go out to Jeroen van Meeuwen for maintaining the Ruby rpm and holding the discussion today / leading the effort to resolve this problem. I'm going to be joining the effort to assist that process in the near future.
• An introduction to Puppet the automated data center configuration tool. I have played around w/ puppet via thincrust (which oVirt depends on) in the past, but it was good to learn the various components of the puppet framework and how to setup an installation from scratch, using it to configure whatever systems to meet your needs

Overall the conference was great, and I am definitely looking forward to attending more FUDCons and other related events in the future.

Until next time, keep hacking!