2013-01-19

FUDcon Day 2

So Saturday was Hackfest day where various people got together in teams and worked on what they liked. Some people worked on ARM hardware, others on cloud software, and others on HAM tests... and those were only the ones I could stumble past.

Earlier in the week I had slipped and fallen on the ice we had in Albuquerque, and my back finally seemed to decide it was the day to truly protest it. So I was not able to see most of the Hackfests, but I have heard that a lot of progress was done in many areas.

For me, I took a seat in the Infrastructure room, and began to pull in mirrormanager and how it works. While it will be a multi-month odyssey for me to get to the heart of this software, Matt Domsch was able to walk me through getting a patch made to log which set of mirrors was chosen first as the best possible mirror. Once this is deployed it should allow for us to get some statistics on whether clients are told local, ASN local, national, continental, or just random pick are the ones various ip spaces are getting the most. Hopefully it will allow us also to see when something comes up wrong or if we can improve spaces with mirrors.

At the end of the day, while everyone else headed towards the celebratory FUDpub experience and bowling.. my back decided it was time for me to retire for the night. So I layed down for a bit while the Vitamin I(brupofen) kicked in and then caught up on my posts for the last couple of days.

Thanks for reading. I am off to sleep.

FUDcon day 1

So day one of FUDcon was great this year. I woke up on time and got to the state of Fedora talk which I had missed by sleeping through the wakeup call, the phone alert, and my Dad telling me to get up (which he later remarked was just like my teenage years all over.)

We took the Redy2Party buses from the hotel to near Eaton Hall. As Robyn would remark later, we would eat in Eaton Hall and learn in Learned Hall. [You can't pay enough money for these puns people.] After the state of Fedora, we voted on the BarCamp talks we would want to listen to for the rest of the day. Sadly I continued a long running trend of every talk I voted for didn't make it to the list of final talks. Next year I expect people to pay me for what talks they want me to stay away from so that they have a better chance of making the schedule.

The talks in the morning were very good and I learned a lot about some new ARM server hardware from CalXeda.. which is good because we will be deploying a large number of the servers in our PHX2 facility later this month. Had a good lunch back at Eaton and listened to a series of lightening talks on upcoming features and software we might look forward to. After lunch I sat in on the EPEL discussion which boiled down to 7 years of EPEL being relived in 40 minutes as every argument/problem was brought back up. In the end, I think we realized we just have to make some sort of decision and let bygones be bygones.

On a brighter note, I enjoyed Dan Walsh's talk on the State of Fedora Security and learned many things I plan to inflict on my home network so that I can better learn Selinux. Finally I ended up on the "End of Spins and How Formulas Will Make Slice Bread Talk." Which was not actually the talk, but was how everyone thought of it afterwords (especially after...)

Pizza night. We ended up the evening doing Pizza and very very wonderful cupcakes. People played many games and drank some alcohol. Or something like that. I turn into a pumpkin at 9pm so missed most of the shenanigans.

FUDcon Day 0

Day 0 was the usual travel day to the event. This year I flew to Kansas City, Missouri via SouthWest airlines. The plane ride was fun and I got to watch all the crop circles that form in Eastern Colorado and Kansas from alfalfa farming. With the straight roads forming "walls" and a 3/4 circle then a series of smaller circles, there was a great pseudo Pac-Man game going on.. sadly my phone booted after we passed the site so I missed the image.  As we were landing at the airport I got to see a Jay Hawk fly across the field and snag something out of the grass (I am guessing a small mouse or something.) Again... no pictures in time.

Met Matt Domsch at the airport with various other Fedorans, and we went on search for a place to sit and eat. Around 17:30 local time, the van and an SUV arrived and we were whisked off to the Springfield Suites in Lawrence Kansas. The hotel sits near the river and has an inverted layout.  The main floor is on 3 and the floors go down from there. On the bottom floor there is an indoor pool and exercise room which various Fedorans used all through the FUDcon. [Clothing was mandatory in the hot spa.]

Got into the room and then went on a walk-about to find food which we found at the Free State Brewery. The beers looked rather good and people had a good time trying them. Afterwords I got to impress people when Peter Jones introduced me as his manager from long ago.. and everyone saying "You don't look as insane as someone would need to be that." Finally got back to the hotel and crashed for the evening.