Groveronline

Hey it’s Friday! Chillin’ at work? This afternoon might be a good time to write up that idea you had for a talk at the Linux Plumbers Conference. We do have a bunch of microconfs, but we’re interested in all interesting talks.

The Linux Plumbers Conf is September 17-19 in Portland Oregon USA, immediately after the Kernel Summit as it were. It’s focused on getting kernel and userspace developers talking more and addressing issues related to the under-the-covers working of the Linux software universe.

We are running a 3 track, 2.5 day conf with 2 tracks devoted to 10 microconfs, the remaining track being devoted to misc talks, tutorials and other fun stuff. The 10 microconfs are:

• The future of Linux storage
• Video input infrastructure and V4L2
• Power management and tools for efficient resource usage
• Future displays and input devices
• Dbus for desktop integration
• Linux server management
• XCB and graphics
• Audio
• Kernel/userspace interfaces
• Debugging, tuning, tracing, and profiling

Today is the first day to both register and submit a talk proposal — I encourage both!

The house is on the market! Whew. Exhale.

Also, after listening to an OReilly webcast by the author, I bought his book on open iPhone development and read it. I’ve successfully built the needed toolchain on my Linux laptop (on Gutsy — Hardy doesn’t work.) Due to the first item I haven’t had any time this week to do more, but I’m looking forward to learning more about Objective C and iPhone development, which is basically OSX Cocoa programming. I think I was turned off by ObjC’s funky syntax (what’s with all the @’s and [ ]s?) but like any language, once you get used to it it’s fine. In school I learned the intricacies of C++ partially because it was such an incredibly hard language to get right, and therefore imbued with power and mystique. But now my old attitude seems a little silly — if it’s so hard to use for no good reason, why use it? So I recently sold both Myers books and feel better for it. I’m a C and Python guy, but maybe my brain has room for a little ObjC. It could be a middle ground between the two, we’ll see. I plan to write a native iPhone app that hooks into BandRadar — I think the combination of iPhone’s location-awareness plus presenting the site’s info via the slick iPhone UI could be very cool. I don’t think any of the horde of other events sites have done this yet, although a few may very well be working on it…

Finally, The Bad Trees have a gig this Wednesday at Slabtown, check it out!

Of the ten people we need to run microconfs (MC Runners) at the Linux Plumbers Conf, we now have six lined up and leads on the other four slots. Once we have that, we can proceed to generating the invitee list (people we want to make sure have a chance to register) and keep working on searching for a keynote speaker.

Lists, lists, lists. Finishing one seems to mean it’s time to start on another…

On the way: 8GB CF card and CF to 2.5″-IDE adapter.

Total cost: $140 (I got the super-fast CF card)

This could be just what my aging mininote needs to be useful a while longer.

Stephen Brust just released his Firefly novel for free.

Stephen Brust is my favorite fantasy author, and Firefly is my favorite western-themed sci fi series by Joss Whedon, so a double win!

It’s pretty frickin’ nice. Once 3rd party apps start being released (SDK next month) I think I’m going to have a hard time holding off getting one myself. Why can’t anyone but Apple make stuff like this???

Dear Apple,

Please make a desktop machine that is neither a $3000 behemoth nor an unexpandable micro-PC. How about something in-between? If you do, I will buy one.

Your friend,

Andy

this is crazy…