FOSDEM 2013 - 01 # On Friday morning our train left for this year’s FOSDEM. Though a bit longish I have a strong preference for going by train as this gives more time and opportunity for hacking (in my case trying out Elastic Search), reading (in my case the book “Team Geek”) and chatting with other FOSDEM visitors. Monday morning was mostly busy with meeting people - at the FSFE, Debian, Apache Open Office booths, generally in the hallways. ...
FOSDEM - Sunday - smaller bits and pieces # With WebODF the Office track featured a very interesting project that focusses on providing a means to open ODF documents in your favourite browser: Content and formatting are converted to a form that can easily be dealt with by using a combination of HTML and CSS. Advanced editing is then supported by using JavaScript. With Open Stack the following talk focussed on an open cloud stack project that was started by NASA and Rackspace as both simultanously needed support for an open source, openly designed, developed cloud stack that strives for community inclusion. ...
FOSDEM - HBase at Facebook Messaging # Nicolas Spiegelberg gave an awesome introduction not only to the architecture that powers Facebook messaging but also to the design decisions behind their use of Apache HBase as a storage backend. Disclaimer: HBase is being used for message storage, for attachements with Haystack a different backend is used. The reasons to go for HBase include its strong consistency model, support for auto failover, load balancing of shards, support for compression, atomic read-modify-write support and the inherent Map/Reduce support. ...
FOSDEM - Django # The languages/ cloud computing track on Sunday started with the good, the bad and the ugly of Django's architecture. Without much ado the speaker started by giving a high level overview of the general package layout of Django - unfortunately not going into too much detail on the architecture itself. What he loves about Django are the model layer abstractions that really are no ORM only - instead both relational and non-relational databases can be supported easily. ...
FOSDEM - Saturday # Day one at FOSDEM started with a very interesting and timely keynote by Eben Moglen: Starting with the example of Egypt he voted for de-centralized distributed and thus harder to take over communication systems. In terms of tooling we are already almost there. Most use cases like micro blogging, social networking and real time communications can already be implemented in a distributed, fail safe way. So instead of going for convenience it is time to think about digital independence from very few central providers. ...
FOSDEM II 2011 # It’s already sort of a nice little tradition for me to spend the first weekend in February in Brussels for FOSDEM. This year I am particulary happy that there will be a Data Analytics Dev Room at FOSDEM. A huge Thanks to @ogrisel and @nmaillot who have done most of the heavy lifting of getting the schedule in place. Looking forward to an interesting Cloud Track, to meeting Peter Hintjens who is going to give a talk on 0MQ, the DevOps presentation and lots of very interesting DevRooms. ...
CfP: Data Analysis Dev Room at Fosdem 2011 # Call for Presentations: Data Analysis Dev Room, FOSDEM http://fosdem.org 5 February 2011 1pm to 7pm Brussels, Belgium This is to announce the Data Analysis DevRoom co-located with FOSDEM. The first Meetup on analysing and learning from data, taking place in Brussels, Belgium. Important Dates (all dates in GMT +2): Submission deadline: 2010-12-17 Notification of accepted speakers: 2010-12-20 Publication of final schedule: 2011-01-10 ...
FOSDEM - video recordings online # As published in the FOSDEM blog the video recordings are available online - at least for the main track and the lightning talks. Happy video watching!
FOSDEM 2010 - part 3 # Sunday started in Janson with Andrian Bowyer’s talk on RepRap machines, that is devices that can be used as manufacturing devices and are able to replicate themselves. After that I went over to the Mono dev room to listen to Miguel de Icaza on Mono Edge. A great talk on the history of Mono, the way the community interacts with Microsoft, the C# language itself and special features only available in Mono. ...
FOSDEM 2010 - part 2 # The event itself featured 306 talks - so pretty hard to choose what to watch on two days. This time, not only the main tracks were awesome, but also several dev rooms featured very interesting talks by well known FOSS developers. Saturday started with a FOSDEM birthday dance done by all attendees. The first keynote speaker Brooks Davis explained his experiences promoting open source methods at a large company. ...