Linuxfest Northwest 2007 - Bellingham, WA

PythonDog and I once again made the yearly trek to Bellingham, WA for Linuxfest Northwest. This year's Fest spanned two days rather than the usual one and, in my opinion, it continues to get better each time.

The presentations I attended were varied:

• Jabber with ejabberd - Aaron Klemm, DigiPen Institute of Technology
• Open sourcing Second Life - Rob Lanphier and Phoenix Linden, Linden Lab
• From HTML to XUL, Web to Desktop - Shane Caraveo, ActiveState
• Why Plone? (An Intro) - Brian Gershon and Andrew Burkhalter, Seattle Plone Users Group
• Up and Running (Fast) - Andy Carrel, Google
• One Laptop Per Child - Jesse Keating, Red Hat
• How Sites Scale Out - Brian Aker, MySQL AB

My favorite sessions were by Linden Lab (Second Life), Google (Up and Running), Red Hat (OLPC) and MySQL (How Sites Scale Out).

Although I do not consider myself much of a virtual socialite, the concept of what Linden Lab is doing with Second Life appeals to a part of me. It is a social medium and, like any medium, it allows the creative an outlet to express oneself and hopefully, in turn, reach a receptive audience.

Listening to what Andy Carrel had to say about Google and the daily issues they face with the vast amounts of hardware and data is mind boggling. One of the things he said that set me thinking was that of programmer effectiveness. Google engineers create services that run on building-sized computing platforms. Their computer is made up of thousands of CPUs, lots of DRAM, networking devices, and disk drives. I consider myself fortunate if I have a second server to help load balance a service.

Jesse Keating with Red Hat gave a great presentation on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. The little green laptop is a marvel of engineering and a testiment to what they are trying to accomplish considering who their target audience is - the third world, underdeveloped countries, kids. Each child gets their own laptop to take home and bring back to school. The short and long term implications of what this could mean for their development as individuals and a nation is awe inspiring.

Next year's Linuxfest is already on my calendar. I can't wait.

Linuxfest Northwest 2005

This past weekend I attended Linuxfest Northwest in Bellingham, WA with a buddy of mine who came down from Canada. There was an exhibit room set up with various vendors and groups as well as a packed presentation schedule with events running throughout the day.

Although there were a number of speakers I would have liked to have heard, we only had time to sit in on three. All three represented great achievements in open source development. The three presentations we attended were:

• Clam AntiVirus - Clam AntiVirus is a GPL anti-virus toolkit for UNIX. Its main purpose is in the integration with mail servers for the purposes of attachment scanning.
• Asterisk - Asterisk is a complete PBX in software. It runs on Linux and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX and more.
• MythTV - MythTV is a suite of programs that allow you to build the mythical home media convergence box on your own using Open Source software and operating systems.

They were all good presentations and it was easy to see that a lot of work has gone into each project to bring it to the standard it shares today. I personally can't wait to find a spare computer to set up a MythTV box and hopefully rid myself of the numerous VHS tapes that are scattered around the living room.