So my blog has been dormant for some time, and in that time I’ve had a variety of hardware failures etc. As such my previous nanoc based site was lost. Thankfully all the content was stored in git so was easy to recover. I thought if I’m going to restart blogging I might as well look at a different platform, and it looks like all the cool kids are using Hugo so here we are.
I was at the wonderful FOSDEM this weekend just gone and met up with many fine folk (as always) unfortunately there were also many people I didn’t manage to catch up with. On the Sunday I attended a talk on The Tumbleweed Factory given by openSUSE’s very own Release Manager, Coolo. I made a statement about this talk, and have been challenged on that statement - I’m glad that I was challenged by one of our community members, because they were quite right to do so.
The final day of EuroBSDCon kicked off (summary of Day 1, 2 & 3) and I gave my talk on “Introducing the 64-bit ARMv8 Architecture” in the morning, actually the morning in Track 3 was overtaken by ARM related talks :-). My talk went down well (no rotten fruit/veg was thrown! \o/), and it was nearly a full room people from various flavours of BSD which was encouraging. There were some good questions and some suggestions for things that could make things easier for the developers to support ARM moving forward which is always useful to hear.
OK so I lied, the EuroBSDCon actually has 3 days of FreeBSD DevSummit. The third day built upon some of the things covered in Day 2. The first part of the morning was taken over by the FreeBSD working groups, these working groups are the ones that do the work and integrate things that make up the full FreeBSD Operating system. There were presentations by groups like Toolchain, Security, Packaging, Desktop, etc.
Day 2 of EuroBSDCon (overview of Day 1) kicked off for me with the morning being dedicated to virtualization. In Linux we’re all used to the usual suspects - KVM/Xen/LXC/VMWare, so I was interested to hear what’s available on FreeBSD especially bhyve which is probably as close to KVM as one will get. Xen support is available in FreeBSD, but only as DomU (guest VM). Dom0 (host server) support is actively being worked on though to rectify this shortfall (this does not apply to NetBSD).
As part of my role at work I get to interact with various Open Source projects, and not all of them are Linux related. This week I’m on the beautiful, historic, sunny and warm island of Malta attending EuroBSDCon. As you can work out from the name, it is the European gathering of BSD developers and users covering all the BSD variants like FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD/PCBSD/Dragonfly. I’m giving a talk on ARMv8 and AArch64 on Sunday, so hopefully that will go well, I’m somewhat nervous as I finished my slides before I left which is somewhat unusual.
I was fortunate enough to get a present for surviving another year of life, a shiny new AR.Drone2.0. This was something that I had desired sometime ago but then dismissed as an expensive toy with little expansion. That desire returned recently after being enlightened to the hacking opportunities, not just hacking the device directly but more around the hacking of applications to use with it. Yet again it was Laurent Eschenauer to blame with his excellent ardrone-webflight.
It’s been almost 18 months since I last made any change to this site, and I’ve been meaning to do it for a while. In all honesty, it’s been a while since I last blogged so I thought it was as good a time as any. Thanks to the likes of Twitter and Google+, and my corporate blog I’m finding myself blogging less an less. As my blog is getting less content, is it really worth running an sql server etc?
I just published a blog post on ARM’s corporate blog with an overview of the recent openSUSE ARM Hackathon. We didn’t quite manage all the tasks that we had hoped for, but we did get the big ones done. For me it was great to meet so many old friends, and some new ones. I’d like to say a few thanks to some of the people involved, they all did so much and this is just some of the things that they did:
Get openSUSE 12.3 Now that openSUSE 12.3 is out, the openSUSE ARM Team want to step up a gear. As the cycle was shorter than normal, there are a few wrinkles that need to be ironed out and also a whole heap of new things that can be added. After some discussion at FOSDEM, it was decided to hold a Hackathon to address these items. The Hackathon will take place on 08 to 12 April, both at the SUSE offices in Nuremberg as well as online for those that can’t attend in person.
There is now real hardware from ARM’s partners that offers the ability to leverage hardware virtualisation, in a similar fashion to Intel and AMD. So far three devices are shipping to the general public – the new Series 3 Chromebook, the Nexus 10 and the Arndale board. They all have one key factor in common, the Samsung Exynos5 SoC. This fine piece of silicon is a member of the Cortex-A15 family which introduces the required virtualisation extensions.
Next week I’ll be in Orlando attending both SUSE Con, and also openSUSE Summit. Not only will I be attending the Summit, but I’ll also be joining Michael Miller in the Opening Ceremony. In addition to you being able to see, talk and interact with me, I’ll also be giving away a whole heap of goodies ;-) So if you’re in the area and have an interest in ARM or most things Geeko, please give me a shout.
After five years at Fujitsu it is time for me to move on. I’ve had a blast, both good and bad, whilst there and was lucky enough to have experienced and hopefully learnt a lot. Whist there I’ve worked in all sorts of verticals; including but not limited to Government, Financial, Education, Science and HPC. Although I was brought in to deal with Linux and Open Source it was never limited to that and was lucky enough to have been exposed to a multitude of technologies that I wouldn’t have known about had it not been due to work.
Just on the off chance that anyone has tried to browse to my blog or any other part of my web presence on the wafaa.eu domain, you may have noticed that it was returning either with no content or pile of garbled mess. Well the reason is I decided to do a bit of a tidy up. I’ve finally migrated completely to my Microserver, and have retired my old but trusty Compaq Evo.
Just a quick post to enlighten those that use an Intel 945GME powered machine of a certain pixel limitation that you may not know about. I’m a full time user of the spiffy new GNOME3 with the fancy gnome-shell mojo. As such it’s on my primary machine, which at the moment is an eeePC 1000HE. Yup, that’s a netbook with a small 10″ screen and relatively low resolution of 1024×600 pixels.
Some people may have noticed that I’ve been fairly quiet on the Geeko front, this has been mainly down to an insane amount of work but also some other bits and bobs. Some of those bits and bobs are a result of my mind running away with me, I like to believe that I’m a good thinker, some people say I’m a daydreamer, others say I have an over active imagination.
I like to think of myself as being fairly consistent, and I’ve had one request for a long time, a desktop bug tracker client. I even asked if someone more adept in the ways of The Code could help. Unfortunately my call for help wasn’t heard :-( That was until HackWeek VI came along! Luckily Matt Barringer (from those crazy cooks in the SUSE Studio team) heard my call. He picked up his code machine gun and blasted away o/
As many know, I have a few Android devices, and I know a lot of other openSUSE fans out there also have robot powered devices. I decided the other day to try something during my lunch break – create a widget to show how many days left till 11.4′s release. Yeah I know it isn’t an earth shattering application, but I’m not a code monkey, so any working code I generate is a serious plus for me ;-)
I’m going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting I’m going to that fine city of Brussels (yet again) for one of the best conferences going (IMHO). If you’re going grab me and say hi. If you’re thinking about going, stop! JUST GO!!! :-)
Personally I find that in Linux or any OS for that matter, keeping track of and dealing with bugs can be a real PITA. This may be in part that I’m not a power user of the services available (they don’t make it obvious how to fully utilise their service); also there are so many different types of bug trackers out there – bugzilla, trac, mantis, etc; it is also down to so many different projects use their own tracker; one advantage is that code/project hosting sites have their own – SourceForge, Gna!
It’s been over a week now since I came back from the fantabulous FOSDEM, and have had a chance to digest a lot of the conversations I had whilst there. One of the conversations I had was with a senior developer who was in a sort of Special Interest Group. He mentioned to me that his management had asked the SIG to formulate a plan for where they wanted to see their project in five years, and how they aimed to get there.
Suffice it to say, I’m actually enjoying my Storytlr install – maybe enjoy isn’t the right word but you get my drift, don’t you? Well I was determined to loose my coding virginity, and Storytlr’s plugin system seemed to be the safest way to do so. I chose to base my plugin on an existing plugin, and my two options were creating a Blip.tv plugin (based on the Vimeo plugin) or a Gitorious plugin based on the Github plugin).
I thought it would be wise to document how I installed Storytlr as I feel the official documentation doesn’t list everything. The basic requirements to get storytlr working are – Apache, MySQL, PHP5 (with php5-tidy, and php5-mcrypt). So once you have the basic system requirements met, the next step is to download the latest stable release from here and extract the tarball in your target directory. So in your virtual host file make sure you have enabled AllowOverride
OK so I’ve finally got round to getting this domain back up after nuking the server, problem is it isn’t back on the server but on my secondary and much less bandwidth friendly machine. So if you want to download anything please be aware it will take much longer than it did in the past ;-) As you can see (if you visit directly rather than through an rss reader) I am now running Storytlr.