5 February 2008
I saw Friday’s keynote at LCA2008, which was titled Two Snake Enter, One Snake Leave?, and given by Anthony Baxter.
It was a good talk — Anthony was talking about the upcoming Python 3.0, which is a backwards-incompatible refresh of the Python language. It is being tweaked in a backwards-incompatible way in order to freshen up the language, which was gaining 15 years worth of cruft. I only wish PHP were doing the same.
Now, I wasn’t unhappy with the talk. It was just that it shouldn’t have been a keynote. The talk was not too technical, but it was really only relevant to Python developers attending the conference. I think the talk should have been a normal talk, not a keynote, so those that aren’t developing Python applications could have gone and seen something more relevant to them.
The other two keynotes, Reconceptualizing Security and Would you do it again for free? both had psychological and philosophical themes that were relevant to everyone in the audience. No matter whether you were a Linux user, kernel hacker, gamer, etc., you could still benefit from seeing those keynotes. But the Python one? Not really relevant unless you are a Python programmer.
Nothing against the talk itself — just it was in the wrong category.
Tagged: aargh, lca2008 | 2 Comments »
4 February 2008
I’m currently giving the Nouveau driver (open source reverse-engineered NVIDIA drivers) a test drive on my computer. I have a PCI-Express NVIDIA GeForce 7600GT, and the 2D side of things are working extremely well.
Dragging windows around is extremely fast, with no laggy artifacts left behind. Even the Composite extension works — I’m currently running the Metacity compositor (Metacity 2.21 actually works with NVIDIA cards as it no longer depends on the libcm library) and it is smooth.
The one thing I haven’t got going yet is 3D acceleration. According to Dave Airlie’s talk on Friday, you need to use Gallium3D in order to get 3D acceleration with the Nouveau driver, which I don’t really feel like using until somebody creates some Debian packages. However, Dave did demonstrate OpenArena running on Nouveau on Friday, and it worked extremely well — excellent framerate and no visual glitches.
I’ve installed Nouveau with RAOF’s PPA. You need to completely remove nvidia-glx before you install Nouveau. I also had some conflicts with two versions of the drm (not an acronym for Digital Rights Management) kernel module being installed at the same time. Try this if you’re having trouble:
$ sudo modprobe -r drm
$ sudo insmod /lib/modules/`uname -r`/extra/drm.ko
That will force Nouveau’s drm module to load instead of the kernel one. You’ll need to do that on every bootup, as I haven’t yet bothered to figure out how to do that automatically.
Tagged: lca2008, Linux, nouveau, Ubuntu | No Comments »
4 February 2008
Phew, I just got the LCA2008 keysigning over and done with. I signed about 70 keys today and last night, which involved typing my passphrase over and over and over again — for some reason, caff didn’t want to use the Seahorse GPG agent.
Tagged: gpg, lca2008 | No Comments »
1 February 2008
For my accommodation at St. Mary’s for LCA2008, I decided to bring my own pillow, as I didn’t trust that they would provide a very comfortable one. Well, on Wednesday, I got back to my room, only to find that my bed had been made, and my pillow case gone.
Presumably, the cleaners didn’t anticipate the fact that guests might be bringing their own pillows. What if I had also brought a towel and left it on the bed? That would probably go missing too.
Tagged: lca2008 | No Comments »
31 January 2008
I missed the RepRap talk today that I really wanted to see. I saw the Open Source Animation talk by Elizabeth Garbee, but only afterwards did I realise that I’d missed the RepRap talk.
Ah well, the animation talk was okay. It was interesting seeing the demos of software that Elizabeth used to create animations from stills — I had no idea that such software even existed in the open source world. I guess I shouldn’t have underestimated the community. 
Tagged: lca2008 | No Comments »
