pre-release: linux.conf.au meeting announcement

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Subject: 
ANN: linux.conf.au at D2.193 Percy Baxter Sun January 31, 12p


linux.conf.au
=========================
When: 12 PM Sunday January 31, 2016
Where: D2.193 Percy Baxter

https://linux.conf.au/programme/

Topics
------
1. Volunteer Training (General) - All Volunteers


(Needs description.) 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

2. Speakers and Miniconf Organisers Briefing Session


(Needs description.) 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

3. Volunteer Training (Audio Visual) - Specifically for AV Volunteers


(Needs description.) 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

4. Beginner's Session


(Needs description.) 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

5. Conference Opening


(Needs description.) 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

6. Open Hardware Assembly Workshop (Registraton required to participate, Spectators welcome)
Jonathan Oxer

http://www.openhardwareconf.org/wiki/OHC2016#Final_schedule
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

7. Introductory remarks
Zac Dover

http://lca2016docsminiconf-schwarzgeraet.rhcloud.com/
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

8. Kernel Miniconf Introduction and Unconference Planning
Stewart Smith

Unconference: https://goo.gl/Zszeu6
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

9. Continuous Delivery using blue-green deployments and immutable infrastructure
Ruben Rubio

Immutable Infrastructure is a topic drawing large amount of attention, namely as a reliable, safe, and effective system architecture pattern to manage server infrastructure generally in cloud ecosystems. Using this concept along with blue-green deployments, a powerful and versatile paradigm opens paving the way for rapid and low-risk deployments with minimal human and infrastructure over-head.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

10. An Open Approach to Whole-House Audio
Bdale Garbee

During the construction of our new house, a proprietary platform for whole-house audio was proposed by our builder. Unable to find a suitable open alternative off-the-shelf, Bdale set out to design and build the required hardware and software. The results include an open hardware USB to 30 watt per channel stereo audio module, and enhancements (we're still working on) to enable Mopidy to manage multiple simultaneous audio streams each controlled by different users in the home. This session will explore the design of our system, the new hardware module, and our progress with and remaining challenges adapting the software to our needs. 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

11. Open Source and Bioinformatics Miniconf Welcome
Alan Rubin

http://afrubin.github.io/miniconf/
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

12. Clinical Genomics: a Computational Perspective
Bernie Pope

http://afrubin.github.io/miniconf/
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

13. A brief history of technical writing with examples
Zac Dover

http://lca2016docsminiconf-schwarzgeraet.rhcloud.com/
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

14. Changes in the security module infrastructure
Casey Schaufler

The Linux Security Module (LSM) infrastructure has gone through some
major changes recently, and has more in the pipeline. This session will
describe the overhaul introduced in 4.2 and outline the upcoming work. How the
changes are going to make it easier to implement modern notions of access
control and how to bring hard to justify features into the system are
described. Includes many forward looking statements.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

15. Many Roads to Bioinformatics
Harriet Dashnow

What is a bioinformatician, and how do I become one? Many bioinformaticians start out in other fields, like biology, computer science or statistics, then transition to bioinformatics later in their careers.

In my search to help ease the transition for biologists moving into the era of big data biology, I have become involved in the Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry training organisations. These workshops have proven to be an amazing tool for helping biologists learn computational skills. I will share the lessons I have learned running these workshops, and start a discussion about how we can provide biology training for those with computational and analytic skills wishing to make the transition into bioinformatics.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

16. RCU Mutation Testing
Paul McKenney

Mutation testing is an automated test technique often used in academia to
determine the quality of test suites and the robustness of programs. Though
seen as the gold standards by academics, it has seldom been applied to
programs longer than a few hundred lines of code due to the computational
explosion it is prone to as programs grow.

We have been working to adapt this technique to the practical exigencies of
the RCU to evaluate its testing harness as well as identify new bugs in a more
scalable and automated way. By rapidly triaging and throwing away
uninteresting mutants we have been able to use this technique to identify 1
bug and 2 test case modifications in a relatively well-established and solid
module of the Linux Kernel over the last few weeks.

In this talk, I will describe mutation testing and its potential, how we
overcame the scalability issues associated with this technique, and how this
technique can successfully be used to identify hairy bugs in big and complex
systems.

Joint work with Iftekhar Ahmed, Alex Groce, and Carlos Jensen, all of Oregon
State University
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

17. The Twelve-Factor Container
Casey West

This talk will use the seminal twelve-factor app essay as a guide to discuss the do’s and dont’s of building and running containers. Each factor gives us an opportunity to consider avoidable anti-patterns if you’re using containers to deploy and manage repeatable, reliable, and portable services.
 
Containers rose in popularity on an oft used metaphor: lightweight virtual machines. We have a robust understanding of the benefits of virtualized hardware as a method of efficient resource utilization. The idea of _even more efficient_ resource utilization makes sense. Unfortunately it’s a problematic metaphor.
 
Containers represent a constrained set of capabilities compared to virtual machines in order to make fine-grained guarantees about resource constraints and process isolation. This is a good thing. There is overlap in ideal capabilities between VMs and containers but it isn’t complete. Newcomers to the container ecosystem begin with a “lightweight VM” understanding and fall victim to specific anti-patterns.
 
After this talk you’ll understand common pitfalls in containerization and how you can avoid them. This discussion is useful for developers who wish to gain greater understanding of the environment their applications are deployed to, as well as operators interested in the benefits of containers for their architecture.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

18. GStreamer in the living room and in outer space
Sebastian Dröge

This talk is targeted at anyone interested in multimedia, whether professionally or as a hobbyist. Be it as an application developer, framework architect, embedded system integrator, or anybody else.
GStreamer is a highly versatile plugin-based multimedia framework that caters to a whole range of multimedia needs, including desktop applications, streaming servers or multimedia middleware; embedded systems, desktops, or server farms. It is also easy to get started with, and is cross-platform, with support for Linux, Android, OS/X, iOS, and Windows, as well as *BSD and Solaris.
This talk will present an overview of some of the many different areas and use cases where GStreamer is deployed nowadays and what advantages the use of GStreamer had in these areas. Examples include web browsers, set-top boxes and TVs, mobile devices, live video mixing applications, audio/video editors, broadcasting applications, airplanes and drones, research of gravitational waves and the International Space Station. 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

19. On working from home
Alexandra Settle

http://lca2016docsminiconf-schwarzgeraet.rhcloud.com/
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

20. Microscopium: Interactive clustering of high content screen images
Adrian Hecker

http://afrubin.github.io/miniconf/
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

21. Why no FOSS on stage right? 
Hugh Blemings

This two part presentation will outline my experiences in using an entirely software based keyboard rig for live use. At present the system, regrettably, uses entirely non-Free software.
A recent conversation with some fellow community members prompted me to re-asses my software choices for same. Alas for my particular uses it appears the Libre alternatives either fall short or don't exist. The second part of the talk will then seek to brainstorm how this might be changed :) 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

22. Kernel Miniconf Unconference
Stewart Smith


Planning at https://goo.gl/Zszeu6
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

23. Message fromthe ABACBS President
Tony Papenfuss

http://afrubin.github.io/miniconf/
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

24. History of the vanguard Linux receiver 'Dreambox' and an introduction of its new multi-standard streaming server
Andreas Frisch

In this talk, targeting a general audience with an interest in multimedia, I will shortly introduce our line of consumer set-top boxes which are prototypical examples of multimedia embedded linux devices and then focus on how we implemented the widest possible multimedia support: what were the pitfalls and how did we (fail to) master them? The talk will explain how we solved audio and video playback and capture with SOC hardware codecs using custom Gstreamer sink elements.
Subsequently, I will present our latest development: a new streaming server which allows re-encoding the live television image to simultaneously provide various ways of streaming to network including RTSP and HLS.
Andreas aka "Fraxinas" in the FOSS world, graduated from the University of Applied Sciences in Aschaffenburg with a degree in electrical engineering and information technology. Since writing his thesis paper about a streaming video server for set top boxes, he has been working for Dream Multimedia, the company which released the first Linux-based STB called "Dreambox". 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

25. Security Topics in Open Cloud: Advanced Threats, 2015's Vulnerabilities ...
Jason Cohen

This talk will present an assortment of security topics related to Open Source Cloud Computing technologies. Topics will include an overview of the most significant security flaws discovered over the last year in popular cloud platforms, the generic foundations of advance persistent threats, and some of the recent countermeasures of encryption, key management, and platform validation being introduced into OpenStack and Hadoop. A demo of Trusted Compute Pools will also be given and an explanation of what types of advanced threats it protects against will be provided.

It would seem that, despite the exponential growth in security products, security services, security companies, security certifications, and general interest in the security topic; we are still bombarded with a constant parade of security vulnerability disclosures on a seemingly daily basis. Knowing that complete protection from threats and vulnerabilities at the front end of the infrastructure is impossible and that advanced threats will find their way past our defenses, efforts to protect the data and the ‘keys to the castle’ being the last line of defense are even more critical.

The hardware enabling ‘trusted computing’ is referred to as a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and is designed as a commodity chip that is integrated into motherboards, as well as appliances such as network switches, firewalls, and embedded devices. The TPM provides features that are useful in providing assurances about the state of a platform and protecting sensitive information. Essentially, the chip can be used to generate, store, and protect encryption keys. It also provides a mechanism to store information about the state of a platform through a traceable, cryptographic mechanism, which can be securely attested to a remote verifier. TPMs have been around for a while but have had a slow uptake in actual use until recently due to initial privacy concerns that have been mostly overcome. Many cloud deployments include hardware with a TPM, but it is rarely used. Championed by Intel and others, support for using the TPM and related Intel TXT to provide remote attestation has been included in OpenStack in the form of Trusted Compute Pools. This feature can detect systems within the cloud that have booted untrusted code and block guests from executing on them. This will be demo’ed on a live system. Of course, this boot time detection of untrusted code is beneficial, there are other ways a TPM could be utilized to better protect user or application data via strong and cheap protection of keys. Work being done in OpenStack to utilize the TPM for key protection will also be discussed. In addition, when configuring bare metal systems, there are many other ways to use the TPM such as with the IMA/EVM subsystem or by using the TPM to protect keys used in disk encryption, applications, or user data. Some of the common tools for using TPMs on bare metal systems will be enumerated. Lastly, although not necessarily a ‘cloud’ platform, Hadoop is a mainstay in the related field of big data. Until recently, the lack of block level encryption has been an issue for organizations looking to protect Hadoop data. We will discuss the architecture of the Hadoop encryption framework and considerations for key protection. 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

26. Kernel Miniconf Unconference
Stewart Smith


Planning at https://goo.gl/Zszeu6
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

27. Open Hardware Assembly Workshop Continued
Jonathan Oxer

http://www.openhardwareconf.org/wiki/OHC2016#Final_schedule
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

28. What a Good Procedure is Made of
Zac Dover

http://lca2016docsminiconf-schwarzgeraet.rhcloud.com/
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

29. Building web-based visualization tools to empower biologists
David Powell

http://afrubin.github.io/miniconf/
 recording release: no  

30. Production Pathology: from spinning wheels to knitting mills
Ken Doig

http://afrubin.github.io/miniconf/
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

31. Managing Infrastructure as Code
Allan Shone

Infrastructure can be difficult to manage, but expressing it as code can drastically simplify this. Covering some key concepts and methodologies, we take a look at ways to manage Infrastructure, from the specification of a server or instance to the environment as a group of inter-connected entities.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

32. Real Time Tuning Analysis
Jan Schmidt

I recently came across a piece of software that's been around since 2005, but not gotten a lot of exposure. Tartini provides a different take on the problem of instrument tuning by continuously tracking and recording while you play.
I've been working on porting Tartini to Android, so this talk is also a bit about that.
Jan Schmidt has been a GStreamer developer and maintainer since 2002. Among other things, he is responsible for GStreamer's DVD and stereoscopic video support, and primary author of the Aurena home-area media player. He lives in Albury, Australia and keeps sheep, chickens, ducks and more fruit trees than is sensible. In 2013 he co-founded Centricular, providing support for Open Source multimedia and graphics development. 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

33. Two years of tech writing
Zac Dover

http://lca2016docsminiconf-schwarzgeraet.rhcloud.com/
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

34. Pick and Place Machine (live demonstration)
Jonathan Oxer

Need we say any more ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=282qku2C4xo ? 

http://www.openhardwareconf.org/wiki/OHC2016#Final_schedule
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

35. R and Bioconductor: open source software for analysing genomic data 
Belinda Phipson

http://afrubin.github.io/miniconf/
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

36. Free Software in the Audiokinetic Laboratory
Tobias Brodel

The Audiokinetic Experiments laboratory (AkE) at RMIT University specialises in developing artworks and installations combining sound, light and motion to interrogate research questions of multi-modal perception, neuro-psychology and cinema theory. This presentation will demonstrate the use of Free Software in the labs, including Debian, python, Pure Data, Ardour and Arduino, to drive motion simulation systems and lighting designs. 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

37. ESP8266 ESPlant (Wi-Fi garden sensors) design and operation
Jonathan Oxer

http://www.openhardwareconf.org/wiki/OHC2016#Final_schedule
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

38. Kernel Miniconf Unconference
Stewart Smith


Planning at https://goo.gl/Zszeu6
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

39. Conference Recording 2.0: Building a Better System
Joel Addison


With the number of interesting talks that occur at conferences, it is almost impossible to see everything you want to. To compensate for this, many conferences record talks and make them available to view later. This also has the added benefit of letting a wider audience participate if they couldn't make it to the venue.
Unfortunately, there is no clear, simple way for this recording to occur. Each conference has its own custom setup, built up of a number of components that are often hacked together at the last minute into something that just manages to achieve its goals of recording talks and outputting videos. In addition, many of the software components have little documentation and some are no longer developed, adding an unneeded layer of complexity to the problem. Hardware also needs to be kept current to take advantage of high definition videos and other newer technologies.
This talk will give a behind the scenes look into recording talks at conferences, starting with the approaches used at previous events. It will then lead into the efforts being made towards a better video capture system for conferences, which aims to be simple for anyone to setup and use, allowing more time to be spent on the conference and less time getting systems installed and configured. There will also be a demonstration of the new encoding system that was developed during Pycon Australia 2015, which uses a distributed setup that even you could be a part of! 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

40. Open source car engine management
Josh Stewart

Open source car engine management project (hardware and software). Covering hardware design experiences and a project update. 

http://www.openhardwareconf.org/wiki/OHC2016#Final_schedule
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

41. Cloud Anti-Patterns
Casey West

The value of embracing microservices, containers, and continuous delivery is powerful only when brought together in logical, scalable, and portable ways. When used incorrectly it’s increasingly easy to make things much worse for you and your team, and do it at scale.

For example, while microservices can be used to effectively isolate functionality, increase the speed of delivery, and help scale your team it can also be a way to inefficiently duplicate functionality and create single points of failure.

I’ll share anti-patterns and corresponding best practices based on my experience building application infrastructure and platforms, as well as the applications which are deployed to them.

 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

42. Applied bioinformatics using open source software
Lavinia Gordon

http://afrubin.github.io/miniconf/
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

43. My beautiful jacket
Andrew Burden

http://lca2016docsminiconf-schwarzgeraet.rhcloud.com/
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

44. LinuxCNC for fun and profit - now with deadly lasers!
Alastair D'Silva

This talk will cover the basics of converting a Cartesian robot to LinuxCNC, and some of the pitfalls (and fire traps !) encountered. 

http://www.openhardwareconf.org/wiki/OHC2016#Final_schedule
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

45. Cloud Crafting – Public / Private / Hybrid
Steven Ellis

Do you need to utilise many different public cloud technologies, or perhaps you’d like to put a cloud friendly shine on that rust old legacy VMware infrastructure. Perhaps the learning curve for OpenStack is too steep or it is missing critical feature you require? Take a look at ManageIQ, an Open Source project that can broker across on-premise IaaS as well as Public/Private cloud environments to provide a one stop shop for your DevOps needs.
This session will cover the key features of ManageIQ and demo connectivity to a range of Cloud and IaaS technologies.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

46. Building and deploying the Genomics Virtual Laboratory on the cloud(s)
Simon Gladman, Yousef Kowsar, and Andrew Isaac

http://afrubin.github.io/miniconf/
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

47. Hardware projects using eChronos and IwIP: toward high-assurance IoT
Sebastian Holzapfel

What eChronos & lwIP (both open-source) are; why they should be considered for embedded projects (including a brief tutorial-like demonstration of the RTOS & TCP/IP stack), porting lwIP to this RTOS and porting the RTOS to this hardware platform (TI Connected Launchpad). The second half will be a few hardware demos on the platform:

    An IoT light controller that makes everyone in the office annoyed if builds fail.
    A telnet-controlled echo server that makes it easy to test wierd hardware devices before they can connect to the internet.
    An HTTP server that responds to sensor inputs by displaying them on a webpage. 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

48. Documentation Miniconf
Jodi Biddle

http://lca2016docsminiconf-schwarzgeraet.rhcloud.com/
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

49. Live Migration of Linux Containers
Tycho Andersen

lxc move c1 host2:. In 18 characters, you can live migrate containers between hosts. LXD makes using this powerful and complex technology very simple, and very fast. In this talk, I’ll give a short history of the underlying migration technology CRIU, describe a few optimizations that LXD is doing in the space to make things fast like optimizing filesystem transfers using native transfer mechanisms (e.g. 'zfs send') and using p.haul to do iterative migration. Additionally, Ubuntu 16.04 will ship with the ability to migrate all of the kernel security features used by container engines, as well as various other kernel features that have been previously unsupported. This talk will also cover the kernel and userspace work that has gone into making this possible.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

50. Informal Jam / Demo session and Lightning Talks
Jonathan Woithe

This unscripted session is an opportunity for people to showcase their multimedia creations to the community, perform, or to present a lightning talk. 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

51. Kerbal space program simulator hardware controller and display
Peter Hardy

The talk I'd like to give is a presentation of a fairly large project I've been working on. I've built a custom hardware controller and display interface for a proprietary spaceflight simulator, Kerbal Space Program. It's a pretty big project involving two arduino microcontrollers, and all sorts of input and output devices. There's a full picture gallery of my build at http://imgur.com/a/o2yh0. 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

52. Sequencing your poo with a USB stick
Torsten Seemann

http://afrubin.github.io/miniconf/
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

53. Music and Multimedia Miniconf Lightning Talks


(Needs description.) 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

54. Open Hardware Miniconf - Lightning talks, project showcase and general discussions
Jonathan Oxer

http://www.openhardwareconf.org/wiki/OHC2016#Final_schedule
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

55. Keynote #1 - Mr George Fong


(Needs description.) 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

56. Open Knowledge Miniconf Opening
Matthew Cengia

Open Knowledge Miniconf Opening
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

57. Functional Programming Miniconf Open
Fraser Tweedale

https://bfpg.github.io/fp-miniconf/
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

58. Is that a data-center in your pocket? 
Steven Ellis

Fed up fighting with the public cloud, or running out of space on your laptop next time you want to try our latest and greatest technology out?
Thanks to technologies like nested virtualisation and thin-lvm you can now
build, run and redeploy on your personal laptop a small data-centre's worth of technology. As great as the public cloud and shared lab environments are(n't), sometimes you just want to thrash out a problem quickly. What do you do when you're missing that extra storage or physical compute resource to make it happen?
Come learn some tips and tricks.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

59. clsXlca Opening
Donna Benjamin

https://linux.conf.au/wiki/CLSXLCA
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

60. Miniconf Open
Kim Hawtin

http://openradio.net.au/index.php/Main_Page#LCA_2016_Geelong
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

61. clsXlca Opening
Donna Benjamin

https://linux.conf.au/wiki/CLSXLCA
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

62. clsXlca Introductions
Donna Benjamin

https://linux.conf.au/wiki/CLSXLCA
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

63. A live demo of the CubicSDR open source SDR software
Paul Warren

http://openradio.net.au/index.php/Main_Page#LCA_2016_Geelong
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

64. clsXlca Lightning Talks
Donna Benjamin

https://linux.conf.au/wiki/CLSXLCA
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

65. The Essential Tools of Open-Source: Functional Programming, Parametricity, Types
Tony Morris


Open-source software projects have become an important contribution to our profession. Volunteers and professionals working away on what they love, aspiring to be a part of software freedom and to provide a benefit to all.

Many tools exist to assist in this worldwide, distributed effort. From distributed revision control systems to programming environments, the open-source team comes to rely on these tools to produce work.

If we are to attract skilled volunteers and work to producing quality software as a team, we must do better than average. Not by just a little bit. We must be the example of a software development team. We must exploit professional tools.

This talk will make a case that some programming tools are neglected, often argued away under a false compromise. Why then, are functional programming and associated consequences such as parametricity so often neglected? Are they truly so unimportant?

This talk will define the principle of functional programming, then go into detail about what becomes possible by following this principle. Parametricity (Wadler, 1989), equational reasoning and exploiting types in API design are an essential property of productive software teams, especially teams composed of volunteers, all enabled by functional programming.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

66. Open Tech School - Open learning in practice
Lilly Ryan

There's a lot to love about open knowledge and open technology, and the OpenTechSchool aims to exist at the nexus of these. We provide entry-level tech workshops that are free and open in every way we can imagine, down to the typeface in our logo. In this talk I'll give you a rundown of the way we work, what we've achieved globally over the last four years, and where we want to go with this in the future.

Finally, I will provide a template for you to open your own chapter in your city, and add to our repository of open workshops with your own ideas. 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

67. Revisiting Unix principles for modern systems automation
Martin Krafft

Revisiting Unix principles for modern system automation by Martin Krafft
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

68. Cutdown!: HAB Telemetry System
Mark Jessop

http://openradio.net.au/index.php/Main_Page#LCA_2016_Geelong
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

69. clsXlca Lightning Talks
Donna Benjamin

https://linux.conf.au/wiki/CLSXLCA
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

70. Open Data + Video Games = Win
Paris Buttfield-Addison

Open data is cool, especially when it comes from government. What’s even cooler than open data? Games. Games are cool. So why not combine them? This talk explores the potential for spreading the word about open data, as well as providing for deeper engagement with data, through game development. 

Open data, such as that provided by many governments around the world[1] is cool. It’s fantastic to see countries around the world opening as much as they can, allowing citizens and interested parties to build upon and enhance the myriad of interesting information collected by countries. There’s a lot of people doing great work with this sort of data, but have to be pretty passionate, engaged, and motivated in order to get involved.

We found another way. For the last three years we’ve been participating in hackathons and jams, and taking open (government) data and turning it into games.

This session explores why this is a good idea, and how you might want to do it to. We cover:

    conceiving of game ideas based on – otherwise dry – open data sets (we once made a Pokemon-style battle game based on the energy efficiency data provided by the government energy regulator, it helped you figure out if your fridge was efficient by letting you battle it against other people’s fridges);
    preserving the spirit and meaning of the data in games you make with it;
    tools for parsing and interpreting the data, and making it usable for your games (we’re very good at Perl, Awk, Sed, and R now);
    getting out and engaging people with your data-based games, and making sure people don’t draw the wrong conclusions from what your game shows them (while still having fun – it is a game after all!)

We’ve built games –– often at GovHack[2] in Australia that do everything from turn your local politician’s parliamentary voting history into a party game, to parsing and interpreting a giant database incorporating all the functional roles in a government, and turning it into a SpaceTeam style party game. We’ll tell you how you can do the same thing in your community, how to make it engaging and meaningful, why you might want to do this, and how to get started.

[1] e.g. data.gov, data.gov.au, data.gov.uk, and so many more!

[2] http://www.govhack.org 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

71. A Gentle Introduction to Ceph
Tim Serong

Ceph is a massively scalable open source distributed storage solution, which runs on commodity hardware. This short talk explains the components of Ceph and how Ceph works, and provides an overview of the things you need to be thinking about when deploying real world Ceph clusters.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

72. All Your Modem are Belong To Us
David Rowe

http://openradio.net.au/index.php/Main_Page#LCA_2016_Geelong
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

73. Functional programming in Python with Toolz and fn.py
Juan Nunez-Iglesias


    In my brief experience people rarely take this [streaming] route. They use single-threaded in-memory Python until it breaks, and then seek out Big Data Infrastructure like Hadoop/Spark at relatively high productivity overhead. ~ Matt Rocklin

That quote succinctly summarises my computational life, right up until recent months.

In “traditional” programming, you load a dataset into memory, process it in some way, and output the result. This is simple to understand. But in streaming programs, a function processes some of the data, yields the processed chunk, then downstream functions deal with that chunk, then the original function receives a bit more, and so on… All these things are going on at the same time! How can one keep them straight?

This talk will introduce Matt Rocklin’s Toolz library which makes functional programming easy in Python and provides a framework to write elegant, concise code to analyse bigger-than-memory data, and fn.py, which has even more FP constructs. I’ll present streaming data analysis using FP from the ground up, from a simple “hello-world” example to image illumination correction and streaming extensions to scikit-learn classifiers, and analysing a genome in a few minutes.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

74. Keeping Pinterest Running
Joe Gordon

With over a 100 million users and under 500 engineers, Pinterest has become one of the most popular websites. But what does it take to run a large service like Pinterest? What tools, processes and best practices do we use? This talk will cover topics such as our software stack, monitoring and alerting, public clouds, continuous deployment, the tools we have open sourced and more.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

75. Open Radio Miniconf Lightning Talks
Kim Hawtin

http://openradio.net.au/index.php/Main_Page#LCA_2016_Geelong
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

76. Open information: Documenting data and methods 
Rhydwyn Mcguire

Open data is great, Open data is amazing, but unless your users understand your data they can't use it.

Do you share or would like to share open data? Is your data adjusted in anyway? Have you cleaned it or removed outliers? Have you added a random spatial offset to anonymise it? Have you used age adjustment, or seasonal adjustment to reveal underlying patterns? Do your users know that you have done this? Do your users need an advanced degree to understand your documentation? Would a journalist picking up you data be reasonably expected to understand what it is telling them without talking to you?

Are there biases in your data? Are you catching every case or do you think that they are some cases that are not captured? Do your users understand how those missing cases and biases effect their use of your data?

Based on my work in medical statistics, I will talk about how to share data with methods and documentation to make data relevant and results reproducible and accessible. In open source we know a lot about documentation, UX design, technical debt and onboarding time. I want to ask how we can apply these ideas to developing open data 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

77. Tutorial - Embedded sensor data with Lora radio modules
Andrew McDonnell

http://openradio.net.au/index.php/Main_Page#LCA_2016_Geelong
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

78. Data made out of functions
Ken Scambler

Church Encoding is a fascinating technique whereby numbers, data structures, and just about anything can be built out of nothing but functions.

Ken will introduce Church Encoding and show how it can make numbers and data types materialise out of thin air.

Even better, he’ll show how Church Encoding is not only a neat party trick, but actually useful in real code, using examples in Haskell and Java.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

79. clsXlca Group Discussions 1
Donna Benjamin

https://linux.conf.au/wiki/CLSXLCA
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

80. Site Reliability Engineering at Dropbox
Tammy Butow

Tammy is a Site Reliability Engineering Manager at Dropbox.
Dropbox is the home for your most important stuff -- now we're bringing it to life with a growing family of products.
Our engineering team is architecting a family of products that handle over a billion files a day. We take on the complexities of technology that affect everyday life, so that people can get back to living and doing their best work.
Dropbox's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team is a hybrid software/systems group which works with traditional software engineering, capacity engineering, and infrastructure teams to ensure that Dropbox runs smoothly.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

81. 'Can you hear me now?' Networking for containers 
Jay Coles

Networking: The final frontier These are the voyages of the Sysadmin, JayC
His 5 year mission
To explore strange new worlds
To seek out new life and new containerizations
To boldly go where no man has gone before
Macvlans? VXLANs? VETH pipes? just how many types of virtual networking does Linux have and why would I want to use them?
This talk is intended to give you a quick run through of all the technologies available, why you would use them and why they are designed how they are in an attempt to dissuade you from reimplementing the networking wheel in userspace over TCP (the talk will explain why this is bad as well)
You should be able to come away from this talk knowing what technology to pick for each situation and understand the trade offs with each choice as you attempt to chose the best networking model for your container (or VM) fleets
This is part 3 of 3 in the doger.io series of talks on containerization
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

82. Prying Open Government - An Introduction to Freedom of Information
Dan Hawke

The Freedom of Information Act (Australia) and Official Information Act (New Zealand) are tools that allow members of the public and organisations extract documents and information - unless there is a good reason for it to stay secret. You'll learn what sorts of information you can and cannot request, how to do this, and the process requests go through. I'll also cover Alaveteli, an open-source software for making and managing FOI requests, and public implementations available in Australia and New Zealand. 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

83. The Emperor’s New Closure: FP in Javascript
Nick Moore

Right at this moment, something terrible is being written in Javascript. But that’s because Javascript’s best features are invisible—I mean, only visible to the wise! We’ll look at how to use functional techniques already available in JS to write clearer, safer code without dressing it up in bulky libraries, including:

    higher-order functions
    closures
    map/filter/fold
    laziness
    pseudo-classes

 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

84. Using the OpenRadio as RF test equipment
Kim Hawtin

http://openradio.net.au/index.php/Main_Page#LCA_2016_Geelong
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

85. Network Performance Tuning
Jamie Bainbridge

This talk is a crash-course in performance tuning for high-speed low-latency LANs for the most common sysadmin usage.
It differs from Glen Turner's similar talk at LCA2008 as he mostly discussed WAN tuning over slower and more latent links.
Topics covered:
Performance Tuning Do's and Don'ts
How Packet Receive Works
Understanding NUMA
Bottlenecks - locating, identifying, fixing
NIC Receive
Protocol Layers
Application
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

86.  Internet Archive: Universal Access. Open APIs
VM Brasseur

With tens of millions of items in its collections, Internet Archive is one of the largest libraries in the world. It provides free and open access to all of its materials to anyone with an internet connection, making it a treasure trove for researchers, historians, and curious individuals.

Of course, having a collection that large doesn't help anyone if it's difficult to access. To help with this, Internet Archive has released a number of open APIs and tools to allow people to upload and download items, as well as data mine the metadata for the entire collection.

In this session we will:

    Give you a tour of Internet Archive and its collections
    Introduce you to the APIs and tools you can use to access and contribute to the Archive
    Show examples of how other people and institutions are using the Archive
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

87. clsXlca Group Discussions 2
Donna Benjamin

(This may merge into clsXlca Group Discussions 1 if consensus calls fo a longer discussion)
https://linux.conf.au/wiki/CLSXLCA
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

88. Ergonomics of Automation
Jamie Wilkinson

In other fields, safety science has had a remarkable impact on systems reliability -- aviation, medicine, engineering; all of these fields understand the importance of designing human-machine interfaces to reduce error.
Many of the lessons from several decades old safety science apply well to computer operations as well. As systems grow we find the overheads of maintenance grow as well, straining our automation to the point of failure or at least requiring humans to supervise that automation, which increases to the point of being a greater cost than the original work!
In this talk I'll present some findings from the 1990s and discuss their applicability to systems administration and site reliability.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

89. Practical Functional Architecture
Jed Wesley-Smith

Functional Programming presents a thesis for how programs should be organised, removing mutation and other side-effects in order to make them simpler and easier to reason about.

While this may be imaginable in the small, it seems far lees obvious how to apply this in the large to real-world systems we build, systems that process and query data, systems that are going through constant apparent change.

What are the techniques and tools of functional programming that we can bring to bear upon these problems? How do they make our lives simpler? We’ll look at how these ideas are crucial to building any reliable software.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

90. Open Radio Miniconf Panel Discussion
Kim Hawtin

http://openradio.net.au/index.php/Main_Page#LCA_2016_Geelong
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

91. Pingbeat: y'know, for pings! 
Joshua Rich

Ping, it is your go-to tool for diagnosing networking issues. But what is a ping actually doing and what is it telling you? What if you could keep a record of ping responses across your network to look at historical issues and potentially predict upcoming problems?
In this talk I'll give a quick overview of the venerable and beloved ICMP ping. I'll then introduce Pingbeat, a small open-source program written in Go that can be used to record pings to hundreds or thousands of hosts on a network. There are many existing tools out there similar to Pingbeat, but its power lies in its ability to write the ping response to Elasticsearch, an open-source NoSQL-like data-store with powerful, built-in search and analytics. Combined with Kibana, a web-based front-end to Elasticsearch, you get an interactive interface to track, search and visualise your network health in near real-time.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

92. Open Radio Miniconf Field Day
Kim Hawtin

hands on demo, radio orienteering and more
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

93. Prospects and pitfalls in open demography
Fred Michna

Demography is used by democratic governments to exercise control. Whatever results the administration and courts deem necessary to release to the public may be handy for civil society analysts and activists. However critical thinkers may disagree with many ways that governments classify and colonise the human experience. I will talk about the connection between open demography and governance. I will discuss the source of demographic methodologies. I will consider the prospects and pitfalls of open demography. 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

94. The life of a sysadmin in a research environment
Eric Burgueno

A SysAdmin job is pretty standard, and more or less the same across the board, right? (right?). It seems this is not always true.
When working in a science research organisation, you not only get to do everything you know and loved to do in your previous jobs, you also learn a lot.
Scientists have varied demands. So varied that they never finish using one thing before asking for another one. And they move at a much faster pace than your average IT organisation, where weekly Change Control meetings and ITIL-based operations are king. But at the same time, Science is playing catch-up with DevOps methodologies. Things do not move at the same rapid pace today, because of the complexities inherent to a shared computational environment.
Can long running jobs that take literally months to complete, have a peaceful and stable existence; in an environment that is striving to become more flexible and volatile?
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

95. clsXlca Group Discussions 3
Donna Benjamin

https://linux.conf.au/wiki/CLSXLCA
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

96. Swift Functional Programming
Paris Buttfield-Addison

Swift is one of the most interesting modern languages that you’ll encounter in your travels, and with its recent open-source release growing its relevance across myriad different communities, it’s a language worth learning. Swift is great for traditional, imperative programming, but especially excels at functional programming.

This session will explore the basics of functional programming with Swift 2.0 using examples. It operates under the assumption that you are familiar with iterative programming in a relatively modern, or heavily-used language, such as Python, Java, C#, Perl 6, or similar. We’ll explore some of the things functional programming is good at, such as filtering, reducing numbers, indexing, and more, and we’ll do it using Swift’s powerful and easy-to-understand functional programming features. We’ll also do it using Swift’s really, really, really cool REPL (read-evaluate-print-loop) live programming environment, Playgrounds.

Learn why Swift might be useful to you, how to use it for the basics of functional programming, and where to go next on your Swift adventure. We’ll also briefly look at how to set it up under Linux, as well as popular open-source libraries to make functional programming even more exciting with Swift, such as Dollar.swift, Promissum, Result, and Swiftz.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

97. Creating bespoke logging systems and dashboards with Grafana, in fifteen minutes
Andrew McDonnell

Grafana is an open source, highly configurable, web charts dashboard.
Grafana can be used to monitor not just the usual suspects such as collectd but Internet of Things data sources using MQTT or similar protocols, and is easily extended with minimal effort.
Grafana can be configured to use a variety of backend data stores, including Carbon, an alternative to RRD.
In this talk I'll complete a live demonstration, starting from a fresh Ubuntu 14 VM with Docker installed, where I will install and setup Graphite using Carbon to log both host CPU resources and MQTT feeds and create a custom dashboard to suit.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

98. Order in the chaos: or lessons learnt on planning in operations
Peter Hall

Planning can be challenging in any part of IT, but what if you don't know what *might* happen tomorrow, service reliability, load issues, changing user requirements or that special project that you only just heard about and needs to go live Monday. Of course to any systems administrator I'm not explaining anything new.
So how we plan in operations? or are we destined to continue like this forever?
This talk will look at some of the strategies my team has used to increase happiness, productivity and visibility of the work we are doing.
While a lot of what I will talk about would certainly fit in the "good devops practices" bucket, this isn't a devops talk. I will attempt to keep it to actionable items you can start to implement on Monday.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

99. Haskell is Not For Production and Other Tales
Katie Miller

Some say it was written exclusively for Unix-bearded wizards with PhDs. Some say only 10x programmers and unicorns can decipher its many operators. Some say any coding problem it touches will be saved from callback hell and find everlasting peace. The Haskell programming language has long been the subject of myths and misconceptions. Nonetheless it has been adopted by a slew of companies big and small, including Facebook, which has a large Haskell deployment and dozens of engineers using the language.

In this keynote, Katie will explore some of the pervasive stereotypes about the poster child of statically typed functional programming and compare and contrast them with her experiences working as a Haskell developer on the open-source Haxl project, which is used to fight spam at Facebook. As the former journalist investigates which stories stack up, she’ll share insights on what functional programming and Haskell have to offer, the challenges that come with their use, and where the ecosystem could be improved.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

100. Intro to Open Street Map
Matthew Cengia

Mathew Cengia
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

101. From Commit to Cloud
Daniel Hall

How hard is it to get something you have done into production, and how long does it take? At LIFX we believe that deployments should be fast, small and easy as possible. In this talk we go over why we think this is the case, and how we built our systems to in order to meet these goals.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

102. clsXlca Groups report back
Donna Benjamin

https://linux.conf.au/wiki/CLSXLCA
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

103. Using Lnav
Paul Wayper

(Needs description.) 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

104. Functional Programming Lightning Talks and Miniconf Close
Fraser Tweedale

https://bfpg.github.io/fp-miniconf/
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

105. clsXlca Take-aways and close
Donna Benjamin

https://linux.conf.au/wiki/CLSXLCA
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

106. Professional Delegates' Networking Session (PDNS)


(Needs description.) 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

107. Keynote #2 - Ms Catarina Mota


(Needs description.) 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

108. CloudABI: Cloud computing meets fine-grained capabilities
Ed Schouten

CloudABI is a new runtime environment that attempts to make it easier to use UNIX-like operating systems at the core of a cloud/cluster computing platform.

Instead of using full machine virtualization (Xen, bhyve, KVM) or techniques that attempt to virtualize namespaces (FreeBSD Jails, Linux cgroups), CloudABI makes it possible to safely run user-provided executables directly on top of a UNIX kernel. The entire setup has very low CPU/memory overhead, but there's also no need for any complex configuration.

Compared to other UNIX ABIs (Linux, FreeBSD, etc), CloudABI is relatively compact. The number of system calls is low (~60) and all data types and structures have been decoupled from the public C runtime environment, meaning that it is relatively straight-forward to add support for CloudABI to other operating systems. Implementations for FreeBSD, Linux and NetBSD already exist. This allows users of such computing platforms to run the same executables without targeting a specific operating system. There is no need to recompile.

CloudABI uses Clang as its C/C++ compiler. It ships with a modern C library that is specifically designed to work in a capabilities-centric environment. The C library is almost entirely thread-safe and has high testing coverage. CloudABI attempts to abstract away traditional UNIX concepts that are not applicable to pure cloud/cluster computing environments, such as UNIX process credentials management (local users and groups), file system access control management and terminal interaction.

In this presentation I will discuss several design aspects of CloudABI and how it can be used to make UNIX software more reliable, more secure and easier to test and deploy.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

109. Going Faster: Continuous Delivery for Firefox
Laura Thomson

Shipping compiled software is old-school. These days, everything is about continuous delivery: shortening the cycle between user and developer to be more responsive to user feedback and needs. But most of the projects and companies using continuous delivery are webby, and the tools and processes commonly used for CD reflect that.

In this talk, learn how Firefox is adopting a continuous delivery process, based on browser add-ons. The end goal of the Go Faster project is to get features and fixes to the user on a reduced cycle time, but includes reductions in time to download updates and new versions, and reductions in build and release time.

I'll cover the build and release process, tools, client changes, and human changes we are making to get there.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

110. to be advised


(Needs description.) 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

111. Using Linux features to make a hacker's life hard
Kayne Naughton

This presentation is aimed at arming System Administrators, Developers and Hobbyists with a collection of tools and techniques to thwart hackers post-exploitation using common Linux features.

Kayne has gathered a bunch of weird system tricks and found ways to use them to baffle, hoodwink, dishearten and perplex penetration testers like himself.

These tools range from unusual permissions and loopback filesystems to using recognised security applications like fail2ban in inventive ways.

 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

112. Tutorial: Beginning with the Shell
Peter Chubb

The Bourne shell is universally available on every Linux system, from the least-powerful embedded device, to the largest supercomputer.
In this tutorial, we'll cover the basics of:
The Shell's input: how it reads words, splits them, expands special stuff, etc.
Control flow: case, if, while, for
Common utilities: sed, awk, grep, test, find, xargs, etc

After some introductory material, we'll spend the time working together to build a simple server for fortunes/fables entirely in shell.
To see the result, do
  telnet lemon.ertos.nicta.com.au 8500

You will need to bring a laptop with you to do the exercises.  I shall assume that you can edit a text file, and can get a terminal window going on your machine.

 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

113. Usable formal methods - are we there yet?
Stefan Götz

Creating safe and secure software is hard, and counter-intuitively even harder in tiny embedded devices - devices that drive you, fly you, inject you with medicine, or keep your heart beating.

We present how we have prevented bugs in embedded systems with open-source tools for formal methods. The big advantage of formal methods is that they can intercept bugs before code is built or run. Therefore, they avoid the difficulties of the classic approaches: testing, run-time checking, or re-using standard code.

Our experience is based on static analysis with splint and model checking with CBMC for the eChronos real-time operating system. Safety-critical applications, such as UAV research and commercial medical devices rely on eChronos as their core OS. The formal methods tools are part of our development process and Continuous Integration system, so they help find bugs both in the OS itself and in the application code.

This presentation shows how we apply splint and CBMC to real-world code and the practical lessons we have learned in the process. This includes:
- a brief overview of the fundamental strengths and weaknesses of each approach and tool
- the bugs we have found and the classes of bugs the tools prevent
- how to apply the tools to a code base in practice, what is needed to support the tools, and how to maintain that support
- the scalability and some limitations and bugs of the tools themselves, and where theory and practice do not line up
- how such tools and formal methods in general can influence software design (which is usually to the better)

Overall, formal methods have matured to be practical and valuable for real-world code in a real-world development process. The available open-source tools may require a design or code tweak here or there, but are well past purely academic relevance.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

114. How To Write A Linux Security Module That Makes Sense For You
Casey Schaufler

The traditional Linux security model traces it's fundamental concepts to the mini-computers of the 1970's. It makes a lot of sense when you consider a machine without a network connection that is being shared by a handful of friendly collaborators. Linux security modules (LSM) were introduced at the turn of the century to address the needs of high security environments. A recent and ongoing rework of the LSM infrastructure makes it significantly easier to implement and upstream small, targeted security features.

This talk will teach you want you can accomplish with a Linux security module, and what you can't. You'll learn the difference between a major module and a minor one. Techniques for implementing access controls on files, inter process communications and sockets will be covered, as will the underlying mechanisms required to maintain the data needed. You'll find out what a secid is, how it relates to a security context. and why it matters to CIPSO. The difference between inode based schemes and path name based ones will be made clear.

When the talk is over you'll have the tools you need to create a security module that protects what you care about instead of what seemed like a good idea to a government researcher during the Cold War. 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

115. Embrace the Atomic (Display) Age
Daniel Vetter

On one hand people stopped appreciating partial redraws and torn-up windows in their GUI. On the other hand seriously power-constrained devices like tablets and phones became all the rage, and that means tons of special-purpose display hardware to help out the power-hungry GPU with compositioning the GUI. Both together means the kernel needs to provide a display API which can do atomic updates of the entire display pipeline. And with the 4.2 release, after years of work, linux finally has the one atomic display API to rule them all!

This talk will cover how it all came about, why existing out-of-tree aproaches weren't up to it and what the merged atomic design looks like. It will also look into some of the nifty detail solutions.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

116. Education and the AGPL: A Case Study
Molly de Blanc

This talk will provide a case study of the AGPL as applied to the Open edX Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) delivery platform, and go on to make the argument that the success of the project and its mission of democratizing education on a global scale relies upon its use of a free and open source license.

With online technology being considered a foundation for modern education, it is important to discuss the implications of licensing on the platforms that power online education. Free and open source licenses are necessary in education, whether the learners are millions of primary school students in India or a vocational training class of twelve in North Carolina. The tools needed to meet these demands cannot exist or thrive without the practical and philosophical benefits of free and open source licenses.

These licenses are not only pragmatically useful for an individual platform, but necessary for future development. In order to educate a global population, resources, tools, and content must not only be adaptive and versatile, but also accessible, changeable, and shareable.

Under the lofty goal of “reaching a billion students,” MOOC provider edX opened up their code base in 2013, releasing it under the AGPL. Later that day, the first pull request was made by someone outside of the company. Since then, the Open edX project has grown, with over 120 institutions and organizations using it independently to teach and train all over the world.

The success of the Open edX project is, in part, due to the choice to use the AGPL. This talk will provide an in-depth case study of the Open edX project as a free and open source software project. This will include governance, contributor metrics, and the practicalities of implementing and protecting the license.

Practical benefits of being a free and open source project are frequently viewed from the perspective of providing free developer time or sweat equity contributions. This is also true within the Open edX project. Platform features and other development goals are met by edX, external contributors, and the two groups working in conjunction. However, many contributions are centered around organizations developing features or fixes based on their own needs. Meeting the demands of  internal development, external contributions, and edX stakeholders while fulfilling the promise made by adopting the AGPL has brought on anticipated hurdles, unexpected problems, and delightful challenges.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

117. Improving thread synchronization in GlusterD (Daemon for Gluster) using Userspace RCU (Read-copy-update)
Atin Mukherjee

Gluster is a open source scalable distributed storage system which can run in any commodity hardware. GlusterD is the daemon which manages the cluster configuration for Gluster.

For more information about Gluster please refer to http://www.gluster.org/
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

118. Synchronised multi-room multimedia playback and synchronised live media processing and mixing with GStreamer
Sebastian Dröge

Many use cases today require synchronised multimedia handling between several,
independent devices, possibly in different rooms. These requirements arise in
consumer use cases, like multi-room playback of videos on TVs, mobile devices
and other parts of a home entertainment system, to allow the user to switch
between rooms without interrupting his multimedia experience. Similar
requirements also arise in industrial and professional use cases, for example
for building video walls as used for digital signage or control rooms, or for
distributed live media processing and mixing in professional media production
and editing scenarios.

In this talk we will discuss how the flexibility of the GStreamer multimedia
framework allows to implement these use cases, and which features are already
provided to make it very simple to develop such applications. We will briefly
introduce what GStreamer is and how data flow handling and synchronisation
works. After this we will discuss how various open standards like RTP/RTSP and
PTP or NTP can be leveraged to implement these use cases, while providing
interoperability with other solutions. We will discuss how these are
integrated into GStreamer and which challenges exist.


GStreamer is a Free Software multimedia framework, based on the concept of
media processing pipelines. Pipelines in GStreamer are built from small,
composable components, like codecs, filters, sources (inputs) and sinks
(outputs). These components are combined to bigger, more complex building
blocks doing more high-level tasks. GStreamer is nowadays used in many areas,
from phones and desktop applications to TVs and airplanes.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

119. Welcoming Everyone: Five Years of Inclusion and Outreach Programmes at PyCon Australia
Christopher Neugebauer

People in the Open Source community turn up to events around the world, almost monthly, to talk about the projects they've been working on with like-minded people. Open Source conferences are a lot of fun to attend. (But if you’re reading this abstract, you probably don't need convincing of that).

On the other hand, there's a lot of people out there who'd make excellent contributors to projects. People who'd be an asset to our communities: speakers at conferences, code contributors, people who can write documentation. These are people for whom the events we run for our own community might not seem accessible.

PyCon Australia, one of the larger Open Source conferences in our region, has been running programmes to improve our outreach and inclusion for five years of its six-year existence. Outreach is what we do to invite new people to our events, and inclusion is about making people who come along feel welcome and more likely to participate in the community into the future.

Over those six years we've learned a whole lot of things that have helped us to grow our community, and to bring in, and retain, people that might not have taken part without our help. Our work has introduced our events to people who now actively participate year after year, and has created new contributors to Python projects.

In this talk, we'll look at how our outreach programme has evolved over the years, what success looks like for a programme like ours, and what we're currently working on to make this programme even better into the future. 

 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

120. Tutorial: Identity Management with FreeIPA
Fraser Tweedale

FreeIPA is an integrated identity management solution providing
centralised user, host and service management, authentication and 
authorisation in Linux/UNIX networked environments, with a focus on
ease of deployment and management.  It is built on top of well-known
Open Source technologies and standards including 389 Directory
Server, MIT Kerberos and Dogtag Certificate System.

This hand-on workshop will provide participants with a comprehensive
introduction to FreeIPA including server deployment and
administration, client machine enrolment, and configuring server
software to use FreeIPA's centralised identity and policy store.

Participants will:

- Install a FreeIPA server and replica
- Enrol client machines in the domain
- Create and administer users
- Manage host-based access control (HBAC) policies
- Issue X.509 certificates for network services
- Configure a web server to use FreeIPA for user authentication and
  access control

There will be a number of elective units which participants can
choose, based on their progress and particular use cases:

- OTP two-factor authentication
- Advanced certificate management: profiles, sub-CAs and user
  certificates
- OpenSSH key management
- Federated identity with Ipsilon
- User self-service secret management
- ...and more!

If you are planning to attend the workshop please note that *some preparation is strongly advised*.

Preparation steps are outlined at
https://github.com/freeipa/freeipa-workshop#preparation.

In brief, it amounts to "install Vagrant and VirtualBox, and download the VM image" so that you are ready to ``vagrant up`` at the start of the workshop.  The `libvirt' provider is also supported.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

121. What Happens When 4096 Cores All Do synchronize_rcu_expedited()?
Paul McKenney

In order to operate efficiently on very large systems, algorithms must avoid high levels of contention on global locks, global counters, and pretty much all other global mechanisms.  So what is a parallel algorithm to do?  My usual advice might be expected to be "Use RCU!", but that advice is not always helpful within an RCU implementation.

This presentation will illustrate some useful parallel techniques, using expedited RCU grace periods as a vehicle for motivating these techniques and for demonstrating their effectiveness.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

122. Adventures in OpenPower Firmware
Stewart Smith

In mid 2014, IBM released the first POWER8 based systems with the new Free and Open Source OPAL
firmware. Since then, several members of the OpenPower foundation have produced
(or are currently producing) machines based on the POWER8 processor with
the OPAL firmware.

This talk will cover the POWER8 chip with an open source firmware stack and how it all fits together.

We will walk through all of the firmware components and what they do,
including the boot sequence from power being applied up to booting an
operating system.

We'll delve into:
- the time before you have RAM
- the time before you have thermal management
- the time before you have PCI
- runtime processor diagnostics and repair
- the bootloader (and extending it)
- building and flashing your own firmware
- using a simulator instead
- the firmware interface that Linux talks to
  - device tree and OPAL calls
- fun in firmware QA and testing
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

123. Sentrifarm - open hardware telemetry system for Australian farming conditions
Andrew McDonnell

My friend is a farmer, who has various problems. Is it too dangerous to reap today? How cold did the soil in paddock 7 get last year? Which paddocks was the driest over the last three years, maybe I should run my sheep there instead? Do I really need to drive hundreds of kilometers every week and manually record all this information? Maybe we could look for correlations between the level of greenness in a photo of the paddock over time vs. the UV light over the same period?

Well, a farmer may not use the word 'correlation' but hopefully you get the point.

So together we decided to build a remote monitoring system, to see if we could solve some of these issues; and at the same time we entered it in the 2015 hackaday prize, because a t-shirt would be cool if we managed to win some :-) By the time LCA happens, we will know if we managed to win anything!

Sentrifarm collects and aggregates a wide variety of sensors, including weather, UV, and even smoke via MQTT and MQTT-SN protocols and made available for future data mining in an SQL database or display via OpenHAB or mobile device.

SentriFarm is built using long range radio modules, so we dont need to rely on the phone system, and variety of solar powered sensor nodes and aggregators - Raspberry Pi and Carambola2 modules running OpenWRT Linux, and microcontroller based nodes built with the Arduino-style TeensyLC and the amazing new ESP8286.  The source code  and schematics are on GitHub under open source licenses.

Why do we have all these different parts? Because this was built in a typical 'bush' style, using mostly modules we already had on hand, in a few hours each weekend. To minimise our production costs, I designed a circuit board that lets  the long range radio modules to be used by any the Linux modules, the TeensyLC or the ESP8266, swiss army knife style.

For this prototype session, a working literal prototype of a multi-node SentriFarm system will be set up for demonstration and practical hands-on fiddling, along with a presentation and demo of various aspects of the open source software used and some of the problems we have had to solve.

Also, Internet of Things :-)
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

124. Wait, ?tahW The Twisted Road to Right-to-Left Language Support
Moriel Schottlender

As the popularity and reach of FLOSS grows, so does the need to support more languages. Internationalization support varies greatly by language, because each language needs particular features that may or may not work properly. One of the most challenging problems in language support is dealing with languages that are right-to-left, and the 500 million speakers of RTL languages often find themselves at the very bottom of the heap.

In fact, the support of those languages – on Linux, other operating systems, and on the Web – is so abysmal that it is hard to find a single piece of software that properly supports all the necessary behaviors.

The effect of right-to-left languages extends beyond the writing and reading of the script. The direction of reading has a significant psychological effect – where your eyes shift on the screen, your expectations of where interface elements should be, and what you expect when typing in a bi-directional setting.

The issues become even more complicated in an environment that handles bi-directionality. The questions of how systems should behave when two languages of two different directions interact become almost mind boggling. And yet, these are behaviors that right-to-left users encounter on a regular basis, and the solutions that are offered today prove to be extremely lacking. 

In this presentation, I will cover some critical aspects that right-to-left users run into when dealing with software and websites, and potential solutions that are available, while concentrating on what developers should look out for and remember when they consider support for RTL languages. I will discuss:

* Use cases for dealing with RTL scripts - visual vs. logical cursor movement, typing and selecting, and, worst (or best) of all, dealing with mixed content.
* Examples from Linux distributions like Debian; the use of RTL file names in the GUI and terminal, typing in RTL in editors, etc.
* Unicode’s bi-directional algorithm and how it is utilized in Linux and on the Web; examples of hidden characters like “LRM” and “RLM” that preserve the directionality of embedded scripts, or LRO/RLO that force certain directionalities in strings.
* How the Web does it in general, and how specifically we at the Wikimedia Foundation handle translations, Wikipedias in RTL languages, and mixed LTR/RTL content.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

125. Twoskip - a robust single-file key-value database
Bron Gondwana

They Cyrus IMAPd server uses key-value stores a lot inside, and it needs absolute robustness and consistent performance more than it needs raw speed.  The skiplist implementation sometimes took hours to recover large files as it rebuilt the entire database after a process or server crash.

After evaluating other options, I decided to extend skiplist to provide fast recovery, 64 bit support and extra robustness with checksums throughout.  Using only POSIX guarantees, here's a single-file database format that's extremely robust, if not the fastest thing in the world.

This talk explains how the skiplist data structure works, and how twoskip creates a flat file representation of a skiplist with an intertwined single linked list to provide fast recovery of corrupted databases while requiring nothing more than a guarantee of fsync ordering and atomic single block writes.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

126. The future belongs to unikernels.
Andrew Stuart

Linux will soon no longer be used in Internet facing production systems.

The days of deploying applications onto Internet connected Linux machines are coming to an end.

Before too long, you'll look crazy if you deploy production applications onto Internet connected Linux machines - and you'll probably get fired for doing so. It's simply too insecure to connect full blown operating systems to the Internet.

Instead, in the very near future, most applications will be deployed as unikernels. Unikernels are a revolution in application development, deployment and security, and they're here right now.

You can get started right now building and deploying your applications as unikernels.  This presentation will show you how to get started.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

127. Melvin: A new implementation of LVM in Rust
Andy Grover

The LVM2 logical volume management tool has been a mainstay of using Linux for many years. Rust is a new memory-safe systems programming language. Melvin is a pure Rust implementation of LVM2 and libdm functionality. This talk will cover why Rust is uniquely suited for rewriting LVM and other existing C-based projects: the benefits that accrue from a second implementation generally, and the benefits particular to using Rust. We will also peer under the covers of LVM to understand what's actually going on, what Melvin supports already, and what's still to come.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

128. Tutorial: Packets don't lie: how can you use tcpdump/tshark (wireshark) to prove your point.
Sergey Guzenkov

We will look into:
differences between tshark and tcpdump,
tools that come with wireshark: dumpcap,capinfos, mergecap, tshark,
how to work with the capture files,
how to select the interface we want to capture on,
caveats in capturing (like vlans not being displayed),
capture and display filters, the difference between them,
statistics capabilities - this will be a big focus,
graphing,
decyphering SSL/TLS connection without access to server certificate.

Most of the tutorial will be done on the command line without a GUI.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

129. Creating an open and distributed video broadcast production environment using GStreamer
Paraskevi Nikolaidou

In a video broadcast production environment, multiple different video sources have to be rendered into multiple different outputs. As the technology evolves, for example in the recent transition to IP-based broadcast, the needs of the market are continuously fluctuating. In order to successfully meet those needs, the key values to adhere to are openness, flexibility and interoperability. Our approach describes a Linux-based video broadcasting system that is built around these values.

We are greatly aided in this effort by the GStreamer framework. GStreamer is an open source pipeline-based multimedia framework, with pipelines dynamically constructed out of small composable components in a greater hierarchy.  GStreamer's open and flexible nature enables us to easily support multiple types of input and output, therefore enhancing interoperability while still relying on open standards. Furthermore, its GL extensions enables us to  use a cross-platform abstraction layer for GPU-accelerated video processing. Another important aspect in our use case is the ability GStreamer gives us to dynamically and seamlessly change the pipeline, adding and removing inputs and outputs as it runs without interrupting already running inputs or outputs.

In this talk, we demonstrate the use of GStreamer in a distributed IP-based production environment, which still also support SDI inputs and outputs. It is location independent, meaning that several physically isolated pipelines can nicely work together over the network while still keeping synchronization.  Network synchronization is achieved by leveraging open standards like PTP, RTP/RTSP, which also allows interoperability with third party solutions.

We explain the architecture of our product and show the range of input and output types supported - for example, Decklink and URI (file or network) inputs can be combined, and the output can be shown locally, written to a file and also redirected to an RTSP server.  We also present our development model, with emphasis on the contributions to the GStreamer project that it has enabled and still enables us to make.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

130. Five* non-cryptographic hash functions enter. One hash function leaves.
Adam Harvey

When you say “hash function” in a room full of developers, people tend to think of the classics: MD5, SHA-1, SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512, SHA-OHGODPLEASESTOP, and the like — cryptographic hash functions intended for cryptographic uses.

There’s another world out there, though: non-cryptographic hashes. Sometimes you just need to figure out if you’ve already seen a string or structure. Sometimes you need a basic checksum. Sometimes you need a hash that’s just fast and can fit into a 32 bit integer.

I’ll run through the state of the art in the world of non-cryptographic hashing — what your best options are, how they compare in terms of CPU and memory usage, and how they work. Who takes it? Whose mixing function reigns supreme?

Let’s find out.

* I’m saying “five”, but realistically I’m going to cover as many modern options as I can fit into the time available. Let’s say “five plus or minus two” in reality.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

131. Export Control: A primer for open source hackers
Benno Leslie

As open-source developers we routinely publish our source code,
and in doing so export it to the world.

However, what many of us might not consider is that, despite
growing free-trade and globalisation, national governments still
exercise control over what can be exported.

In Australia the regulatory framework that controls which
goods can be exported has recently been updated to include
intangibles (which includes software).

This presentation will provide you, an open source developer,
an overview of the Australian regulatory framework that is in place
regarding export control, focusing on those areas that are
related to software. In addition to getting a practical
understanding of your responsibilities regarding
export control the presentation will provide you with
practical tips you can use to ensure you remain in compliance
with the regulations.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

132. Challenges when Scaling: Adventures in Swift's Sharding
Matthew Oliver

Swift is an open-source, highly available, distributed, eventually-consistent object storage system.  As the project has matured, so has the need to store more and more data. Objects in swift are tracked in the containers they are placed and a container in essence is a SQLite database which is distributed throughout the cluster. As the number of objects in a container increases, so does latency meaning larger sites have moved to using expensive solid state drives (SSDs) for container storage, but there has to be a better way we can solve this in software, right?

For this presentation we'll cover the design decisions that have enabled Swift's success, and then show how these same decisions need to be revisited as we cater for the ever increasing size of containers.  We'll consider a proof of concept container sharding implementation that attempts to address a few of these limitations, allowing for larger datasets to be deployed on cheaper commodity hardware, splitting a container database over many databases and nodes. 
We won't just present the final solution, but we'll iterate over the different approaches tried, so that you can learn from our mistakes and lessons learnt.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

133. An introduction to monitoring and alerting with timeseries at scale, with Prometheus
Jamie Wilkinson

Monitoring is the foundational bedrock of site reliability, and yet is the bane of most sysadmin's lives.  Why?  Monitoring sucks when the cost of maintenance scales proportionally with the size of the system being monitored. Recently tools like Riemann and Prometheus have emerged that can address this problem, by scaling out monitoring configurations sublinearly with the size of the system.

In this talk, Jamie will talk about the theory of alert design and timeseries-based alerting methods, and complement that with practical examples in Prometheus that you can deploy in your environment today to reduce the amount of alert spam and help operators keep a healthy level of production hygiene.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

134. to be advised


(Needs description.) 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

135. Keynote #3 - Mr Jono Bacon


(Needs description.) 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

136. Building museum exhibits with open hardware: Raspberry Pi & Arduino
Michael Borthwick

When galleries, museums, libraries and archives create exhibitions they make choices between proprietary and open hardware solutions for video playback and interactive exhibit control. The wildly successful $25 Raspberry Pi single board computer with hardware accelerated playback of high-definition video represents a compelling alternative to proprietary media players in temporary and permanent exhibitions. It is low cost and low power, extensible and open and leverages the reliability of the Linux OS and open source video player applications. Having access to the source code allows museums to leverage the work of the 1000's of great minds who contribute to the development of the technology stack, to modify the code to incorporate new custom features, to contribute those changes back for the benefit of the global cultural heritage community and to obtain support from peers and others in the community with knowledge of the base OS and popular powerful open source languages such as Python. Not only is the Pi more open, but omxplayer's support for closed captions makes museum exhibits more accessible for Deaf and hearing impaired visitors while the ability to switch on-the-fly between subtltles in different languages makes these exhibits more inclusive by embracing the language needs of our multicultural population.

The vibrant Arduino eco-system allows the creation of unique open solutions by remixing hardware designs and prototypes from a vast community of hobbyist and commercial contributors upon which can be run realtime interactive applications that utilise powerful libraries for controlling audio-visual and other technologies.

 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

137. Using Persistent Memory for Fun and Profit
Matthew Wilcox

With persistent memory closer to becoming part of mainstream computing, software developers are finding many interesting uses for persistent memory.  This talk will share some of the innovative design patterns we've found.  I hope to inspire Free Software developers to enhance their applications to take advantage of persistent memory.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

138. to be advised


(Needs description.) 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

139. Tutorial: The Power of Open Data with ELK
Mark Walkom

Through the Declaration of Open Government, Australian citizens have been empowered with access to government data and information at both a local and national scale. This means Australian citizens can openly and freely access both historical and up-to-date information on areas that have a direct impact on themselves and their communities.

Our tutorial session will enable participants to run up an ELK stack to process a dataset from data.gov.au, and leave them with the skills to apply the stack to nearly any dataset. The ELK stack, which is comprised of the open-source software projects Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana is a powerful data and analytics platform that makes it easy to take structured and unstructured data and present it in beautiful ways. We’ll take a sample dataset from data.gov.au, feed it through Logstash, store it in Elasticsearch and then create a dashboard of visualisations from the data in Kibana.

At the end of the tutorial, participants will have enough knowledge to be able to adapt the process in the tutorial to other data from data.gov.au and will hopefully be inspired to start analysing the vast amounts of data that are readily available.

Participants should bring a laptop with Java 1.7 or 1.8 installed, it is assumed the attendee has basic Linux experience with shell and editor usage. 
A set of files, including the ELK packages and the dataset, along with instructions will be made available by URL before the talk, and on USB thumbdrive on the day.

Presented by Joshua Rich and Mark Walkom.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

140. Linux driven microwave
David Tulloh

Imagine a microwave that can defrost a steak without cooking the outside edges, heat a mug of milk without letting it boil over and download a chocolate self saucing pudding from the internet and guide you through the preparation steps.

The modern microwave hasn't substantially changed since the 70s. Despite improvements in screens they still uniformly use a four character display. My phone has an advanced multilayer interface - my microwave has fixed buttons that can't adapt. My electric scales cost $10 - my microwave asks for the weight in pounds. Electronic thermometers are sold in the impulse purchase section of Kmart - my microwave requires me to watch the milk to ensure that it doesn't boil over.

Reworking all the non-heating parts allows the microwave to be brought into this century. Switching to a lcd touchscreen substantially improves the user interface. Building in a set of scales improves the existing auto functions. Adding a thermal camera allows the functionality to be transformed enabling temperature based cooking control, food to be kept warm and really awesome pictures. Throwing in a network cable allows for remote control, access to online information and hackers to play.

Readily available open source hardware enables this kind of development to be done quickly and cheaply. The banana-pi provides the complex electronics, Linux just needs a microwave driver. 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

141. Dropbox Database Infrastructure
Tammy Butow

Dropbox helps users store and share more than a billion files a day. Our Databases team manage thousands of MySQL servers which requires a deep understanding of MySQL, Ubuntu, kernels, hardware performance, monitoring, automation and much more. In this session I will share the overall architecture, some of the design decisions we took, war stories and lessons learnt.


 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

142. He aha te mea nui? 
Chris Cormack

The Koha project started in a small town in New Zealand and now is used by over 10,000 libraries worldwide. How did we grow the project to this state? What lessons have I learned along the way?
Suprisingly something I have come to learn was that I already knew a good framework for building and sustaining a healthy community. It's something my ancestors had figured out hundreds of years ago.
In this talk I will be discussing the similarities between a functioning and health FOSS project and traditional whānau and hapu communities. Hopefully providing some insight and some useful tools for others.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

143. Hardware and Software Architecture of The Machine
Keith Packard

Innovations in optical interconnect and storage technologies have
prompted HP to undertake a large-scale development effort called "The
Machine". This radical departure from traditional computer
architectures which we call 'Memory-Driven Computing', where large
scales of heterogenous computation can be brought to bear on a data
set which is accessed not over a traditional network or storage
system, but rather directly from the computational elements using
memory load/store instructions.

This presentation will describe the first implementation of this
architecture, both hardware and software. On the hardware side, this
will include:

 • Heterogenous computation node hardware
 • Memory interconnection fabric
 • Hundreds of terabytes of memory
 • Network interconnect
 • Top of Rack Management Server

The system software for The Machine is based on Debian GNU/Linux.  The
presentation will focus on new and updated software elements while
mentioning some of the existing code that has been particularly useful:

 • Two-level storage allocation system
 • DAX changes needed to support large storage systems
 • Concurrent file system designed for large shared memories
 • Provisioning services
 • The Machine Environment Simulator (TMES)

As with any research project, The Machine asks more questions than it
answers.

 • How should we build data structures for storage where the
   addressable persistent unit is a single byte?

 • What changes are needed in the design of large-data software
   systems to best take advantage of this shift from network-driven
   computing to memory-driven computing?

 • The Linux operating system model drives a huge range of hardware
   these days. Is The Machine different enough to encourage a
   different model?
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

144. Open Sourcing Anti-Harassment Methodologies
Randi Harper

Online harassment has always been a problem that existed without a solution. Many have been unaware of the prevalence of abuse directed primarily at minorities, but in the past year this has become more of an international topic, gaining media coverage as well as spawning conversations about how to mitigate and prevent abuse.

While preventing abuse is a complex topic, open source tools have been developed that have mitigated targeted abuse. Creating software to mitigate abusive content can be a difficult task, as classifying unwanted data is more complex than most filters, such as anti-spam.

In this talk, we will discuss the cultural context of online harassment as well as different techniques for writing software to help protect users.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

145. Builds, dependencies and deployment in the modern multiplatform world
Jussi Pakkanen

One of the great virtues of any Linux distribution is the package manager. It makes it trivial to install both software as well as dependencies to build more software. It is therefore surprising to learn that most free software installs are done on platforms without package managers. As an example it is not uncommon for gui programs to have more than 90% of their user base on Windows. Similarly all installs to mobile devices must embed their dependencies rather than rely on a package manager. During the development of the Meson build system, the problem of everyone writing their ad hoc embedding systems kept popping up and eventually lead to the development of the multiplatform Wrap dependency system. Wrap is unique in that it aims to work seamlessly with a package manager when one is available. In this talk we look at the requirements and problems of a cross platform dependency system as well as some unexpected benefits, such as improved performance and making it easy for people on non-Linux platforms to participate in development.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

146. Forcing Change in Healthcare through Open Standards
Grahame Grieve

Healthcare is the slowest moving industry, and has yet to be transformed by the social/mobile/analytics/cloud platform. RIght now, one key barrier is that you can't move data around effectively. The FHIR standard is starting to change that - maybe. This presentation will review the FHIR project's origins, governance, open source credentials, and prospects and show that an agile open source standard can be a little lever with a big impact.

 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

147. Tutorial: Hunting Linux malware for fun and $flags
Marc-Etienne M.Léveillé

Server-side Linux malware is a real threat now. Unfortunately, as for its Windows counterpart, most system administrators are inadequately trained or don't have enough time allocated by their management to analyze and understand the threats that their infrastructures are facing. This tutorial aims at creating an environment where Linux professionals have the opportunity to study such threats safely and in a time-effective fashion.

In this introductory tutorial you will learn to fight real-world Linux malware that targets server environments. Attendees will have to find malicious processes and concealed backdoors in a compromised Web server.

In order to make the tutorial accessible for a range of skill levels several examples of malware will be used with increasing layers of complexity -- from scripts to ELF binaries with varying degrees of obfuscation. Additionally, as is common in Capture-The-Flag information security competitions, flags will be hidden throughout the environment for attendees to find.

Requirements

* Some programming experience
* Good understanding of Linux server systems (userland)
* Pre-installed tools: text-editor, radare2, gdb
* Optional: ipython, IDA Pro (proprietary)

Skills to acquire

* Live system incident response and forensics using Linux's standard tools
* System hardening
* Introduction to reverse-engineering obfuscated scripts and binaries
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

148. Open-Source Software Stack for High-Assurance Autonomous Vehicles
Gernot Heiser

The DARPA HACMS Program aims at developing open-source systems and tools for protecting autonomous vehicles from cyber attacks. Specifically, a team comprising NICTA (Australia) and Rockwell Collins and Galois (US) is developing SMACCMcopter, a complete open-source software stack for flying a quadcopter. We are developing new code-synthesis and verification tools, also open-source, which allow us to architect the system for maximum resilience, and produce a large amount of high-assurance software at affordable cost. The software stack is based on NICTA's formally-verified seL4 microkernel and the NICTA and Breakaway eChronos RTOS, also being verified. Flight-control software is generated from high-level specs by Galois' Ivory/Tower tools.

The technology developed for SMACCMcopter is being transferred to an optionally-piloted helicopter developed by Boeing, as well as an open reference platform for military ground vehicles.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

149. Machine Ethics and Emerging Technologies
Paul '@pjf' Fenwick

Technology is advancing at a faster rate than society's expectations, and many technologies go from the stuff of science-fiction to being consumer-available, with very little in the way of discussion in between. This is made worse because many decisions regarding emerging technologies are uncomfortable to have: when should an autonomous vehicle sacrifice itself and its owner to protect others? What happens when medical expert systems work on behalf of insurance agencies rather than patients? What happens when the world's weapon systems—including tens of thousands of combat drones—are able to make lethal decisions without human involvement?

Emerging and autonomous technologies have enormous potential for benefiting humanity, but we need to discuss the ethics and risks of them now—and in a public space—before widespread deployment occurs.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

150. Open Source Tools for Distributed Systems Administration
Elizabeth K. Joseph

Distributed systems administration teams are becoming more common. This is often fueled by the increased desire for gathering the best talent regardless of location and as the need for worldwide systems coverage grows.

The OpenStack Infrastructure Team does this today and is also staffed by individuals from several companies and organizations which strengthens our need for solid collaboration tools even more. From code review to chat channels and meetings to collaborative editing tools, this talk explores the fully open source tool set that the OpenStack Infrastructure Team uses to collaborate on a daily basis, handle maintenance windows and remain a cohesive team regardless of distance. It will also dive into some of the struggles of time zone hand-offs and the bi-annual in person gatherings which help keep the team on track with project work.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

151. Open Source and back again
Stephen Hemminger

This is the tale of how open source products don't always work out the way the original founders intended. It will cover the growth and metamorphosis of Vyatta an open source router project. This is a reflection on what went wrong, what went right, and what was wrong with the original intentions. It also how other projects can avoid the same problems.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

152. A Detailed Look at Erasure Codes in OpenStack Swift
John Dickinson

OpenStack Swift has recently implemented erasure codes as a way to durably stored data. In this talk we'll start with a very brief overview of Swift and erasure codes and quickly move on to a detailed look at the implementation the erasure code feature. First we will cover the simple read/write data path. Then we'll move into some interesting challenges the community faced when implementing the feature, and how they were solved. We'll go over how Swift, an eventually-consistent (AP) system, does a multi-phase commit. We'll show where Swift uses two-dimensional time to handle failures and reach a steady-state. Swift's supports multiple external erasure code libraries, and we'll review the different ones available. There will be code. There will be performance graphs. There will be math. Come learn how we have implemented this feature in Swift and why it's such a big deal.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

153. What I've learned as the kernel docs maintainer
Jonathan Corbet

Neil Brown recently described kernel maintainers as developers who weren't sufficiently agile to avoid getting pulled into the maintainer role.  I failed on this score just over a year ago.  This talk will get into the details of what it is like to be a kernel subsystem maintainer, the ups and downs of maintaining a documentation tree in particular, and why one may or may not want to avoid getting pulled into this important role.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

154. Record and replay debugging with "rr"
Robert O'Callahan

Debugging is expensive and not fun, especially debugging intermittent failures. rr changes that by recording Linux user-space process execution and letting you play back a recording and debug it using gdb, getting exactly the same execution as was recorded, as many times as you need. rr is used by Mozilla developers to debug Firefox, so it works on real applications. It runs on stock hardware, requires no kernel changes, and has low recording overhead (usually less than 1.5x). rr supports gdb's reverse execution features, which (combined with breakpoints and hardware data watchpoints) make debugging fast and fun. This presentation will describe how rr works, discuss some of the kernel issues that created difficulties for rr, and speculate about what we can do to make rr and related tools even better.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

155. Tutorial: Applied Data Science in Python
Tennessee Leeuwenburg

Ever tried to get into data science or machine learning, but struggled with getting your tech stack working, or found the maths off-putting? Curious about the limits of what your laptop or desktop really are when it comes to Big Data and predictive analytics? Ever wondered if these tools were really accessible to a general developer?

This tutorial will provide attendees with a walkthrough on getting set up for this work, and an overview of a good tech stack / software ecosystem for beginning work. We'll cover some of the standard data sets in machine learning, and how to apply interesting algorithms. Random Forests and neural networks will be included, but with a minimum of fuss and jargon. There will be a focus on the application of technology, with only the most relevant theoretical aspects included. This is about actually getting things done.

This tutorial would be suitable for intermediate developers of any background, or experienced developers who would like an introduction to data science that gets to the point fast. Prerequisites: the ability to install Python modules on your laptop, the ability to set up a new virtual environment, and an interest in applying new techniques.

The tutorial will include clear walkthroughs, as well as allowing adequate time for discussion and individual learning. Please contact Tennessee via email ahead of time if you would like to get a head start on setting up your environment -- this may help you get more out of the tutorial.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

156. edlib - because one more editor is never enough
Neil Brown

edlib was inspired by the brilliance of emacs, and motivated by the weaknesses of emacs (and its competition).

edlib is both a library to support the writing of document editors, and a document editor built using that library.

As a library, it provides clean abstractions, useful functionality, and extensible interfaces, which can be accessed from multiple languages.

As an editor it emphasizes display of informative context, and direct manipulation of content.  This applies on documents as varied as code, git commits, mark-down, email, directory listings, and raw block devices.

This presentation will describe the structure of edlib, display the different tools that can be built with it, and maybe even be presented using edlib itself.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

157. SubPos - A "Dataless" Wi-Fi Positioning System
Blair Wyatt

SubPos is an extensible, open-source, Wi-Fi based indoor positioning system, that doesn’t require expensive licensing, specialised hardware, laborious area profiling or dependence on data connectivity (a connection to an online/offline location database is not required). With this, it also retains backwards compatibility with existing Wi-Fi access points and receivers.

The SubPos Standard defines an accurate method for subterraneous positioning in different environments by exploiting all the capabilities of Wi-Fi. Plug and play SubPos Nodes or existing Wi-Fi access points are used to transmit encoded positioning information in a standard Wi-Fi beacon frame, which is then used for passive, low-latency, location trilateration by a device of your choice (as long as it provides access to Wi-Fi scanning functionality).

Further developments are being made to increase the system’s accuracy using various techniques such as room zoning capabilities, dead reckoning and improved averaging functionality. A cost effective, extended ranging module is also in the works, to provide enhanced positioning accuracy and distance calculation between Nodes for hobbyist robotics applications.

A live demonstration with battery powered SubPos Nodes scattered about the presentation space will be shown. Audience members will be encouraged to try SubPos out on their own devices by downloading and running an Android demo application.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

158. Law and technology: impedance mismatch
Michael Cordover

The law doesn't get technology. Laws drafted with technical input end up too technical: the Telecommunications Act govnerns "the carriage of communications by means of guided and/or unguided electromagnetic energy". Laws drafted without technial input end up too broad: nobody really knows what metadata falls within the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Act. Some laws, like the Privacy Act, completely ignore the impact they might have on tech. And that's before we get to the time it takes for law reform, or the incredibly complex jurisdictional issues...

One of the great moments in the free software movement was the development of copyleft: a way of using existing legal structures to promote a free software purpose. Surprisng as it might seem, EULAs have had a similar impact, providing "just enough" legal protection for a lot of online commercial activities. The only people who don't have some protection now are users: consumers who lack protection, individuals subject to invasive tracking and activists denied access to information.

There are no purely technical solutions to social problems. This talk will look at some ways individuals, F/LOSS projects and socially responsible enterprises can position themselves to maximise good outcomes. It will also consider areas where legal or policy change could have the greatest impact.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

159. Playing to lose: making sensible security decisions by assuming the worst
Tom Eastman

The unfortunate truth about networked applications is that an attacker only needs to know one thing you didn't know to get past your defenses. You need to know everything, they don't.

The odds aren't in your favour. You're eventually going to get hacked.

That's the bad news. But if you stop thinking about a security compromise as that thing you close your eyes and hope never happens", and instead start thinking about it as an inevitability, then you can start making better security decisions.

"If they compromise my web servers, how do I protect my application servers?"

"If they break my application server code, how can I prevent them from gaining a foothold on my infrastructure?"

"If they poison my web-site with cross-site scripting, how do I find out before my users get hurt?"

In short: "If I’m going to get hacked, how do I make it hurt less?"

This is a talk about defense in depth.

Building a secure system isn’t about luck, it’s about planning.

 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

160. Opening classrooms through the Australian Curriculum
Arjen Lentz

How do we get F/LOS software, hardware, data, standards into our school classrooms? This has been an ongoing debate, and many practical attempts have also been made. What metrics should we use for deciding success and analysing mishaps?

This talk is about one such exploration, happening quietly right now and doing rather well. Engaging students, involving parents, inspiring teachers. Un-boring kids! What is its approach, and why is it working?

It's not about the tools. Just like we cannot "sell" Linux to a desktop user by arguing that "it's better", resources typically don't get adopted for their openness. We all know numerous examples proving this. Rather, the initial reasons for adoption tend to be different ones, and the openness is either a nice bonus or something that can be discussed later. Whatever works, right?

Other aspects of open resources provide a variety of opportunities. They might enable a poorer school to acquire more hands-on gear for their students. They might provide a busy teacher with more suitable resources, quicker, and kept up-to-date. They might allow students to explore a topic or skill in an engaging way that other (proprietary) resources have not made possible, such as turning a previous "tool" into an object of significant learning in itself.

Dozens of senior primary kids (and their teachers, and some parents!) learn how to solder every month, know the difference between a servo and a stepper motor, year 5 students talk and write programs in mnemonics, and that's just a few examples.

And it's not just in the realm of Maths, Science and Technology. History and Geography are right in there, and even aspects of HPE (Health & Physical Education) are touched on. And the Australian Curriculum, rather than being a restrictive hindrance, has proven to be part of what enables the endeavour in core school time with entire co-ed classes, not merely extra-curricular activities!

We'll show what we've got, what we're doing, how we scale, and where we're going (as far as we know). Naturally we'll also cover what we have found doesn't work. As that's useful too!
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

161. Computer Performance Microscopy with SHIM
Xi Yang

Developers and architects spend a lot of time trying to understand and eliminate performance problems. Unfortunately, the root causes of many problems occur at a fine granularity that existing continuous profiling and direct measurement approaches cannot observe. This paper presents the design and implementation of SHIM, a continuous profiler that samples at resolutions as fine as 15 cycles; three to five orders of magnitude finer than current continuous profilers. SHIM’s fine-grain measurements reveal new behaviors, such as variations in instructions per cycle (IPC) within the execution of a single function. A SHIM observer thread executes and samples autonomously on unutilized hardware. To sample, it reads hardware performance counters and memory locations that store software state. SHIM improves its accuracy by automatically detecting and discarding samples affected by measurement skew. We measure SHIM’s observer effects and show how to analyze them. When on a separate core, SHIM can continuously observe one software signal with a 2% overhead at a ~1200 cycle resolution. At an overhead of 61%, SHIM samples one software signal on the same core with SMT at a ~15 cycle resolution. Modest hardware changes could significantly reduce overheads and add greater analytical capability to SHIM. We vary prefetching and DVFS policies in case studies that show the diagnostic power of fine-grain IPC and memory bandwidth results. By repurposing existing hard- ware, we deliver a practical tool for fine-grain performance microscopy for developers and architects.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

162. Speaking their language: How to write for technical and non-technical audiences
Rikki Endsley

Open source communities are made up of individuals with a range of experience and expertise, so how do you write for the different audiences? Sure, you're comfortable shooting sentences over IRC or knocking out a note to your mailing list. But what about reporting your team's progress to a non-technical manager, or explaining your product to non-technical end users? Find out how to: 
* Define your audience(s) 
* Outline your idea 
* Decide what information to include and terms to define 
* Repurpose content for multiple audiences 
* Streamline the writing process

Attendees will also see real examples of submissions for Opensource.com, which illustrate how marketing pieces, developer blog posts, announcements, event reports, and other formats can be turned into polished articles, tutorials, and documentation.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

163. Speakers' Dinner


(Needs description.) 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

164. Keynote #4 - Ms Genevieve Bell


(Needs description.) 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

165. Python's Dark Corners
Peter Lovett

Python is an excellent tool for *nix people. It is easy and fast to develop in.
But like all programming languages, it has its 'dark corners' - parts of the language that can bite you if you're not careful.
This presentation will shed light into those dark corners so that you can make the most of this excellent tool.
If you are self taught in Python you really need to know what you have missed!
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

166. Open Source Software in Silicon Manufacturing
Matthew Hiltner

Intel uses feedback from manufacturing test to continuously improve product yields and drive cost savings. Open source software plays an important role in this process, as its flexibility and transparency allow rapid innovation in manufacturing test development.

This presentation explores the use of open source software as part of system-level test for silicon components. By using open and well-understood customer-like workloads, Intel is able to effectively identify manufacturing defects. More importantly, key workloads that expose abnormal failure rates are integrated into more directed test environments, such as a test of a chip before it is even packaged.

The presentation will then focus on the cost impact of late defect detection, and how open source software specifically enables earlier detection. Techniques such as execution recording and CPU state insertion by PSMI, RTOS-like execution of directed workloads within NMISR  will be described.

The presentation ends by describing previous (and ongoing) challenges working in a closed-source environment, and how key learnings have dramatically increased awareness and appreciation of open source software within a decidedly hardware-centric field.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

167. Helicopters and rocket-planes
Andrew Tridgell

Title: Helicopters and Rocket-Planes

ArduPilot on embedded Linux boards is now flying on a wide variety of
vehicles. In this talk I will present three very different examples of
ArduPilot based aircraft and describe the unique challenges of each.

The smallest is the tiny Parrot Bebop, which has been running Linux for
a long time but now can run ArduPilot. The ArduPilot dev team has been
working closely with Parrot on the port, and it is now flying very
nicely. I'll give some demos at the conference.

The loudest is a 700 sized petrol helicopter, which turned out to be a
real challenge for vibration handling, and also had some interesting
issues with IMU filtering.

The craziest is the Lohan rocket plane, which aims to fly at supersonic
speeds 20km above the ground, before doing an autonomous landing at
Spaceport USA (or possibly creating a new crater in the ground nearby!).

Linux on flying robots is really going mainstream now!
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

168. Tutorial: The eChronos Real-Time Operating System - Just what you want, when you want it
Stefan Götz

Learn eChronos, a newly open-sourced Real Time operating system for MMU-less systems and the Internet of Things!

In this tutorial you will learn:
   -- What eChronos is for and good at
   -- How to build a system using eChronos
   -- How to run that system for testing on QEMU
   -- How to deploy the system onto real hardware

Participants are expected to understand basic OS concepts and have basic familiarity with the Linux command line.

Sometimes you want to run some very time-critical code on a device that doesn't have a lot of memory. This device might be so tiny that it mightn't even support memory protection - but you don't care, because you wouldn't run any code on this device anyway that you didn't fully trust. The code you do run, however, has to run on time and like clockwork, because that code drives a medical device or a ground or air vehicle, and lives are depending on it.

Perhaps you may have felt that this code of yours would be best expressed as a set of tasks that each have a clearly defined role, and you may be looking for an operating system that offers you just the means of specifying when those tasks need to happen, how long they get to run for, and how they should synchronize with each other when they need to coordinate their access to something. At the same time, you might need this code to compile to a binary that occupies no more memory than it strictly has to, because the power consumption or physical size of your device is a significant limiting factor in its deployment.

The eChronos Real-Time Operating System offers you a way to configure and build a statically resourced system of tasks, running code that you've written, to a schedule of your choosing. In this tutorial, we will teach you how to write, specify, and build systems that run on eChronos, and run them on the QEMU system emulator for ARMv7-M or PowerPC e500. We will also open the hood on the way the eChronos code base (available under the AGPLv3 license, on GitHub) is structured and maintained (with a view towards ease of certification), so that you can plan how you might port the eChronos RTOS to your own choice of hardware.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

169. Preventing Cat-astrophes with GNU MediaGoblin
Ben Sturmfels

What woul happen to all the cat videos if YouTube were to disappear? It would be a cat-atstrophe!

GNU MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform — an alternative to centralised, censored and surveilled systems like Flickr, YouTube and SoundCloud. MediaGoblin gives people privacy, choice and control of their own media, something we need now more than ever.

This talk will explore the current status of GNU MediaGoblin, the technical challenges in implementing fully decentralised sharing and commenting through the Pump.io API as well as work to lower the Python deployment barrier to empower normal people to escape the centralised systems.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

170. The world of 100G networking
Christopher Lameter

2015 saw the arrival of multiple 100Gbps networking technologies: Fast 100G Ethernet switches, Mellanox released EDR (100G Infiniband) and Intel came up with OmniPath (also 100G). 2016 is therefore likely going to be a battleground of these competing technologies. Facebook already is supposed to upgrade their infrastructure to 100G in 2015 and its likely that others are going to follow. This talk gives an overview about the competing technologies in terms of technological differences and capabilities and then discusses the challenges of using various kernel interfaces to communicate at these high speeds (POSIX, RDMA, OFI).
Hopefully we can come up with some ideas how to improve the situation.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

171. Accessibility and Security
Nicolas Steenhout

Did you hear about the double arm amputee who was refused service at a bank because he could not provide a thumbprint? Did you hear about the online petition to increase services for blind folks, that blind folks couldn’t sign because of CAPTCHA? These are examples of security practices that cause barriers to people with disabilities. We don’t set out to create barriers, but some policies or code can have unintended consequences. Security can create barriers to access for users, with or without disabilities. However security doesn’t have to reduce accessibility!

Does your application use CAPTCHA or session timeouts? Does it validate data, or get users to confirm entered data before transactions? Is there data loss after re-authenticating? If you answered yes to any of these, this session’s for you.

Security should be built into applications, not tacked on as an afterthought. Accessibility should also be built into from the get go and not offered as an add-on. It can be complex to work both accessibility and security together from the start – yet it is mission critical to make it happen.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

172. Copyleft For the Next Decade: A Comprehensive Plan
Bradley Kuhn

Copyleft, and the GNU General Public License (GPL) in particular, have faced
serious challenges in the last five years.  It's not over: many more threats
are on the way.  Not by coincidence these attacks on copyleft come when Open
Source seems to reach new heights of success.  For example, hordes of
software developers are funded full time to churn out wonderful new Free
Software, but their employers make one key requirement: develop Free Software
only under non-copyleft licenses.  Some of this new code is specifically
designed to replace existing, widely used, copylefted programs and packages.

Meanwhile, those programs that remain under copyleft licenses (most notably
the kernel named Linux) face a decades long, ongoing myriad of license
violations.  Such violations, most frighteningly, include nefarious attempts
by major companies to shirk their responsibilities under copyleft.  The
situation is undoubtedly bleak.

Those of us who care about software freedom need a plan.  Up until now,
copyleft assured an equal playing field, but big companies work daily to tilt
the playing field in their favor -- directly against the interests of most
developers, hobbyists, users, and enthusiasts.  This talk will present the
political challenges that copyleft continues to face, and offer real actions
that individuals can do to assure software freedom for everyone.

 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

173. Fuzz all the things!
Erik de Castro Lopo

This presentation was inspired by two un-related incidents.

Firstly, in late 2014, the presenter received two separate bug reports of stack or heap overflows in well known and widely deployed pieces of Open Source software for which he was the maintainer. In both cases these bugs were found using the latest fuzzing tools, one of them being American Fuzzy Lop (AFL). Using AFL the presenter then found and fixed numerous other bugs in these two projects.

Then, in early 2015, as part of the Snowden relevations, the SSH protocol and/or common implementations like OpenSSH were briefly suspected of containing a flaw that was known only to the NSA. Fortunately this suspicion quickly fell out of favour but how can we know for sure that the NSA doesn't have an exploit for OpenSSH?

This open question led the presenter to try to figure out how to fuzz encrypted network protolcols like SSH. For OpenSSH, it turns out to be rather difficult but that is mainly a design flaw in OpenSSH itself. Software written to communicate over an encypted tunnel could easily be designed to make fuzzing relatively easy. The result is software that is more secure and robust.

This presentation will cover:

* What is fuzzing?
* What makes American Fuzzy Lop and the LLVM Fuzzer so much better than previous fuzzers?
* How do the GGC and Clang compiler's sanitizer options assist in the fuzzing  process?
* Using American Fuzzy Lop as a file input fuzzer.
* Fuzzing network protocols (even encypted ones like SSH) with the LLVM Fuzzer.
* Integrating fuzzing into your standard development process.

 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

174. Open Source Technologies in Neuroscience
Gagan Sharma

"With Simon Salinas"

In our Neuroscience research group, Linux has become a core technology for image processing and clinical study management. It is very suitable for tight research budgets, but our choice was dictated mainly by its excellent performance and reliability.

We have successfully implemented open source technology based systems (Linux, python, bash, DCMTK etc) which are very reliable, robust and scalable for handling the main dimensions of our work flow: (i.) Image processing, (ii.) visualization and (iii.) remote server management.

We will show how Linux has benefited Australian neuroscience research, not only by reducing costs, but also by improving the overall performance of highly relevant studies. While this talk highlights Linux/Open-Source applicability in Neuroscience, we believe the main concepts discussed could be applied to any other discipline, especially in scientific studies with an imaging component and high volumes of data.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

175. Linux Guest RDMA On Hyper-V
K Y Srinivasan

Low latency, high bandwidth communication is critical for HPC workloads. In this presentation we describe the architecture and performance characteristics of Linux guest RDMA with Hyper-V as the host. The primary deployment target for this functionality is public cloud environments where tenant isolation is critical. We have come up with an interesting architecture where the control plane is over a software mediated path (to ensure security) while the data plane completely by-passes both host and the guest kernels. The result is a near-native performance profile while ensuring security.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

176. Free as in cheap gadgets: the ESP8266
Angus Gratton

Who wants a programmable WiFi device for less than $3? The ESP8266 microcontroller has been hugely popular since it first appeared in 2014. Like many hardware devices, the ESP8266 incorporates a bunch of Free Software. But proprietary hardware and Free Software haven't traditionally been great friends...

A black box at first, the ESP8266 has evolved to be unusually open for a very cheap embedded device. This process has been helped along by massive engagement from hobbyist and maker communities. It's also leveraged existing Free Software tools like the GNU C compiler. There are now multiple open source frameworks for programming the ESP8266, including a port of the Arduino IDE. There is a small but active reverse engineering community, which I'm part of, looking into ESP8266 internals. There are also projects like esp-open-rtos aiming to strip back layers of proprietary code to produce a more programmer friendly development environment.

The ESP8266 exemplifies a trend towards cheap ubiquitous hardware, a building block for the much-hyped "Internet of Things". It's also a product of the hugely competitive world of low end Chinese manufacturing - related to the "gongkai" notion of information sharing. By looking at ESP8266 we can find clues about how low end connected hardware is likely to evolve, and what that means for people who care about software freedom and hardware openness.

Coming away from this talk you'll hopefully have gained some inspiration for projects you might build with an ESP8266, and knowledge of the open source based frameworks you could use. You'll also have insight into the fascinating world of low end Chinese hardware manufacturing, and how the future of cheap hardware might look from a Free Software perspective.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

177. Terry & the path to an autonomous robot
Ben Martin

Learn about 'Terry' which uses the Robotic Operating System (ROS). Note that ROS is a FOSS stack that runs on Ubuntu Linux rather than an operating system in it's own right.

The latest iteration the Terry robot includes mapping and navigation, multiple Kinect sensors, a robotic arm for manipulation, IMU, and LED matrix display. Getting here from there has involved an iteration using the BeagleBone Black at it's core (presented at OSDC 2014), then moving to the current quad core Atom CPU to be able to process depth image data to build and use maps.

I'll also talk about Tiny Tim; a tiny teleop robot I made in <24hrs. The difference between simple Teleop (joystick to move robot) and the ability to process higher level commands with more autonomy ('bring me a beer') is vast and moves a robot from an 8 bit micro controller to more of a desktop machine processing power.

 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

178. Troublesome Privacy Measures: using TPMs to protect users
Matthew Garrett

Trusted Platform Modules (or TPMs) are small cryptographic chips frequently found integrated in mobile devices. When they first appeared in the early 2000s we were worried that they'd be used to restrict what users could do with their computers. For a variety of reasons, that didn't happen, and since then TPMs have mostly sat unused.

But now we face a new era, one where threats to user freedom are of a more chilling nature. Modern malware is capable of attacking lower levels of a system, making it difficult for a user to determine whether their computer can be trusted to behave in their best interests. New threats require new countermeasures, and TPMs may be part of the solution.

This presentation will cover the use of TPMs as part of a boot security process that makes it easier for users to verify that their system hasn't been compromised. It will explain what TPMs actually are, what they can be realistically used for and how the devices that we once feared for their impact on user freedom may be one of the best ways we currently have to defend it.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

179. Raspberry Pi Hacks
Ruth Suehle

Maybe you bought a Raspberry Pi a year or two ago and never got around to using it. Or you built something interesting, but now there's a new version of the Pi and new add-ons, and you want to know if they could make your project even better? The Raspberry Pi has grown from its original purpose as a teaching tool to become the tiny computer of choice for many makers, allowing those with varied Linux and hardware experience to have a fully functional computer the size of a credit card powering their ideas. Regardless of where you are in Pi experience, join Ruth Suehle and Tom Callaway to hear some of the best tricks for getting the most out of the Raspberry Pi. They'll also share some of the best projects they and others have built, from gaming devices to home automation, and they'll fill you in on what the Raspberry Pi 2 can help you do. 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

180. Overcoming barriers to open source adoption in the public sector
Norvan Vogt

Organisational budgets are shrinking and stakeholders are putting increasing pressure on public sector organisations to be efficient without jeopardising service delivery. There is a multitude of ways to share and reuse software amongst organisations and the public sector employs (and has employed) a variety of different approaches. This session will specifically focus on open source software and the factors influencing the adoption of open source software within public sector organisations. The primary objective of the session is to explore open source software benefits for public sector organisations, discuss the current state of adoption, and review the motivators and a-motivators affecting adoption. A secondary objective of the session is to investigate where organisations are utilising open source software and whether organisations consider open source software as a means of achieving business goals.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

181. Open Source Two Way Radio
David Rowe

This talk will describe how an open source codec, modem, and open hardware can be used to improve two way VHF radio by a factor of 10.

Push to talk two way radio is commonly used for police, emergency services, and the construction industry, with a world wide market of 50 million units/year.  It can be used with or without base stations, and has a range of 10s of km.

Several two way digital radio systems exist and are in common use today, however these are hobbled by the use of closed source codecs, which add significantly to the radio costs, and prohibit experimentation.  There is frustration throughout the radio industry with closed source codecs.

A team of open source developers has been working on open two way radio systems.  The team has demonstrated a performance increase of a factor of 10, which can be used in a variety of ways:

Transmit power can be reduced
Battery life can be extended
Relatively high bit rate digital data can be sent
High quality speech, or variable rate speech coding and quality
The range of the radios can be extended
The cost of the radio hardware can be greatly reduced due to low power, simple hardware, smaller batteries, and no codec license fees.

The use of Software Defined Radio (SDR) hardware is bringing the price of the hardware down, and open software is improving the functionality and performance.  The new, open two way radio protocol requires a new, open hardware radio design.  Fortunately, this can be relative simple, as most of the signal processing can be done in software.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

182. Life is better with Rust's community automation
Emily Dunham

Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety. Behind the scenes, Rust is also a community that nurtures new contributors, consistently enforces its code of conduct, and maintains a high-quality codebase. 

This talk will discuss the implementation details, as well as the social motivations and effects, of the customized infrastructure and workflow practices which allow the small core team to have such a significant impact. Come learn about bots which integrate with GitHub to identify and assist new contributors, the "Not Rocket Science" process for holding a project's code to high standards without being mean to anyone, and more!
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

183. secretd - another take on securely storing credentials
Tollef Fog Heen

Essentially all machines need access to some secrets such as API keys or database passwords. This, combined with increased automation and cloud solutions requires automated tools for managing those secrets. They need to be stored securely, mechanisms for rotation need to be present and access need to be audited and controlled. Various solutions such as chef-vault, KeyWhiz and Vault already exist and solve parts of the problem. secretd is a new take on the problem and, in the author's opinion, solves some problems the other solutions don't.

This talk will both include an exploration of the problem space as well as a presentation of secretd: everything from language choice through tradeoffs made and lessons learned.
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  

184. Lightning Talks and Conference Closing


(Needs description.) 
 recording release: yes license: CC-BY-SA  



Location
--------
D2.193 Percy Baxter


About the group
---------------
linux.conf.au is a conference about the Linux operating system, and all aspects of the thriving ecosystem of Free and Open Source Software that has grown up around it. Run since 1999, in a different Australian or New Zealand city each year, by a team of local volunteers, LCA invites more than 500 people to learn from the people who shape the future of Open Source. For more information on the conference see https://linux.conf.au/