Last day of conference! This is generally considered to be the wind-down - where you acknowledge that your brain is probably too full to absorb anything really new. Think light dessert after a big meal.
Today's keynote was from Genevieve Bell. She started her talk by saying "I know I'm in Australia when I go to a conference that has a raffle."
Genevieve's talk was easily the most entertaining of the keynotes. She is an anthropologist that works for Intel. She was hired by Intel to help them understand two groups of people:
- Women
- ROW (Rest Of World - ie anything not American)
Describing herself as both an unreconstructed Marxist and a radical feminist, Genevieve discussed how we as a open-source community have a moral obligation to make a better world. There are a number of benefits to the open source paradigm, including facilitating innovation, sharing and re-use. The ‘open’ paradigm is increasingly extending to other areas such as open government, open culture, open health and open education.
5/1 - The eChronos Real-Time Operating System - Just what you want, when you want it by Stefan Götz
I've never worked with an RTOS before, so this workshop was a baptism of fire for me. I setup the emulator on my native OS rather than a vm, which leaves me wondering how much stuff I've broken that will need to be fixed. :-|
With not a lot of personal background I was still able to come out of the workshop with an appreciation of just how much is involved with an RTOS and the utility that eChronos offers. It also makes me appreciate just how much utility is sacrificed by including features into an OS that we could easily do without.
Since it was in the same room, I attended the Home Automation BOFS (Birds of a Feather) during lunch. Home automation is a nice idea and I have a level of admiration for those who pursue it, however the cost and the level of work required just to have programmable central lighting control and having a graphical display of your water usage is not worth it IMHO.
5/2 - Free as in cheap gadgets: the ESP8266 by Angus Gratton
After lunch I went to two embedded Linux talks. The first one was for the ESP8266 which is essentially a super-cheap wifi module that can be easily be connected to an Arduino or Raspberry Pi. So if you want your hardware project to talk wifi - this is the unit to get.
Angus covered its benefits and disadvantages and gave pointers for those wanting to work with this unit.
5/3 - Raspberry Pi Hacks by Ruth Suehle
Ruth is the co-author of the book of the same name as the talk. It re-whet my appetite to get one, particular when she described some of the projects people had completed with the Pi.
Closing Session - Lightning Talks
The closing session includes the five minute lightning talks. Although short, the speakers manage to put a lot into these punchy talks.
- Steven Ellis - "A call to ARMS" was a pun plugging the ARM series of processors for NZOSS.
- Geordie Millar - Explained is stackptr project: OS GPS map sharing project.
- Katie McLaughlin - Discussed the #hatrack project
- Christopher Neugebauer - Plugged the pyconaustralia in Aug 2016. There was also a plug for kiwipycon.
- Cherie Ellis - Plugged Govhack 2016
- Bron Gondwana - Discussed using JMAP as a better way to do email.
- Martin Krafft - Discussed the curse of NIH and emphasised "Do one thing. Do it well."
- Keith Packard - Demonstrated his low-cost random number generator that hooks into /dev/random
The conference finished with an impromptu performance entitled "I lied about being a Linux type".
No comments:
Post a Comment