Posts tagged 'uk'

SambaXP and other travel

It’s been a busy two weeks. Wilco and I drove up to Göttingen on Sunday two weeks ago to spend some days hacking and meeting up with the other developers before the start of SambaXP. It was really nice to see everybody again after more than 7 months.

SambaXP was a bit different this year. There were three tracks during the second part of the conference this year, one more than previously and of course, there were several engineers from Microsoft attending this time! Some of the interesting talks this year included Julien’s update on OpenChange, Tridge’s talk on PFIF, the talk from the likewise folks and of course the talk from Microsofts’ Wolfgang Grieskamp on SMB2. We also had some other informal discussions with the Microsoft folks about specific topics - very useful!

There are some photos up on the SambaXP homepage. And just to be ahead of the comments: yes, I know I need a haircut.

I did some initial work on several bits and pieces of code that I hope to expand over the next few months. Volker has started working on ncacn_ip_tcp support and I have been working on making the Samba 3 DCE/RPC library compatible with Samba 4. This should allow OpenChange to use Samba 3 in the future.

Guenther, Wilco and I made some initial progress on the policy library, allowing client-side manipulation of (group) policies in Samba. I worked with Simo on trying to get rid of an evil hack in Samba4’s event subsystem.

David Holder blogged about some of the IPv6 development that we did during the conference: http://www.ipv6consultancy.com/ipv6blog/?p=34

And lots of other things I can’t remember at the moment…

After the conference Andrew, Wilco and I drove back to the Netherlands and I played tour guide for a bit showing Andrew around the country during the afternoon and hacking Samba together in the morning. Later this week we took the train to Brussels, Eurostar to London and visited Sam’s company in the UK Midlands for a couple of days.

And in the midst of all this, it seems Ubuntu Hardy was released. Congratulations to all those involved!

Currently Playing: Brandi Carlile - Turpentine

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LUG Radio Live

Just got back to the hotel after LUG Radio Live and the afterparty event. I guess the best way to describe LUG Radio live is as a your average geek conference but with a bit of a rock concert flavor: lots of cheering on, groupies, swearing, simple humor and metal music being played in between between sessions.

The talks were very good; in particular I liked Nat Friedman’s talk about, among other things, the way the Oxford English Dictionary was developed (although he still doesn’t seem to understand what is so bad about the MS-Novell deal) and Aaron Seigo’s talk on KDE 4 (made my fingers itchy and want to contribute..). The short talk Szilveszter and I gave on bzr-gtk went ok, but was probably not all that entertaining right after Malcolm’s talk on zombies and Ubuntu.

The major thing I disliked is the fact that the wireless was very crappy. I got it to work on two occassions, just long enough to read a few emails. It took a while to get used to the weird accent with which they speak English around here and I seem to’ve picked up a few swearwords that I now have to unlearn again. Doh.

All in all really worth the trip from Amsterdam and definitely something to keep in mind for next year!

Erik and I decided to stay an extra day to see a bit of Wolverhampton and Birmingham, but it turns out this isn’t your typical tourist spot.

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London

I’m currently doing a bit of sightseeing in London, after attending the Bazaar sprint at the Canonical office. It was a good sprint, and quite different from the previous ones - in that there was only a limited amount of actual coding involved. The view from the Canonical office is magnificent, so we were even able to do some sightseeing while working…

Bazaars’ focus has previously mainly been on correctness and features. The first has always been one of our strengths, and we’re in pretty good shape regarding the second. Performance has been one of the main complaints from users about Bazaar and so we have recently tried to improve in that area.

Since 0.12, we have already tried to optimise some of the common code paths and some people have been working on a high performance smart server (to speed up remote operations).

During the first two-and-a-half days of the sprint, we analysed 20 of the most common use cases with Bazaar and determined what complexity they should ideally require to be able to work. After this analysis, we looked at ways to change our data structures to reach these goals.

I have mainly been a spectator during the latter parts of these discussion, but they were interesting to follow.

One of the things I worked on was support for true push in bzr-svn. This was one of the bugs that has bitten a lot of users of bzr-svn. The upcoming bzr-svn 0.4 now supports true push as well as commits in heavyweight checkouts. I hope to release 0.4 after adding nested tree and ignores support so that I don’t have to change the internal mapping mechanisms again.

And now, it is time for some more sightseeing. After that I hope to get back to the reason I’m doing all of this in the first place: Samba!

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UK Summer

Great Britain appears to be the place to be this summer; a lot of the annual conferences are held in various cities around the UK this year: DebConf (Edinborough, 17-23 June), GUADEC (Birmingham, 15-21 July), Akademy (Glasgow, 30 June-7 July) and last but not least the next Bazaar sprint (London, 14-20 May).

I’ll be attending at least the Bazaar sprint and LUG Radio Live, and I hope to be present at GUADEC, time permitting.

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Bazaar Sprint

It’s been a fun week. I visited the Bazaar sprint in London with LarstIQ and had a great time meeting the core developers. Especially the pair-programming and test driven development was very interesting; the number of lines of code I wrote was smaller than usual, but I have never spent so little time debugging. Among the things I worked on were Commit Builder with Robert and some more work on bzr-svn.

The Arrow Rock festival yesterday was great. I was a little skeptical about Porcupine Tree’s live performance, but I was very pleasantly surprised. Roger Waters’ show was shorter than announced (3 hours) but very good nonetheless. Queensryche was the only disappointment - they played only a few old songs and their sound was pretty bad (at least from where I was standing).

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