Series 7 Episode 4 – In this episode The Binary Times guys are are joined by Ben Klaasen, Ben has been to FOSSDEM 2020 and gives us an insight to what it is like to attend this conference, Mark has been playing with Kubuntu 20.04, more under the hood tips and another epic Irish saying. Enjoy.
00:27 Wayne welcomes us to Season 7 Episode 4 from a windy and wet Bristol. Mark reports that Kilkishen is much the same, and our special guest Ben Klaasen tells us that Dublin suffers from the same affliction, that being Storm Dennis.
02:38 Mark tells us he’s been continuing to test Kubuntu 20.04, and all is going well, he’s looking forward to the release. Mark also noticed that LibreOffice 6.4 is now available as a snap, and recommends that people start using it, as it is an “essential release” as noted in the release video. Mark also notes that the Document Foundation released LibreOffice 6.4 on the 29th January, while the snap was released on the 11th and has been available since February 3rd on OpenSuse Tumbleweed’s repositories , so Mark suggests that if the Document Foundation are encouraging people to use a Linux distribution that has the latest releases of LibreOffice then they should suggest OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Apart from that Mark has been watching videos of FOSDEM, at which point he suggests who better to talk about FOSDEM than Ben.
04:33 Ben tells us about FOSDEM. He decided on a whim to go and he’s really delighted that he went. He notes that it’s free to attend and run by volunteers. He describes that FOSDEM stands for the “Free and Open Source Developer’s European Meetup”, and that it has taken place on the Université Libre de Bruxelles du Solbosch Campus for the last twenty years. First impressions were a bit chaotic. He relates that the scale is hard to comprehend, but he gives us some statistics saying that there are 841 speakers, 873 events and 71 parallel tracks, all taking place more or less simultaneously across 35 rooms. Wow!
Ben goes on to tell us that FOSDEM is organized into a number of keynotes, with maintracks of Community and Ethics, Containers and Security, Databases, Freedom, History, the Internet and Miscellaneous! There are Developer Rooms helping developers to get together and solve problems, Lightning Talks on many subjects, and a part that he really loved, the stands. It stood out to him because while Corporates like RedHat and Suse were there, they weren’t there in their glossy booths; it was more like a school fair, with representatives of the companies and projects standing behind school desks ready to answer whatever questions were thrown at them.
There was so much going on Ben found it frustrating at the start, just because there was so much going on, but once he made the realisation that that was the whole point of the conference and just to go with it, he found it amazing and would thoroughly recommend to anyone interested in Free and Open Source software to go there.
The topic changes to the male to female ratio that was quite apparently skewed. Ben describes a book by Marie Hicks, a University Professor of History who wrote a book called Programmed Inequality, which describes how Britain discarded their technological lead in computing when they discarded their women technologists. Mark tells us that there is a documentary about Kay McNulty (one of the original Eniac Programmers), available to view on the RTE player (which Mark isn’t so sure is available outside of Ireland).
Wayne asks Ben what talks did he get to see and what tweaked his interest. Ben tells us he got to meet Mike Saunders, who’s a proper gent by all accounts. He also got to see the State of OpenJDK, a review of the past year in the life of the OpenJDK Community given by Mark Reinhold. Another talk that caught his eye was The Hidden Early History of Unix by Warner Losh, describing the early history of Unix, funnily enough. He also talks about Generation Gaps by Liam Proven. This leads to a general discussion around programming. Ben goes on to tell us about What’s up at Haiku, a talk given by Francois Revol, one of the developers of Haiku, on its current state. The guys have a general discussion around Haiku. Ben rattles off a few more talks to give us a feel for the scale of the event, namely BASICODE: the 8-bit programming API that crossed the Berlin Wall, Infrastructure testing, it’s a real thing!, Correlation analysis in automated testing, Thunderbird in 2020 and Beyond, dqlite: High-availability SQLite, and Reinventing Home Directories. This leads to a more general discussion on having to relearn everything and building in complexity to solve problems for some but having the effect of pushing others out. Ben recommends another book by Cal Newport called Deep Work.
Before moving on to Under the Hood, Ben gives a shout out to Mike Saunders and the Document Foundation Group.
55:33 Under the Hood – Mark’s Under the Hood is to listen to the latest series of Command Line Heroes, as the first two episodes of season 4 have been about the history of computers, with the first episode about Minicomputers, followed by Mainframes and soon to be followed by more interesting talks on hardware.
Ben’s under the Hood is to recommend legacy code rocks. He also tells us that Firefox’s Multi-Account Containers will now sync your container configuration and site assignments.
Wayne’s Under the Hood is the How to Geek article on How to work with variables in Bash. He also mentions an indiegogo campaign for NVMe ExpressCard Adapters for ThinkPads!
Irish saying of the show is “Tá grá mór agam ar an Binary Times” or I love the Binary Times!
We hope you enjoy this show as much as we did making it!
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