TedPage: SCALE Summary

I spent this weekend at the SCALE conference in LA, saw a few presentations and made one of my own. They were all good. As far as I could tell the conference ran beautifully, with the only hick-up being the lack of speaker's badges on Saturday morning. Not a big deal. Here's a breakdown of some of the talks that I went to.

• kernel-janitors project. I went to this talk because Bryce said that I just had to go see Randy, and I enjoyed it. I never knew much about the kernel janitor's project before, and I like they way that they are introducing people to Linux kernel development through mentoring. I agree with the comments during the session that they need a sexier name, but I love the idea behind the project.
• Linux internals and Device Drivers. I only saw part of this presentation, and the reality is that it wasn't my cup of tea. I really wanted the speaker to start throwing up C header files, but the talk was more about configuring Linux boot up, error conditions, and loading drivers. A good speech for lots of people, just not what I was looking for.
• Embedded Linux for Engineers. This is another talk where it wasn't at all about what I thought it would be, but that really wasn't a bad thing. I thought the talk would be more about things like busybox and handling protected memory, but it was more a talk on best practices of doing embedded Linux development. Things like using an NFS root to test your userspace applications, that way you can build then, and then run the directly without rebooting. Tradeoffs in boot time, while your customer may not care, a 5 minute boot time might really hurt your developers who have to reset much more often.
• Business Applications for Linux. This speech was given by David Uhlman who I first met at PLUG. At first, I thought that it was pretty useless to have a talk which did one slide on 100 different applications -- then I thought about it. Where does someone find out what apps are actually useful for Linux? You can use the apps packaged with your distro, but those are still more than it is reasonable for most people to know. What it really comes down to is that, if you're looking to implement Linux, you need to go through a talk like this one to learn which apps are important for you to look into.
• Open development on Solaris and Linux. This was an interesting presentation from Sun on opening up Solaris. It seems like they're trying really hard to get open source, but I'm not sure they're there yet. It was also interesting because it was obvious Mark spent most of his time defending the decision to open source Solaris, while with this crowd he really needed to defend why it took them so long to open source Solaris. I had to leave early to get ready for my talk, but I'm really curious if he talked about Java -- that's what I want open sourced.
• SVG and the Linux Desktop. This presentation was wonderful! Yeah, it was mine. Not great attendance because it was matched up against John Hall. Heck, I would have gone to his talk too.