LCA2006: Day 5
Posted 2006-01-27-2259
Day five. Weather? What weather? It was nice, mild this evening.
Another impressive keynote. It was a very funny talk, and highlighted some important points. I will have to use some of them with the projects I work on.
RepRap is interesting, and improving. I had a look at their stuff about 6 months ago and Vik showed some improvements made since then. There is still a lot to go and more to go before it is really useful.
Mysql Cluster. This has to be the coolest software I've seen during the conference so far. It works so easily, quicky and works very well. It is a pitty I didn't have a laptop to follow along (not that the one I have could cope with it anyway). I look forward to using it with the Thousand Parsec server.
Avahi is cool too. I have a project or two in the pipeline that might use it. And it looks nice and easy. A really cheap way to monitor boxes and services too.
Passive IP conflict detection is an interesting problem, but Linux doesn't
handle it at all. I agree with Marc - it should be in the kernel, not userspace. The
event system could handle it, and no action other than detecting the
conflict and notifying userspace is needed. Perhaps he needs to do the
base_handler
trick that David Miller told us on yesterday.
Securing php and other web apps is important, but until this seminar (again, I only saw the first half) I didn't realise all the facets of it. He has a really cool automatic tool for checking webapps. There are some really simple and easy things to do that will prevent most (or at least, some) problems. IE is braindead, but I'm sure you knew that already. Use Firefox (or Konqueror!).
ENUM is odd. It could be good, but I can see my ISP, phone and cell providers all charging me for it, where I could do it myself. It is a neat privacy idea, but why do we really need to stay tied to a long number. Throw your old phone away and use a VoIP. Address by domain, human text, not computer (very old dumb computers) numbers. It seems to replicate some of SIP's features (redirection) and adds an extra layer of indirection and complexity. On the other hand, it is neat from privacy point of view.
The Game Development BoF went well. There was 15 or so people, and a bit of
lively, but friendly, discussion on what makes a good game, common components of games
and making them known, and the number of abandoned games on SourceForge. One thing is
that someone (and I suspect this could mean I
) needs to set up a site (wiki
probably) to have links to point to the various components and library out there that
make game programming easier. We need to reduce the redundant code and focus on
improvement, not duplication of effort.
I guess it could extent to tutorials and other things from there.
One thing I will mention here is that we articulated the difference between Focus games and Framework games. See the LCA wiki for more. I guess I need to work on the description a bit.
One day to go.