SELF 2018

I really enjoyed SouthEast LinuxFest this year, probably more this year than I did last year. Mostly because I made a point of being more outgoing and interacting with more people. Last year I attended I had tried talking to a few people but didn’t really have a good feel for things, and volunteered for the FSF booth and tried to take the Ham radio exam. This year I attended many presentations, had an opportunity to go to a Birds Of a Feather meeting on containers put on by Michael at RedHat. Additionally I met and at least briefly talked to Eric Raymond, Noah from the Ask Noah show, and some of the gang from the Linux Link Tech Show. If I met and hung out with you, thank you I really did have a great time and I hope we can continue to stay in contact. It really is hard to stay in contact especially when people are very far away. However it can be very rewarding to meet back with the people at a conference or festival or getting something to eat or drink. Additionally when you even talk about technology both parties often walk with something. I certainly enjoy sharing even giving advise, a secret config setting, or a new feature.

On my journey to SELF; on Friday I had to pick up my daughter from day care so I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it. On my way down Saturday morning I got a speeding ticket, some guy in a black BMW was tailgating me and I had tried to speed up and get out of the way, then he merged behind me and continued to do so, then I tried to speed up and get around a van and he still followed behind me. I explained this to the state trooper, I suspect they had extra enforcement because of this a wreck and complaints that there is rampant speeding (I agree there typically is a lot of speeding). I don’t speed much any more, consider I was driving in an older prius after I surrendered my Volkswagen Jetta Sportwagen TDI (due to the Federal emissions issue).

On my way back home I ended up getting caught in the traffic from this fatal incident, I had to go all across Lake Norman, I got home at 3, and fell asleep around 3:45. Sunday was fairly easy I will try and post links to some of the talks I attended, I really enjoyed Percona’s troubleshooting and analyzing database performance with PMM; that was done by the Percona CEO who spoke with me afterwards. I was really happy about all of that, and I might try and get some benchmarks of my own, I do like analyzing performance on many different level going back to other blog articles like using perf. However they aren’t to the caliber I would like them to be at. I’m just trying to produce content so that I can get into a pattern/habit of writing more.

On my commutes I thought that I would really like to try and present, I had done some presentations to the Phoenix Linux Users Group. But when I went a deployment with the Army I lost some momentum. I am committing to doing a speech next year given that my speech/paper is accepted, but I haven’t determined what my topic will be I could cover toolsets that I use at work, but really that is what https://stackshare.io/ is for I think, I don’t know if many people will get a lot out of that. So I have thought about these topics:

  • Quagga/Bird Routing software for Linux
  • Kernel tunable via sysctl
  • iptables GPU offloading
  • fuzzing an open source project to assist with security analysis

Or focus on some directed core content, like SSL certificates, or the Percona CEO giving a speech about analyzing performance, here are some ideas:

  • SSL certificates, again I still think many don’t know this area as well as they should
  • git porcelain and plumbing
  • Linux powertools like nmap, qutebrowser, copyq, autokey/xbindkeys, xidotools, xautomate Some of these could be prime for an easier ones targeted for a Sunday afternoon when people are about ready to leave, and they also can be done by me independently and I can make the content available through other means such as vimeo/youtube/archive.org I don’t entirely know, but I have time to polish something up. I also hope that by committing here to doing this it will help to re-enforce that. Sorry if this is either long or scattered, I really am very tired, and I might go back and edit this later.