The first time I’ve been to FOSDEM was when I was an undergrad student at the University of Namur. I had joined the city’s Linux Users Group, and it didn’t take long until I was talked into going to my first ever Free and Open Source software conference (this may also have been my first conference ever, by the way). At that time the NamurLUG was recording the two main tracks and posting the videos online for everyone to see. Indeed, with such a packed programme and so many parallel tracks, chances are that even if you could make it to Brussels, you would most probably miss a lot of interesting talks. My first FOSDEM was a wonderful experience that greatly contributed to my enthusiasm for Free and Open Source software, and I’ve been attending almost all FOSDEMs since then, and saw it getting better and better every year. I was therefore delighted to read last weekend on the FOSDEM mailing list that the dates of the 2013 edition have been announced: 2-3 February. I’m already looking forward to it.

Over the years, NamurLUG had greatly improved the quality of video recordings: we started by using cheap, consumer-grade cameras to professional material that we got through the Communauté Française de Belgique’s lending service, covered more rooms (hello, lightning talks), and eventually even live streamed the videos for those unable to attend. I have moved to the UK and am not a member of NamurLUG anymore, and the LUG does no longer record FOSDEM talks: the DebConf video team has taken over the task though, and they’re doing a fantastic job too!

If you’re not familiar with FOSDEM, it is the Free and Open Source software Developers’ European Meeting. It takes place every year in Brussels, and it is completely free to attend. Many, many open source hackers and projects will be there to talk about their shared passion. It is a great opportunity to learn, exchange ideas and meet in person the people you interact with online. FOSDEM is spread over a whole weekend, including the famous beer event of Friday night at the Delirium café in Brussels, a few steps away from the main square. You wouldn’t go to Belgium without sampling a few beers, would you?

Finally, the call for speakers (and devroom organisers) has been released. If you want to talk at FOSDEM, now is the right time to put an application together! And to be kept updated with FOSDEM-related announcements, including more calls for participation, don’t forget to register to the mailing list.

… and so should you.

For those who haven’t heard of it, ElectroMagnetic Field is a 3-days hacker festival, in the same spirit as HAR or the CCC camp, taking place next weekend in Milton Keynes, UK (who said that nothing ever happens in Milton Keynes?). As I happen to live just a few minutes away by bicycle, it would have been a shame not to attend. There will be talk and workshops and meetings and discussion on various subjects including programming (of course), high altitude ballooning, knitting, GSM basics, 3D modelling, Esperanto, you-name-it.

This is the first edition of EMFcamp, and the organisers should already be congratulated for the huge amount of work they have put in to make it happen. I am sure that this first edition will be a success, and the beginning of a long series of EMF camps in the UK.

Tickets are still available, and if you buy a ticket for the entire festival you will get a TiLDA, an Arduino-compatible programming board. Hours and hours of geeky fun at your fingertips. You know you want it. Go. Get. A. Ticket. Now.

TiLDA, your camp badge and programmable board. You know you want it.

So, this is it. The first day of EMFcamp is over and I came back to a warm, dry bed instead of freezing to death in a tent between a lake, a helipad and a motorway. That’s the advantage of living a mere 20 minutes cycle away from the event site. This doesn’t happen often though, as Milton Keynes isn’t exactly the most lively place in the UK.

The site looks great – as long as it doesn’t rain -, and the talks so far have been very interesting. My only regret is that the badges are not ready yet, but they will soon be available. Hopefully.

After locking my bike, I had a quick tour around the site to find out where the talks and workshop tents are, where the food is available, and, most importantly, went to the bar. They serve a nice local beer for a good price. They also serve Beck, which they mistakenly refer to as ‘beer’, and Club Mate. I’ve heard of Club Mate a lot as a hacker drink, but never actually tried it. That issue has now been resolved. It’s good. I like it. It’s full of caffeine (48gr/bottle according to the label). I like it even more. I have a vague feeling that I shouldn’t drink too much of it though. One more reason to stick to beer .

As with the talks, I happened to have mostly stayed in tent Beta (when not in the bar, that is). The talks were interesting and varied.

• The Future is Right Here, by Jez. Although I didn’t understand everything, the main idea is interesting. It seems to boil down to creating trees (sort of mindmap-like things) and sharing branches with different people. I’m not sure how this would work in practice and how in would scale up, both in terms of the number of users and the size of each tree, but an interesting project anyway. Also, I don’t understand why it has to use trees. Surely, graphs are better. I would want my cycles!
• Two-fisted tales of DevOps – beards vs. process by John Hawkes-Reed. That was an interesting one too. John is a unix sys admin, and talked about the solution his company has been working on to deploy applications on lots and lots of servers. Includes git, java, message queues, puppet, and lots of great things that make people’s lives easier. John is also a great public speaker, and his talk was funny on top of being interesting.
• DNSSEC, What it is and why you need it by Jasper Wallace. A quick but very interesting talk about DNSSEC, which problems it can solve, and how. Also featured horror stories of DNS poisoning and various attacks that could be easily avoided. There’s a follow-up talk (or is it a workshop?) later in the weekend, apparently.
• Lightning talks. We had a few improvised lightning talks of great quality, covering subjects such as food distribution algorithms in a pub, a hilarious rant against date formats in log files (I completely agree with the speaker on that one), lightning, datacentres, why sys admins hate developers, someone who hates web applications, etc. Lots of fun.

After the lightning talks, the discussion carried on with a few of the attendees. We mentioned, in no particular order, the Mars rover, developers, operating systems, web applications, things going horribly wrong with servers and workstations, amusing ‘games’ that are probably only funny to computer people (well at least we all found them funny), jokes, etc.

Then I came home. It’s COLD, but at least I’m not sleeping in a tent. This was a great first day, and I hope tomorrow will be just as good. Hopefully the badges will be ready by then .

And that’s another day over at EMFcamp. A full day this time, with talks starting as early as 11 am. I arrived a bit later, just in time for the talk on TiLDA, the camp badge that happens to be an Arduino board. Unfortunately, the boards were not ready yet and hence the talk had to be rescheduled later (or was is eventually canceled? I’m not sure). I wondered around the camp until the talk on high altitude ballooning, which was followed by the launch of a balloon outside the tent. If you didn’t make it to EMFcamp, I bet you now wish you had booked a ticket.

A balloon is launched shortly after the talk on high altitude ballooning

I then spent part of the afternoon in the workshop tent, helping out with the badges. I first had to flash the bootloader with an ISP programmer, then helped sticking the batteries to the boards and getting them ready for distribution. Eventually the badges were distributed in the afternoon, and I think everyone was happy with their new toy. The boards feature 2 LEDs, an IR received and a transmitter, as well as a wireless card for boards to communicate with each other.

Meet TiLDA, the EMFcamp badge

I then went to see Ben Goldacre‘s talk on Big Pharma. He is a great public speaker and did an amazing as well as horrifying talk on how some pharmaceutical companies conveniently forget to publish results of drug trials that do not look too good for the drugs they’re selling, which is the subject of his new book, The Drug Pushers.

Ben Glodacre

I then got some food and a beer, before attending the lightning talks session, followed by Tef’s Programming is terrible. Lessons learned from a life wasted. It was a funny (and true) account of the horrors he has seen in his life and how programmers (mis)behave, to finish with a rant on how poorly programming is taught in schools and universities.

Playing music with synthesisers and a radio theremin between two talks

After that was a talk on safe cracking, Safe cracking from back in the day to the present day by Warren Rockley. Not only did Warren avoid inflicting death by PowerPoint upon us (by not having any slides at all), he proceeded to walk us through the history of safe making and safe cracking, from the early days of heavy wooden boxes to present day safes and vaults. His talk was interesting and full of funny anecdotes. The tent was full, people were grouped outside to watch, and the questions session went on for over an hour, with contributions and live lock picking demos from other locksmiths as well. After that, it was time to call it a day and go home for the night.

No post would be complete without a picture of the bar, under the M1.

Sunday was the third and last day of EMFcamp. These camps are always too short .

Next time, I should come dressed either as pacman or as a ghost, and run around the place like crazy.

On Sunday I didn’t take my laptop with me, but instead I did bring my camera. After having to cycle through a charity running event going the other direction around Willen Lake, I arrived on the camp side to meet my friend Adrien who was there for the day. We listened to the end of a talk on Hypermedia RPC by Tef (the same one that talked about how programming is terrible the day before – and a very good public speaker). As I arrived late into the talk I’m not completely sure what exactly it was about. Something to do with using http properly, caching, and scaling. I should probably look into it and find out exactly what it’s all about. We then proceeded to have a beer and eat lunch, until it was time for Adrien’s talk on Datamining a cloud that wasn’t meant to be public. Interesting as always, Adrien found an, err, “undocumented feature” in a cloud storage service that allows anyone to look at the files shared by users, and that many of them probably think are kept more or less private. The trick is that the tiny URLs that the service provides are not generated randomly as one may think, but are actually a counter. It then becomes trivial to watch for new files being uploaded. By simply looking at the files’ metadata, Adrien was able to compute statistics about file sizes, types, and other similar things. Ooops.

A hacker camp wouldn’t really be a hacker camp without beer. And Club Mate.

We then desperately looked for the workshop on Fundamentals of web application security & security testing by Tom Doran, but there didn’t seem to be anything happening in the workshop tent, so I think we went for a beer instead (what else?). After hanging around the camp for a while it was already time for the camp’s feedback session, where the organisers discussed what went ok and what went wrong, and how they plan on making the next edition better. They also gave the audience the opportunity to provide feedback, which is great to find out what needs to be improved and what was good and interesting. Apparently there will be a one-day event next year, and the following camp will take place in 2014, but not in Milton Keynes. It turns out that there were quite a few problems with the camp site, for example the fact that it is often flooded by the nearby river (we were lucky it didn’t happen), or the fire hazards that were left on camp when they arrived even though it was supposed to have been cleaned by the parks trust beforehand.

Meet the bouncer at the bar, who was making sure that everyone was safe and had a great time.

The closing talk was then the occasion to thank everyone that came and everyone that got involved in the organisation. The organisation team has made a fantastic job, and so have the volunteers. Thanks a lot to all of them.

Many people have been taking pictures throughout the camp, and some of them are already available. My pictures are already online, and a dedicated page has been added to the EMFcamp wiki for people to post a link to their pictures galleries. If you were there and took pictures, don’t forget to edit the page.

I had a great time at EMFcamp, and I’m sure everyone else did, too. I hope we will all see each other again at EMF2014, and before that, at OHM2013.

Goodbye EMFcamp, see you next time!

It isn’t exactly a secret that I am a fellow of the FSFE, or Free Software Foundation Europe. If you’re reading this, you probably already know that FSFE is a non-profit whose goal is to promote and work for free software, which is software that guarantees you four essential freedoms:

1. the freedom to use the software, in any way you want;
2. the freedom to share the software with whoever you want;
3. the freedom to study the software, through access to its source code;
4. the freedom to improve the software, by fixing bugs or adding new features yourself.

The point of this post is not to give a course on free software, so if you have been living in a cave for the past 15 years or so and would like to know more about free software, then you can check the FSF (FSFE’s sister organisation in America) website, Wikipedia, or plenty of other online resources.

Last weekend, FSFE has started a new programme for individuals to show their support to the free software cause: supporters. Anyone can become a supporter of FSFE, at no cost. The FSFE will keep you updated about its activities by sending you an email a few times a year. Being a supporter is the easier and cheapest way of showing your support to free software, and helps FSFE to get a better idea of the number of people out there that care about the software they’re running and using. If you want to get involved a bit more, you can subscribe to the FSFE mailing list to be kept updated about events and discussions. You could of course also make a donation to help FSFE continue its mission.

If you want to become more involved in FSFE, you could consider becoming a FSFE fellow (like me). The fellowship scheme has been in place for a few years now, and allows individuals to become involved in FSFE operations, attend meetings, etc. If you become a FSFE fellow, you will get an @fsfe.org email address (it’s actually a redirection), a jabber/XMPP address, a GPG smartcard to sign and encrypt your emails or any other files, a blog, a page on the fellowship wiki, etc.

The free software movement needs you, and it only takes a few seconds to register as a supporter. Do it now!

… and so should you.

Last year already, I blogged about the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE)’s I Love Free Software campaign for Valentine’s day. It is a great occasion to remember that free software plays an essential part in our lives already, whether we are developers, contributors in any way, or even users. Yet the word still needs to be spread about the numerous advantages of free (and open source) software and why they are absolutely essential to a free and open society.

I love free software because I can look at the code, I can fix it when it doesn’t behave the way I want, I can share it with my friends and family, and I can adapt it to my customers’ needs. I love free software for its (potential) technical superiority, and for the fact that it give power back to users.

Today we can all thank all the contributors to the free software movement, and all its dedicated users. However small your contribution: thank you. And keep up the good work

If you use and like free software, why not spread the word? You could help a project, or support the FSFE or one of its sister organisations. You could tell a friend or a parent about free software. You could try a free (as free speech) operating system, and you could blog or tweet about free software. There are so many ways you can help, surely there must be one that suits you!