Episode: 1490
Title: HPR1490: HPR at NELF 2014 Part1
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1490/hpr1490.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 04:08:33

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Oooop.
This is in my bill and yes, and now you are in this episode, say hello HPR, hello HPR.
You're official now, so I'm here with X1-101, yeah, X1-101, it's not safe, I'm used to
typing it.
Yeah, so am I, I have a hard time saying it, it's a visual thing, not a spoken one.
The whole family's name, something along those lines, yeah, the new one is 1-1-1-1, because
what I did with the way handle I sent it for my wife was 0-0-1-0, which for anyone not
looking at it, it's the bit compliment of 1-1-0-1, combining those is 1-1-1-1.
Are you a geek, sir?
Yes, sir, I am.
You had a long trip in, yeah, say how you got here.
My trip started, I'm already at work, Pokey, I'm at work.
My trip started, leaving my house at 6am to get to the bus station in Portland, Maine
at about 7am to take the 730 bus to the bus station in Boston, and then the subway over.
So this is like an overnight thing?
No, doing the same thing in reverse tonight.
But what time did you get on start, traffic leaving from Maine?
6am.
6am.
Okay, that's not so bad.
So I actually slept in today, I didn't get up till 5.30.
Okay.
You have a newborn, you sleep at all.
Actually, my daughter sleeps really, really well.
Down at 6 o'clock most nights and not up till 5.30, 6 o'clock the next day.
Pokey, you've met X-1-1-1.
No, I've seen each other online.
Yeah, I know.
Back when we were up in, what's it's not?
Worcester, Worcester, yeah.
Yeah, I was the first event.
Yeah, I remember seeing you there.
Oh, I have a tear, guys.
It's like a little reunion.
You ever in Portland?
I'm actually about an hour north of Portland.
He's up at the canis his way.
Yeah.
We were trying to figure out if they live near each other,
but was he coming this time?
I don't know, I didn't.
Because I think he's even further in Maine, which, you know,
I feel like I'm far up in Maine, but then Maine just keeps going.
And then you think there's, this has got to be Canada by now,
but nope, it's still Maine.
Yeah, there's hundreds of miles of, of just woods, woods,
and wood.
Yeah, just, and nothing.
Actually, it was almost two years ago,
went up to Fort Kent, which is, like,
I could have thrown stones at Canada from there.
Don't do that there.
No, very militant people.
No, no, no, no, that would be the other way.
If I was in Canada, I'd throw it in the war, people.
There's another story there.
The kids could slow down.
Throw rocks at us, eh?
And that was when I have my gallbladder attack.
OK.
See, the people did that.
No, no, my diet did that, all right.
24 years of eating like, well, like a geek is not good.
Someone who's got a history of gallbladder issues.
You showed up and disappointed me.
I have to say you pulled out a MacBook.
Better explain this.
That case shows up in any pictures.
Yeah, that MacBook was my sister.
She bought it in 2007.
She bought a new one month or so ago.
And I coerced her into giving this one to me.
I'm like, hey, I'm letting you live in my house.
Can I have your discarded computer
that you were going to donate to charity?
Can the charity be me?
But you saved it with Arch Linux.
Of course, everybody should put Arch Linux on a Mac.
On everything.
I'm running it on my toaster.
I'm running it on my desktop.
I'm running it on my netbook.
I'm running on my Raspberry Pi.
And now I'm running it on my MacBook.
So did you look at the schedule?
You got some.
Oh, briefly.
You don't have to do it.
Wow, we're talking.
Oh, what's all later?
Ah, briefly.
I will catch you after some talks.
I'll talk more.
Yeah.
OK.
Hey, how's it going?
Good.
How are you?
Good.
Do you wish any please?
Phil Durbin.
Phil, how are you liking NELF 2014 so far?
It's really good.
I went to that first talk that was about identity management.
They talked a lot about SSD.
I think that's the right number of S's.
That's a piece of open source software
that Red Hat seems to be working on.
Cool.
And that was the only talk you've been to so far?
Yep, that was the first talk.
Cool.
Now, do you work in the IT field at all?
Yeah, I do.
I work on an open source application called Dataverse.
It's mostly for academics.
It's a place for them to upload data.
Often, these professors have a place.
They know exactly where to put their paper.
But then they'll have data associated with the paper.
And they think, well, should I put it on my website?
Where should I put this thing?
And so this is a way to archive the data.
And you get a unique identifier for the data.
So that people can cite the data, remix the data, things
like that.
Excellent, excellent.
How long have you been working on that?
I've been working on the team for a little over a year.
But the product itself, under the name Dataverse,
goes back to 2006.
Before that, it was called Virtual Data Center.
And before that, it had different names.
So it's probably has about 20 years of thought
going into what this thing is.
Wow, it's pretty incredible that you
must be on version 120 by now.
It was like something like that.
Yeah, it's interesting.
We're actually in the middle of a big rewrite.
We're calling this new version Dataverse 4.0.
Awesome, awesome.
And you were here last year.
I remember seeing you here last year.
And we talked last year and had some beers.
Right, yeah.
Last year was the first milk I went to.
And yeah, it's funny.
I think I mentioned a little bit ago
that after the conference, I noticed
there's a channel on free node called Northeast Linux Fest.
And I popped in.
I didn't start the channel, but I'm like, oh, this is cool.
And I sent my little logging bot in there
and started logging it.
And a couple people showed up.
And I have been chatting with them now again.
But I've been logging that channel for about a year now.
It's just kind of on the side.
It doesn't bother me.
It just sort of sits there.
But it'd be cool to get some more community input
around this festival, some kind of forum or a mailing list
or something.
I think that's kind of one thing I'm looking for
is a way for all of us to connect when it's not
the actual fest going on.
Little more community in our community.
Yeah, I like a little community in my community, sure.
Yeah, yeah.
And you also suggested, which I thought was a great suggestion,
that we might want to rewrite just a little bit
of the HPR outro and remind people
that head to the comments section for each of the episodes,
too.
I thought that was a great idea.
Right.
Well, I had mentioned that I listened to that episode
where you talk to John O'Anneck.
And you mentioned that.
Oh, there are a lot of comments on that episode.
And I'm like, comments, what do you mean comments?
I didn't even realize.
Because I just didn't my pod catcher
downloading episodes.
I never really go to the HPR website.
So I didn't realize that comments were going on there.
But you were saying that maybe there
could be a place not specific to an individual episode
more about HPR in general, a place where people could talk.
Yeah, yeah, I've asked for a forum for years.
And I just don't, I mean, if I could write one, I would.
If I was a cis admin, I just add it and do it.
Because we're pretty much, it seems like at HPR,
if you want to do something, just go ahead and do it.
And if I could, I would.
And I don't feel it's, I think it's
too important a place for me to go experimenting
and learn to do my first one there.
But yeah, I absolutely would love a forum, but yeah.
Well, at least we have the comments for now.
This seems like a good outlet for a lot of people.
Yeah, it is for sure.
So you're going to have a good day.
What talks are you looking forward to?
I'm not even sure.
That one I was really interested in because I'm working a lot
in this sort of identity management space right now.
Oh, I know what there's one about Docker
that I definitely want to check out.
I've been using Vagrant for a couple of years.
And I like that a lot.
But people keep telling me about Docker.
And that's the one I want to check out next.
What's the use case for those?
So Vagrant is great for managing.
For me, I use a virtual box.
Managing virtual machines on your laptop.
You want to spin up a virtual machine that
has certain software installed and configured in a certain way.
So I just set this up.
I mentioned Dataverse as a software I work on.
Just set up a Vagrant environment for Dataverse
so that it installs all the dependencies
that I need to run the application.
It's a Java-based application.
And we run it on top of Glassfish,
using Solar, and they're, too.
So the idea is that you just type Vagrant space up.
And then you get this VM, I'm using CentOS.
And all the stuff's already installed.
And then you can just go to a high port
and just see the app running right there in the VM
on your laptop.
Oh, that's cool.
So that's Vagrant.
And then Docker, I guess, takes it to the next level somehow.
I don't know.
I've got people yelling at me, like,
why aren't you not using Docker yet?
But it's new.
And I don't know.
I'm here to learn about things like Docker.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, right now I'm getting my job done.
And I totally get it.
No, that sounds cool, though.
And that's great.
As far as conference is going and checking out
the cool new thing that you'd only be able to learn
by trial and error and maybe have a problem with it.
So you go to their forum and it takes a day and a half
to get an answer.
When you're here, you get to talk to someone who
knows what they're doing.
And you go, OK, hey, my use case, I need X, Y, Z.
What can I do for that?
And you always get great feedback.
And it's fun, too, to watch when the presenter gets a question
that he wasn't expecting.
He's got to figure it out on the fly.
You may get a new feature in the next rev of the software
for it.
It's always fun to see something like that happen.
Yeah, I don't want to say that I was trolling the speaker
of that first talk I went to.
I wanted to.
He was a great guy and I got his business card.
He works for Red Hat.
And I do feel like I was getting information that was fresh
that I hadn't heard before.
And specifically, I'm working in this Shibleth space.
And everyone talks about this Apache module called ModShib.
But he's saying, oh, Red Hat, look at that.
But they're instead shipping a different Apache module
called ModOffMellon.
And I had never even heard of this thing.
So it was great to be at the talk, get this kind of information.
I probably wouldn't have stumped across quickly, otherwise.
Now I have his business cards.
I'll go harass him a little more offline.
Cool.
Cool.
All right, man, we'll enjoy the conference.
Thank you for talking with us.
Oh, thanks.
Great talking to you.
Yeah, was there anything else you wanted to pimp here?
Well, you're here, a website you want to promote or anything?
I guess if you do want to check out Dataverse,
that's the project I work on.
Our website is TheData.org.
We're also on GitHub.
It's from IQSS.
So it's github.com slash IQSS.
That's the Institute for Quantitative Social Science.
Excellent.
Thanks a lot, man.
Thanks.
Hello, I'm Manuel Abil, and I'm here with Mark.
Do you have a Nick online?
MK Coles.
OK, because I recall you.
You said three years now, and I guess you won't end.
I remember this guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So any talks you're here to see or something?
I just come every year and figured out when I get here.
Yeah, are you close to here?
I was closer, and now I used to live in Massachusetts
and I'm up in New Hampshire.
So it's a little bit of a drive, but did you make it
to the Worcester ones?
So you've been to the five?
Yes, I went to the one in Worcester,
and then the one in Harvard last year, the two days
in Harvard last year.
OK, that was last year.
See?
I asked you if you didn't HPR, and now you just did one.
OK, you're on the board.
And if it keeps going, next year I'll be back again.
OK, and then I'll interview.
Or you should do an episode in between then, and now,
I think, if I find a good topic, I will try to do one.
No pressure, I'll just give it your time.
I know, man.
All right, good to talk to you.
Thank you.
Hey, it's Poki at the Northeast Linux Fest again,
and I am here with beautiful cabbage, Spaceman.
Spaceman, nice name.
Nice to meet you, Pete.
How are you enjoying the Fest so far?
It's great so far, man.
Everyone seems really, really nice.
Talks are interesting, and you've pretty well organized
so far.
Excellent, excellent.
What talks have you been to?
I checked out the open source licensing one, Track One,
and also the integrating Linux with Active Directory
by Dimitri, also on Track One.
Right on, right on.
Yeah.
Doggy paddled through that one.
I don't know much about Active Directory,
I try and chew off things bigger than my head, so.
That's actually a good plan.
And what about the licensing track?
Now, I didn't even look at the program,
and now I'm sad to have missed that one.
How did that go?
It was good.
There was actually a guy from Red Hat, too,
that gave a lot of good information from the crowd.
It was interesting.
I didn't know much about licensing,
but it seems like, at this point in time,
the licensing development is matured to a point where almost
everything seems to be covered by one license or another one,
and I find some really good resources on how to walk yourself
through picking which one is right for you,
and integrating it into your own project.
Right, right.
Was it mostly about software licensing?
Or was there creative common stuff, too?
They did a little bit on creative commons,
but it's basically just like a general overview of how
to decide which license is best for you,
depending on what your project needs are, what your goals are,
and what your plans are for the next few years.
Excellent, excellent.
Do you work in the IT field?
Not yet.
I'm a woodworker.
Trying to change careers.
Some of the school right now with UMass online.
Right on.
Are you a Finnish carpenter?
Yeah, we do a lot of doors and windows.
And it's been interesting for the last 10 years,
but I'm ready for a change.
And I've been playing around with computers for so long
that figure, why don't I just go into this?
Seems really interesting.
Right on.
And you said you're new to Linux?
About two years ago, I started tinkering with Linux.
And it's been fantastic.
The community has just completely blown me away
with how friendly they are and how open they are.
So it's been awesome, yeah.
Yeah, I think I got involved with Linux,
maybe starting in early 07 or maybe in late 07.
And I thought the same thing.
But a lot of the old school guys
talk about how unfriendly the community, at least used to be.
Maybe it used to be, and I've never really experienced that.
So it's interesting that you say that too.
Are you still distro-hopping?
Or have you settled down on a distro you like?
For the last year, I've pretty much stuck to crunching.
It's light.
It's easy.
I was using an old laptop for a while,
and it couldn't really run many to heavier ones for a while.
But I don't know.
I always have my foot outside of the wheel.
I heard crunch bang.
He's came right from Kornomano.
Sorry.
Sticks to get on the beat.
Yeah, I've been in my bill online, so I didn't mean to button.
Is this a joint we're having a contest?
We can two interviews to five, is it?
No, this one's mine.
All right, I'll get out of it.
It's two to five.
Yeah, no, it's going to say we know Kornomano
and Bill's got the crunch bang stickers.
It's going right on my laptop, man.
Yeah, right on.
And we've got some HPR stickers if you're interested in those, too.
Definitely, definitely.
Sorry, my brain's still working off of three hours of sleep
and not enough coffee, so.
Yeah, me, too.
Are you involved with anything online with open source?
Yeah, I'm still in programming.
I'm still in programming.
I just finished a survey course in Pearl, PHP, and Python,
and my skills are minimal at best right now.
So I'd love to.
As soon as I get some chops, I'd like
to join some open source project just to keep learning.
I mean, everyone seems to be like, for your accept,
I just need to find the right program to dive into and join up.
Yeah, what do you have any idea like what you're looking for?
What kind of software you'd like to work on?
I mean, I've taken a handful of computer site courses
that are just kind of broad range
and to kind of figure out what I feel more comfortable with.
So I really don't know right now.
It was my first time actually meeting people from the online
world in podcasts and forums and things like that.
So I figure as a like develop relationship,
so I'll find good people to work with.
And that'll lead me towards certain projects I figure, you know?
Yeah, definitely.
There's good people everywhere.
It sure is.
Is there anything else in the conference
that you're looking forward to, any tracks
or anybody you're looking to meet or anything?
You know what, I'm going to draw on a blank right now.
There's definitely a bunch of things.
So I figure I'll just see how the day goes.
Right on.
Well, I like the attitude.
Definitely go to positive attitude going at it.
It's great so far.
It's been fantastic.
Excellent.
Well, thanks so much for talking.
Is there anything you wanted to plug while you're here
or anything you're excited about?
I was hoping to have my website like up and running
with at least like one project live,
but I just couldn't get it done this week.
Well, this may not go up for a week or two,
and it'll be around forever.
So as long as you've registered with me
and go ahead and plug your website.
SpacemanDev.com.
And you should have something up within a week or so.
Right on.
Cool.
Well, thanks for your time.
Have a great conference.
Thanks.
Hello, it's NYU Bill, and I'm here with Bruce
who helped organize NELF.
Yes, actually, as much of it as we possibly could.
I mean, did it go smooth?
Oh, my God.
You know, it was the tale of, whoa.
All right, well, basically, John and I,
Johnathan and I've been working on venues.
And for the last couple of years,
we've tried to make a couple of places
our permanent home.
And like anything else to tell you the truth,
I wasn't sure we'd get this one off the ground this year
because we had venues changed three times on us.
We'd been working with the fine folks
over at the Boston Linux users.
And you know, they've been at MIT for years, years.
I mean, probably 30 plus years.
And so, you know, they said, you know,
why don't you guys store the fest here?
And we thought, oh, this is an ideal place for it.
We can certainly make that happen.
So anyway, time had gone on.
And so, you know, around September,
Johnathan goes, you know, we do as an April,
maybe we should start saying, you know,
what's going on, let's check in on it.
So they go, oh, we sub into the talk.
So it's like, all right, the next round, you know,
we're getting into October.
Now, I've got other things I'm doing right now,
but I figured you might have been deep
into fixing your house.
Oh, my God.
So you must have been busy.
Oh, big time.
So anyway, so after that rolled around,
I said, you know, let's check in on these guys and see again.
And so they go, yeah, you know, we sub into all this,
but I think we're good to go.
So Johnathan started to work on the speakers.
And then November rolls around is like the same deal.
You know, we've submitted the paperwork,
submitted the paperwork.
December, they say, well, we've had a problem,
but I think we can work our way around it.
It's like, okay, fine.
So January is on us, and we're now just four months away.
And so bottom line is that they wait until the very end
of January to say, well, we were denied,
but we're going to try something else,
and that was the last we heard of it.
This is MIT.
MIT.
Oh, goodness.
Yeah, so anyway, sorry we're shutting the door.
Yeah, you guys can walk that way.
And then so we ended up at Harvard next to see if maybe,
I mean, it's my own backyard.
So I figured this should be an easy one.
Was there last year that worked out good?
Yep.
And so anyway, bottom line is we go in there.
You know, I made the, you know, the verbal contract,
and you know, they told us everything
that we were good to go with.
And then we find out that the cost started coming in,
the person I've been working with, they've been fired.
Oh, no.
And so not only was he fired, but it seems
that maybe he made some deals that probably shouldn't
have happened.
But I can't go any further than that
because there's some other issues around that as well.
We're about hackers.
We can figure that out.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
So bottom line is that, you know, they gave us
the new updated bill, which was twice the amount
that we thought it was going to be.
And as soon as I told Jonathan that,
he goes, yeah, I plan B.
Oh, they pretty sure.
Yeah.
So anyway, bottom line is that he found out
that the place that, you know, was providing the hotel space
for the Linux space actually had conference rooms.
So at the very last minute, he made that happen
and we started to get people in.
We actually have a good turnout today.
So it's much better than what I expected,
but watching from the outside, I'm wondering,
is it going to happen?
So it sounds like it was happening on the inside,
a little bit like that.
Oh, you know, hanging by your nails.
Well, you know, it was a lot of gnashing of teeth
and things that didn't have to happen.
And I think the bottom line is that, given the fact
that we're dedicated, after this event is done,
we're going to find a permanent home because this is
for the birds, you know, just getting
people to, you know, go by the seat of their pants on this
and, you know, it just, it doesn't do anybody,
any favors, you know.
And I'm really excited that people showed up today,
but I wouldn't have held it against them if they didn't.
It was, it was a tough go.
Yeah.
It's, but there is demand for it.
They did show up here.
Yeah, we all are.
So yeah.
In fact, Mad Dog was here almost right away.
Yeah.
He's a regular.
I've seen him every year.
So he's a fun guy.
I'm excited about that, you know.
And it's good to see people coming from all over, you know?
Yeah.
You know, the door made the trip up from Maryland, you know,
traces here this year from Texas.
I mean, you know, we're really excited.
I'm glad they could make the trip up, you know?
But, you know, all things aside, you know, I think, you know,
permanent home is our only goal after this year.
Nice.
Because, yeah, this stuff is for the birds.
And, you know, it sucks not having a permanent home.
Bottom line, bottom line.
So, you know, so we'll hope for the best.
So I'll see you next year.
And the permanent home.
Exactly.
Thanks for explaining it.
Because like I was just clicking on the web page every week, you know,
and what is going on?
What is going on?
I ended up in a hotel at Harvard Square.
And I'm like, what?
I was just getting on the subway.
Pop up, pop out.
So it didn't work out too bad.
So I'm like, well, I think that's the other thing that, you know,
we want to address this, make it a lot easier for everybody next year too.
So, you know, I'm glad that everybody showed up.
And, you know, like I said, permanent home next year.
That's our goal, you know?
That's very cool.
And I'm glad you guys make it here every year too, you know?
I'll be here next year too.
Nice.
Okay.
Thanks.
Bye, Bill.
Thanks.
Perfect.
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