hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2155.txt

Episode: 2155
Title: HPR2155: Ohio LinuxFest 2016
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2155/hpr2155.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 15:01:45

---

This is an HPR episode 2,155 entitled Ohio Linux Fest 2016.
It is hosted by AYUKA and is about 19 minutes long.
The summary is my experience of Ohio Linux Fest 2016.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
Get your web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
Hello, this is AYUKA, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode.
This time I want to talk about Ohio Linux Fest 2016, which I just got back from.
So I thought I would share some of my experiences with the rest of the Hacker Public Radio audience,
a few of which were probably there.
So one of the things that we had this year that was a very nice addition was a podcasters
table that Joe Heck had set this up originally and we had 51.50 was there from the Hacker
Public Radio group, also representing Linux lugcast.
We had door to door geek from the pod nuts network and Richard Hughes from the Linux
link tech show and there's probably some others I didn't necessarily catch everyone's name.
But it was nice to have a table just for tech podcasters and swag that was being handed
out, stickers, cups, what have you.
So it was very nice and you may hear more about that from 51.50 because he was the one
representing Hacker Public Radio there, I wasn't, because I was doing other things.
So the Ohio Linux Fest is generally a two day event.
So the first day they have, and that would, the first day was Friday, October 7th, and
there were two things going on.
One of them was a professional training, what they call the Ohio Linux Fest Institute,
and that gives you the opportunity to get training in various tech subjects from professionals
and usually it's a few hundred dollars to get into that.
The same time that's going on, there's something they call the early penguins track and all
that means is that this is another track of talks that happens a day earlier than the
main event of Saturday.
So it's not so much that it's for beginners.
I mean, we had things like real world integration with CF engine, what's happening with open
NMS, brief introduction to GNU screen.
I heard something good about devs are from Mars, Ops are from Venus, Michael Lucas on
introducing ZFS and so on.
So there were some, some pretty good talks there.
I was driving down from Michigan, so I took Friday off from work, drove down, and it was
afternoon by the time I got there.
But I was in time for the opening keynote and that was Catherine Devlin.
And Catherine Devlin is someone who might be well known to people in the Python community
where she's very active.
But her talk was about hacking bureaucracy with something called 18F.
And 18F is an interesting thing, it is a government program.
And what they were looking at is that in the private sector, private industry, you can
move fast, you can do agile, you can spin things up in the cloud and so on.
And that tends to be stuff that the government doesn't really know anything about and the
government has all this bureaucracy and everything is civil service and what have you.
So the way 18F was set up is it's people from private industry who come in as essentially
temporary workers, I talked to Catherine about this and apparently you can come in for
two years and then get renewed for an additional two years and then you have to leave because
otherwise you start becoming subject to civil service and all of that kind of stuff.
So these are all, I wouldn't call them volunteers exactly, they're getting a salary but they're
only there sort of as a temporary public service kind of thing.
So she shared a lot of the things that they're doing and then there was a talk the next
day by one of her colleagues, Stephen Harms, who was sharing with us some of the cloud-related
stuff that they're doing and it was a talk called cloud.gov automated scalable, resilient
and powered by Linux.
So they're starting to introduce a lot of these features of the startup world into government
and helping to make it more efficient.
Catherine, it was very easy to tell listening to her was just terribly excited by this and
when I talked to her afterwards, she was kind of regretful about the fact that she was
going to have to leave at some point and probably in about two years because I believe
she said she started in 2014 and the longest you can stay is a total of four years.
So she's coming to the end on that.
After that there was a kind of a happy hour party sponsored by Oracle and had some drinks
and some food and what have you and that was done in the vendor room.
So you got to snack and get a beer and walk around and take a look at all the vendor
tables and so it was Oracle, IBM, Nagios, who was one of the sponsors.
This is where the hacker public radio and all of the other podcasters had their table.
There was an Ubuntu table and a company called Cover My Meds, which is kind of an interesting
thing.
I got to talk to them about what they do and that involves basically what they do is try
and set things up if you have prescriptions and in the United States there's this whole
thing about if you want to get a prescription filled that has to be authorized by the insurance
company first.
So they basically handle a lot of that bureaucracy for you and if you're in a civilized country
you don't really worry about that stuff.
So the next day, Saturday, I had a very nice breakfast with Mary Tomich from the Sunday
Morning Linux review and her partner and then went to the opening keynote and this was
by Ethan Galstad, who is the founder, entrepreneur, etc. of Nagios and so he was telling the whole
story about how he had started that company, lessons he had learned, what kinds of things
you would want to keep in mind if you wanted to become an entrepreneur and get involved
in starting up a company or some other kind of organization.
So it was a very interesting talk.
After that I wandered back into the vendor room similar and got a chance to talk to a
few more people, Richard Hughes from the Linux link tech show was there and I was happy
because I know he lives in Florida and we've had this hurricane so I had actually sent
an inquiry, you know, are you okay kind of thing and so seeing him there kind of answered
that question.
I talked to him and Joel McLaughlin, who is also from the Linux link tech show and some
of the other folks, then I went to a very interesting talk called Improving Computer Science
education with FOSS style projects by Roberto Sanchez.
So he's teaching computer science and he's doing it with obviously some good industry experience
as a programmer and he was talking about how he uses projects and he sets the projects
up in a way that is familiar to open source people and uses similar kinds of tools so
that his students get some experience.
He said a lot of times computer science classes is just sit there and code something and
he pointed out that that's not how most people involved in development spend most of their
time.
So he was trying to teach them about GitHub and being able to do merges and pull requests
and collaborating with people using various online collaboration tools and even talked
about someone who's not even in his college and in a college in a different state who wanted
to get be a part of it.
He said, yeah, that's fine.
So we'll do everything with remote access tools.
Very inspiring talk and I loved hearing what he was doing.
And after lunch, I went to the cloud.gov thing that I had mentioned previously and this
was a little more technical because he was talking about specifically what are the technologies
they use.
How do you set up a cloud thing in the government?
And they basically have a contract with Amazon so they're using the Amazon cloud that
you might use if you were a private company and talked about the different technologies
that they use.
Then I went to a talk by Brian Sherwin about open source software at Microsoft.
I know that that is for some people pretty controversial.
There was one fellow in the presentation was obviously very hostile to the whole thing.
But the way I look at it, trust but verify.
So I assume Microsoft is going to do whatever is in their corporate best interest.
And they're going to do whatever is going to make them the most money.
And basically they have a cloud environment called Azure and they were saying, hey, a pretty
high proportion of our customers want to be able to run Linux on that.
And they actually, it was very interesting he was talking about they have a partnership
with Red Hat and that includes having some Red Hat employees that are stationed at the
Microsoft campus at Redmond.
And how if you're running Red Hat in the Azure cloud, anytime you open up a support ticket,
it automatically opens up with both Red Hat and Microsoft and instead of pointing fingers
at each other and saying, no, no, this is the other guy's problem, they take ownership
of the problem.
So it was an interesting talk I was glad I went.
After that was my turn to give a talk.
And it was one that I've recorded for hacker public radio, password best practices in the
last pass hack.
It's a good thing I've given it before and recorded it for hacker public radio and everything
else because my computer had a problem.
And that is that the video just refused to function.
So that there was nothing being projected on the screen and it's like, okay, what am I
going to do?
I've got a talk to give.
So I just said to heck with the slides and I gave the talk and it seemed to work out
pretty well.
So all's well that ends well on that.
And then right after that, Tony Beamos from the Sunday Morning Linux review did a talk
on offensive security and countermeasures using Cali Linux and this was very much a demonstration.
And in fact, one of the things he did was he brought in his own router and set up a little
network inside the room, not connected to the internet or any other network.
It was isolated but several of it, myself included, I had obviously my laptop with me.
I logged into it and three or four other people logged into his little network and then he
was able to demonstrate using NMAP and what kinds of results he was getting and how he
could ask questions about the nature of the computer and the operating system, et cetera
and how those things work.
And then he also gave a demonstration using his own Android phone of how you can put an
exploit onto an Android phone if you can get someone to run the APK file that you've created.
I took a break after that and I had my computer with me and it's a big heavy bag with all
of my stuff so I took it back to the room.
But I got back for the closing keynote which was a lot of fun, democratization of invention
with Joe and Lily Bourne.
Now Joe Bourne was someone who first came to the attention of a lot of us for a device
called Neuros which is a multimedia player and there were several different versions of
it.
There's one called Neuros OSD which I have.
Well, you know, at a certain point that didn't really work out very well.
He's now with a company called Iowa but what was most fascinating, Lily is his daughter.
And a 14 year old girl and it was interesting because he was talking about how at one point
she was so shy she wouldn't even talk to the waiter in her restaurant if she had to order
food, someone else had to order it for her.
You wouldn't believe it looking at her now because she was just bouncing all over the
room and it was an interesting story she had to tell.
It started with her grandfather having Parkinson's disease and one of his problems was when
he got a drink he'd tend to spill it.
And so, you know, as a seven year old she sketched out an idea of a cup with three legs.
Three legs get just ability, right?
Well that was just the start.
You know, her father being someone who was an entrepreneur who knew something about business
was able to say, well, you know, what do you want to do with this?
And so they initially did a Kickstarter and got the device, this cup and they called
it the kangaroo cup.
And the idea is a kangaroo has three points stability because it's not only two feet
but the tail provides stability and so they wanted to suggest the three points stability.
And they did up, like I think it was 1,500 of these cups that the Kickstarter got them.
Did that run and shipped all of those out?
And then you know, started to get more inquiries and started looking into other things.
And finally ended up going with 3D printing, making it out of plastic.
But you know, various things started to happen.
You know, the media started to find out, you know, what is this young girl doing, creating
this product and getting it out there?
Well, long story short, she gets invited to the White House.
She meets the president, she gets to meet Bill Nye, the science guy and so it was just
absolutely wonderful presentation and probably all of you would have enjoyed it if you
had been there, but I was there.
So I'm going to share that part with you.
And then finally there was an after party sponsored by Nagios, who was, you know, we had the
founder of Nagios as a keynote speaker, they were a sponsor for Ohio Linux Fest.
So you know, it's a great company with a great story.
And they were giving out t-shirts that said, the only people who monitor more than us as
the NSA, something like that.
So it was nice and so that the after party was a chance to spend some time with friends.
So I spent a fair amount of time with my fellow podcasters with 5150, door to door geek, Richard
Hughes and some other folks.
But I also got a chance to wander around the room and chat with various people and of
course, as in my capacity as the tech track programmer for PenguinCon, I was, you know,
lining up some possible speakers for that and doing a little work to get some leads.
So that was Ohio Linux Fest 2016.
I had a great time, I hope I can get back next year.
It remains to be seen.
It depends on what dates they pick and whether I have a conflict, but I've already got an
idea of a presentation that I'd like to put together and give if everything works out.
So this is Ahuka signing off for Hacker Public Radio and reminding you as always to support
free software.
Bye-bye.
You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org.
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday.
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast and click on our contributing to find out
how easy it really is, Hacker Public Radio was founded by the digital dog pound and the
Infonomicom Computer Club and is part of the binary revolution at binrev.com.
If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment
on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released on the creative comments, attribution,
share a light, free.or license.