hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2275.txt

Episode: 2275
Title: HPR2275: Penguicon 2017
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2275/hpr2275.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 00:43:56

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This is HPR episode 2,275 entitled, Penguin 2017, and is part of the series, Penguin.
It is hosted by a huker, and in about 19 minutes long, and carrying a clean flag.
The summer is a look at the lineup for the 2017 event.
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Hello, this is a huker, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio, and another exciting episode
in our ongoing discussions.
What I want to do is talk a little bit about Penguin 2017, which is coming up.
In fact, it is going to be the end of this month, April 28th through 30th, in Southfield,
Michigan at the Western Hotel, which is where we've been the last few years.
I have the honor of being for the 4th, but final time, the head of the technology track,
which is a very important part, because the name Penguin Part comes from Linux and open
source, and we're looking at all sorts of open source technologies.
We've even started looking at some open hardware stuff, and we've got guests of honor and
all sorts of good stuff, and the other thing about Penguin is that it's also a science
fiction convention, and there can be some overlap there.
Every year we bring in guests of honor, and we've got a number of them this year.
The first one I want to mention is Ada Palmer.
Now Ada Palmer is a professor of history at the University of Chicago, among other things,
and she has also written her first book, A Novel, that just came out a couple of days
ago that it was nominated for a Hugo Award, so that's pretty darn good.
So I think that's definitely an interesting guest of honor.
Then the next one I want to mention is Cory Doctorow, and I would hope I don't really
have to tell the hacker public radio audience that much about it, but I'm going to talk
about him a little bit anyway.
He's co-editor of the Boeing Boeing weblog, Consultant of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
He's a visiting professor at the Open University in the UK, MIT Media Lab activist in residence.
He's a novelist and has written a number of very successful novels, and in fact is on
a book tour for the latest right now.
One of the nice things about Cory is that he walks the walk.
He's a great believer in getting rid of some of the copyright nonsense, so he has always
made his books available to people really free of charge.
You can go to his website and download an electronic copy of his book if you want, and it
prints perfectly legal.
He says, yes, if that's what you want to do, go ahead and do it.
In fact on his website, he says, if you really want to give me some money, the way to do
it is if you like the book, buy a physical copy and donate it to your library, something
like that.
Yet he does very well commercially, because I think many of us understand that if an artist
is giving you something of value, you want to be able to give something back to them.
He's also very much an activist in privacy, in defending yourself against an overreaching
state, and I'm really glad to have him as a guest of honor.
Then another guest of honor I want to mention is Sumana Hari Haraswara.
She's an open source contributor and has involved with Genome, Media Wiki, Genu Mailman,
and a number of other open source projects.
I think she's a very interesting person.
She's also a stand-up comedian, and she has co-edited the Thought Crime Experiments Enthology
in 2009, written for a number of online sources, so I think she's going to be a fun person
to have.
Then another guest of honor is Coraline Ada Emke, and Coraline is a speaker, writer,
open source advocate and technologist, and has 20 years experience in developing apps
for the web.
She is involved in promoting diversity and inclusivity and open source in the tech industry,
and was recognized for her work with a Ruby Hero Award in 2016.
She's the creator of the contributor covenant, the most popular open source code of conduct
in the world, with over 15,000 adoptions, so that's pretty good.
Then we've got a guy named Kevin MacLeod, who is a composer and copyright activist.
He offers royalty-free music through Creative Commons license on his site and compotec.com.
He believes that copyright is fundamentally broken and no longer serves the needs of
artists, creators, or audiences.
So he is an interesting fellow there, and you can see that we're really looking at people
who are challenging some of these notions of what copyright should be.
Then we've got Tommy Edison and Ben Churchill.
Now Tommy Edison is interesting, he has been blind since birth, and has a website called
Blind Film Critic, where he reviews movies.
Now think about that for a second.
He has obviously a very different perspective on what movies are, and has a great sense
of humor, as you might guess, from having a site called Blind Film Critic.
He's worked in radio for 25 years as a disc jockey, and he's also being joined by Ben
Churchill, who produces his shows and is a documentary filmmaker.
So we actually get two for the price of one there.
Then our hack of honor, and I assume hack or public radio will be interested in this,
the Tri-Corder Project.
So this is a project that is aiming to develop a handheld device.
Of course we all know the Tri-Corder is famous from Star Trek, and it was a medical device.
So this is an attempt to build something that is portable, accessible, and is going to
let us get this kind of information.
So I think it's a very interesting kind of project.
Then we have what are called featured guests.
So we have some in gaming, that's another one of the things we talked about, Angie Rush
and Les Orchard, are going to be talking about some gaming things.
We've got a food track, that's an interesting one, and we have a professor from Wayne State
who is interested in the evolution of the human diet, and is going to be, I think, serving
insects to people.
So if you've ever had an urge to find out what insects taste like, come to PenguinCon.
Then we've got a science track featured guest, which is a fellow named Greg Les.
He's a lab manager at UMEI Battery Fabrication, and he has a doctorate in chemistry from
the University of Michigan, and his work was featured on a recent episode of NOVA.
Of course we're in Michigan, so it's not surprising that we draw on the university faculties
from this area.
So those were some of the special guests.
Now I also mentioned that I'm in charge of the technology track, and you might wonder,
well, what are some of the things going on there?
What did you accept as proposals here, and it's a very interesting bunch of things?
First of all, one of the interesting signs of where life is going is I had a number of
proposals given to me by people from Microsoft.
Now, you might not think Microsoft is particularly known for open source.
This first came up back in 2015, as we were preparing for the PenguinCon that year.
I got an email from a lady who lives in the area, a woman named Jennifer Marsman.
A very nice email said, you know, I know that you're probably not used to dealing with
people from Microsoft, but would you be open to considering a talk, because Microsoft
is doing some things, and that your audience might be interested in, and we corresponded,
and I said, Jennifer, if you are going to be talking about open source as part of what
you're doing, you know, how Microsoft is working with open source, something like that,
then absolutely.
I'd be delighted to have you do that presentation.
So she came and did one about Microsoft's Azure Online Cloud environment, and for an
hour, went through all of the open source technology that has already set up to work in
that environment, a number of different Linux discos, programming languages, software of
various kinds.
So it was really, it was very interesting, and we had, in fact, one of the fellow named
Mark Ram from Canonical, the Ubuntu people, was there, and said that they really appreciated
working with Microsoft on this stuff, that they were a good partner.
So we're going to have Jennifer back, and apparently some of her colleagues found out
about it.
So we're going to have, we've got to, I think, three people from Microsoft who are doing
something on open source game development.
So I think that is going to be, you know, a lot of fun.
We're going to do, we have a talk on the future of net neutrality from a fellow Ed Platte
who's been here a number of years and is very much involved in, you know, citizen privacy
and things like that.
We're going to have a presentation called Late Night Tales, as a couple of people who,
if you're familiar with tales, it is a Linux distro that is oriented towards privacy
and security, particularly.
And so they're going to do kind of a late night workshop on that, which I think is going
to be absolutely fascinating.
We're going to have an introduction to deep learning with Google Tensor Flow.
We're going to have build your own satellite.
That should be absolutely fascinating, okay?
And you know, we're going to have, and this is, this is from Jennifer Marsman, a dance
with intelligent dragon drones.
So I think that should be absolutely fascinating.
We're going to have a few open BSD and BSD related things.
Michael Lucas, who literally has written the book, and if you've ever listened to Sunday
Morning Linux review, and oh, by the way, they're going to be here as they are every year
doing their program live.
But you may recall some discussion of Lucas's BSD book on there.
So he's doing a couple of talks, and that's, and we've got someone else doing a BSD thing.
We've got a senior Cicidmin panel, several people, Cicidmin's talking about, I guess we'll
see what they're going to talk about, that's the thing about panels.
We've got, do it yourself, internet of things.
And so this is an interesting, it's, it's a two-parter, starts with an hour presentation,
and then followed up with a workshop where you can put some of these things to use.
And that's going to be in the computer lab, and that's one of the things.
We now have a computer lab with a whole bunch of netbook computers, and we're able to
use that to help a lot of these presenters.
We've got someone from Microsoft talking about Bash, Ubuntu Bash on Windows.
So we're going to see about that.
Then we've got a group called Grand Circus, which is a local training place, and they
are coming in to do intro to coding workshops, they're going to do a couple of them, each
two hours long, great opportunity to learn about coding if you're new to it.
We're going to have a key signing session, that's going to be, you know, if you want to
get your public-private key pair signed by people, that's a good opportunity to do that.
We're going to have a thing on educational robotics, and that is going to be, again, it's
a demonstration, first of all, a demonstration, and a little presentation about it, followed
by a workshop, three hour long workshop, you can put some of this stuff into practice.
We've got more building a file server with Raspberry Pi, that should be fun.
Let's see, some of these others, industrial robotics the next 10 years, you know, Detroit
is a manufacturing place, there's a lot of robotics activity with the auto companies.
So you shouldn't be surprised that the industrial robotics is a big thing in this area.
I think a lot of people are going to find that an attractive presentation.
Scientific Linux, so we're going to have a couple of people come in and do a presentation
on what scientific Linux is, and I think that's going to be really good.
Having open source beyond the developer-centric solutions model, all right, I think that should
be a lot of fun, because that's one of the things I often think about is that, you know,
sometimes some of the people in the open source movement, I think it's entirely about
liberating programmers, and I don't always think about the people who need to use the software.
We're going to have a presentation open source hardware and Libre silicon, so I think
that's going to be a lot of fun, test-driven programming, and that should be good.
Network firewalls for fun and profit, and that's going to be by Tony Beamus from Sunday
Morning Linux Review, I think that should be good.
Python informatics to everyone by a professor at the University of Michigan, and we're going
to have a systems infrastructure as code, continuous delivery with octopus deploy, all right,
one on own your OS, and so this is about, you know, making sure you have a freedom-respecting
operating system. Freedom box, the Libre personal server, presentation on wearables, and let's
see, hacking the MK2 badge, and then software configuration management at the National Cancer
Institute. So, that's just, and that wasn't all of them. I was, you know, just pulling
out highlights as I went through the list, because I've got 91 hours of technology programming
without counting any of those guests of honor, and I know that, you know, Corey and the others
are going to be involved in that. So, that's a lot of stuff, and I'm really excited about it.
Now, I will, as I always do, give you a rundown of what I actually experienced after the fact,
but I think I can get this into the feed before the event and just kind of tantalize you into
making a little trip to Southeastern Michigan. So, I'm going to sign off for Hacker Public Radio,
and as always, remind you to support free software. Bye-bye.
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