hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1790.txt

Episode: 1790
Title: HPR1790: Penguicon 2015 Report
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1790/hpr1790.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:21:25

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This is HPR episode 1,790 entitled, Penguin 2015 Report.
It is hosted by Huka and is about 14 minutes long.
The summary is, Penguin 2015 happened on April 24, 26, 2015 in Southfield, Michigan.
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Hello, this is Huka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode.
What I want to do this time is give you a report.
My report is going to be on Penguin 2015, which just wrapped up a couple of weeks ago.
It was a great success and I have to say far more happened than I could have been a part
of.
We had about 500 hours of programming and even my track, which was the tech track, had 100 hours
of content.
So what I'm going to report on is my own diary of my particular experience of Penguin
2015.
Each person would have had their own experience based on the events, panels and talks they
chose to attend, but with this much programming, there was plenty for everyone to enjoy.
And since most of the team that put this together is coming back for another year and we have
managed to add some more people, I think next year can be even better.
So on Friday, April 24th, I left my office in Dearborn, Michigan, grabbed dinner and then
checked in at the event registration desk.
I arrived in time for the official opening ceremony at 6 p.m.
Of course there were talks and events scheduled even earlier on Friday, because with 500 hours
of stuff to fit in, you use every possible slot.
And I was happy to get going at around 6 p.m.
These opening ceremonies are usually about introducing the guests of honor, advertising
events of the upcoming weekend and so on.
And right after the opening, we had the first of our two keynotes, Errol Balken.
He's the designer and co-founder of a place called IND.i.e.
And there's a link in the show notes, although I've just basically told you the domain name
haven't I?
Now he's very passionate about security and privacy.
And his keynote focused on the dangers posed by companies like Google and Facebook, who
know everything about us.
One of the things he's trying to do is to create alternatives that really do protect our
privacy.
Now Errol was followed by our second keynoteer, Bruce Schneier, and if you had listened
to my recordings previously, you know I'm a big fan of Bruce.
So this is something I had really been looking forward to, and Bruce's talk fit in very
well with what Errol was talking about.
So it was a really good one to punch that they put together here.
Now Bruce just published a book called Data and Goliath, linked to Amazon in the show notes,
which explores the problems of mammoth data collection, which is happening every moment.
Bruce referred to data as the pollution problem of the 21st century.
This becomes an interesting problem, because as he noted, similarly to Errol, the biggest
source of data collection is private companies, and stopping them might require government
action.
And the problem with that is that governments are generally very happy to have companies
do their data collection for them.
Bruce thinks this can be resolved with the right legislation, but noted futurist and science
fiction author David Brinn disagrees, and says that the only thing that can work is radical
openness, where ordinary people can look at the government just as much as the government
looks at us.
Now I lean work to Dr. Brinn's view myself, but no matter which side you come down on,
this is a big deal for all of us.
Now as part of having Bruce there, we arranged to have copies of his book, which he kindly
signed for anyone who wanted one.
Now when our con chair said he had arranged to have 25 books on hand, he immediately said
double the order.
That was a good thing.
I talked to the con chair afterwards.
We sold all the six copies, and he said, thank God you got me to up the order.
We angered a whole bunch of people otherwise.
So that was very successful.
Now while the book signing was going on, I was introduced to 5150, who came out from Kansas
to see what Penguin Con was all about.
I have to admit, I was so focused on getting my book and getting it signed.
I didn't really give him as much attention as I might have, but fortunately I did have
some more opportunities over the weekend.
Now he did try to get an interview with Bruce for Hacker Public Radio, but unfortunately
Bruce could only be at Penguin Con for Friday evening, so there really wasn't time to do
all of that, but possibly 50 found something else that he will be able to upload at some
point.
Now after that, I went to a panel on Welcome to Night Vale, and I've got another link
in the show notes here.
That's a semi-monthly podcast that I absolutely love.
I recommended to anyone who is interested in an offbeat podcast about a fictional town
that has been described as Stephen King meets Lake Wolfgang.
But about halfway through this panel I could tell, you know, I was running out of gas.
It was Friday night after a full week of work, so it was time to go home.
So Saturday morning, I started off by moderating a panel on getting involved in the open-source
community.
On the panel, I had Ruth Ceeley and Tom Callaway from Red Hat, and you may remember Ruth
Ceeley because she did a keynote at Ohio Linux Fest that I uploaded to Hacker Public Radio
some months ago.
Then I had Emily Garnier from the Ganon Project, awesome lady, who I'd love to get involved
in these things, and William A. Row from the Apache Project.
So you know, it was fun to have all of these people sharing their experiences, and in
particular to point out that most open-source projects need a lot more help than just coders.
So if anyone wants to contribute, there's plenty of ways.
For my part, I noted I have done things like review documentation for the LibreOffice Project,
which really means taking a chapter and going through it with the software open in front
of me and just verifying that each instruction works the way it says, it does, and that
the instructions make sense.
That's something anyone can do, and lots of projects need people to do things as simple
as that.
After this, I had a nice hallway talk with Susan Sons, who does our crypto party each year.
She has lots of ideas of things we can do to improve, so I enjoy talking to her.
One thing we discuss that I definitely want to bring in next year is that she and Eric
Raymond are looking at some of the base plumbing software, as I call it, that we all depend
on, but which is maintained by one or two aging developers, and it kind of like what happened
to OpenSSL earlier, and they're working to develop some good support models and tackle
some of this.
So I really want to have them do some kind of a progress report and then update to everyone
next year at PenguinCon.
I went to a MariaDB talk by Colin Charles, a developer from the MariaDB team, who flew
in from Malaysia to tell us about what MariaDB is doing now.
Now this project forked off from mySQL as a result of Oracle taking ownership and then
as they so often do with open source projects, messing it up.
MariaDB is now the default choice on most Linux distros.
And by a happy coincidence, just about the time I heard about Colin joining us, I read
a post from my friend George Castro of canonical who talked about how MariaDB was now integrated
into their JuJu Cloud solution.
So I signed up George right away and turned this session into a two hour presentation incorporating
both MariaDB and JuJu.
So a lot of awesome cloud goodness here, but that was not all.
I followed this with a talk from Jennifer Marsman from Microsoft.
It was taking a little bit of a chance, but she knew this was an open source convention.
And therefore presented Azure and emphasized all of the open source software that was
ready to run on that platform.
Pulled bunch of different Linux distros, you know, Debian, CentOS, Sousa, etc., Hadoop,
Apache and Drupal, and so on.
So her talk was actually very well received.
I plan to invite her again next year.
And it was interesting that Mark Ram from canonical, whose George's boss was there and
casually dropped the fact that Microsoft is actually their best partner for the JuJu Cloud
stuff.
JuJu is a way of managing things in the cloud.
They like working with Microsoft because apparently the Microsoft people are the most responsive
when there's an issue.
So it's worth knowing.
Now after this was my second panel, this time on Creative Destruction, Mark Haynes put
this together.
And when he asked me if I knew any economists, I decided I should be one of the participants.
After all, as some view may recall, I was a professor of economics at one point.
So for my part, I looked at the origin of the term as used by Joseph Schumpeter in his
book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, and some of the implications of it.
There were others looking at ecology, biology, and other sciences who were on this panel.
So I actually participated in something on the science track, which was a first for me.
But after that, I left the con to get home because my wife and I had tickets for the symphony
and I try not to let anything keep me away from that, particularly when Mahler is on
the program.
They did the Mahler 5th symphony.
Although to be fair to the Ann Arbor symphony, they do an excellent job in most things.
That's one of the reasons I never want to miss them.
So Sunday, up early, because I had to get there in time for the recording of the Sunday
Morning Linux review, they always do a live recording at Penguin Con.
And this year, 50-150 was a guest on the show.
This one well is always, and I won bragging rights for the trivia quiz, which took the
place of Mary's usual, Is it a live feature?
Then I went to the What's New in KDE 5 talk, but unfortunately, Ryan had to take his wife
to the hospital.
So we didn't have that talk.
We did have some discussion among ourselves in the room for a while.
I did check later, and Ryan's wife Emily seemed to be doing fine, which I'm very happy
to hear.
Then I decided to get some breakfast at the buffet in the hotel.
Next up was Mary Tomuch's talk, Swimming with Dolphin.
Dolphin is the KDE File Manager, and I've been looking forward to this talk since both
Mary and I are KDE users.
And she did not disappoint.
It was a great talk, and I learned a lot.
As a result, I made a commitment to try using Dolphin.
Up until now, I'm strictly a crusader, user.
But give it a shot.
If I can do everything I need to do there, I may switch, or I may not.
Then I went to one of the science fiction panels called Science Fiction is Now Science Reality.
This panel had Carl Schrader, a previous guest of honor.
He knew it's of Gokker, who was one of our guests of honor this year.
And Charlie Jane Anders from I-09, who was also a guest of honor this year.
Now we had a very interesting discussion about where science and technology are taking
us, and even managed to bring in some optimism.
I'm one of those people who is just sick to death of reading about dystopias, and sometimes
it seems like all current science fiction is nothing but dystopias.
I read Science Fiction as a kid, and it was all about how awesome the future would be,
and that's what I like reading about.
Because I think the future really is awesome.
Carl and I, by the way, had a very nice breakfast together on a Sunday morning at
Pangrokan a few years ago when he was the guest of honor.
And I was happy to renew this slight acquaintance.
He claims to remember me.
So after that, I went to Firewalls with PF Sense by Tom Lawrence.
Now I just met Tom earlier this year, and I am glad I was able to sign him up as a presenter.
He did a great job, and I had a number of people come up to me afterwards to say that that
was their favorite talk of the convention.
He really knows his stuff and did a very thorough job in the 50 minutes that we gave him.
And then after that Tony Beamis from the Sunday morning Linux review grabbed me, and
I joined the Sunday morning Linux review team to do a wrap up recording on what we saw
at Pangrokan 2015.
And then after that, it was on to the closing ceremonies which were liberally punctuated
by the firing of a T-shirt cannon.
Prizes were also awarded for best room party, volunteers were recognized, and so on.
So that was my personal experience of Pangrokan 2015.
I am already registered for next year, and I have made the commitment to stay on as the
TechTrack head.
So I'll try to do as good a job for next year.
I don't think we could handle any more content than we had.
But there were some things I am working on to bring some specific talks that I think
will attract people with a tech interest.
And I'm kind of excited about where that might go.
So with this little diary, I'm going to sign off now.
This is Ahuka reminding you as always to support FreeSoftware.
Bye-bye.
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