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hpr_transcripts/hpr1473.txt

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+Episode: 1473
+Title: HPR1473: FOSDEM Discussion
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1473/hpr1473.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-10-18 03:45:53
+
+---
+
+MUSIC
+Hello everybody, this is Dave Morris for Hacker Public Radio. I'm here with my friend Tom
+Kane who and we went to Fozdem at the beginning of February and I thought it'd been interesting
+if we were to just get together and have a little chat about our experiences there.
+It's taken us more than a month to get to this point for various reasons, technical
+and just the busyness of life and so on, but that's so be it. Anyway, we'll give it a try.
+So Tom, you'd never been to Fozdem before, neither at I, what made you want to go?
+Well, a number of things. First of all, actually, it was great to know that you were going.
+That was a big thing for me because I know how knowledgeable you are in this area, but also
+the idea that thousands of young people who were interested in, and not actually I'll
+take that out, just thousands of people, but mostly young people who are interested
+in open source software, were going to the effort of getting together, but also that a university
+in Brussels was going to make available space for them to meet and make a whole event
+out of it, give over lecture rooms and walkways and places to sit up, food stalls and stands
+and all that stuff. It was very exciting to know it. There must have been done on that
+shoestring, actually. Yes, it didn't look like it cost a vast amount, but it was amazingly
+effective. It didn't have the flashing as a big international conferences, but then who
+wants to flash? Sometimes it's empty of other stuff when you go to quite a lot of conferences,
+don't you? Very, very sorts, but as a thing full of quality, I thought it was an amazing
+event. That's the other thing. The quality was very high, and given that it was so specialist,
+it was amazing that all these very interesting people had found out that it was even there
+and turned up and had made a big success of it all these years. That was a big indicator
+to me that this was something a little bit special, and these are people that I admire.
+These are people that I strove to be like when I was younger and still admire, but just
+for the way they are and what they do. It's quite astonishing how many people who were
+very active in the various areas were there. They were the developers who were really working
+on the stuff, which I had not fully appreciated before I went. I just flew over to Brussels
+from Edinburgh, and it was a fairly simple process for me, fairly early, because there's
+not many planes going over that way. I'd start off about, I don't know, about a bus
+two in the morning, but you had a far more interesting journey, of course, that you want
+to tell us about how you manage.
+Well, first of all, such a cheap skate. I was thinking this would be great to go see
+this first empty, and it just sounds wonderful and mad, but then I just thought, you've got
+to be careful. I was lucky enough to see a 16-year-old 99 cent return from my socks, so
+I just thought, you know, if you could get back for 17-year-olds, just find the cheapest
+one you could possibly get to go there. So, unfortunately, the cheapest way that I could
+find to go there involved taking a bus, first of all, from Edinburgh to London, and then
+from London right through to the centre of Brussels. The only unfortunate part about that
+was the first heart. And it was a nice bus, but there wasn't much sleep being done. It's
+an overnight, to the morning, to get to Victoria and London by about 6.30. Being in London
+is great though. Actually, I like that kind of travel. There's a bit of human thing going
+on, I can't help it. Caravan said, I think, going on. The people give me on the bus.
+And then what was lovely though, was when you went on the channel tunnel, you went through
+with the bus drives on to the great train, and it was underneath. And you get off the
+train, and then you drive through the flatlands to Belgium, and then right into Brussels.
+That would be interesting. It was lovely to see you. Lovely landscape, yeah.
+Yeah, it was. It only took 18 hours or so. It was so horrific. It was quite a mammoth,
+I'm just saying. Did I keep you on the bus when you're going on the train, or do you?
+Yeah, well, it's not a long journey on the train. But, yes, no, no, no, no, you can get
+off, and you can walk along even the outside of the bus, and you can use facilities there.
+Okay, no, I've been on that train, but just as a train passenger rather than a, I've seen
+these weird flatbed things that you can drive cars and lorries and stuff on to. Wow, that's
+quite something. You don't need pictures by any chance. I did. I'm actually a bit of some
+really interesting people on the bus. That was just wonderful. Yeah, that's another story.
+That's a whole other story, you have to tell us more about that some of the time.
+Anyway, so that was interesting. We were both there by the Friday with the actual event
+starting on the Saturday, which I thought was great, actually. I would certainly do that
+again, get there early, because Brussels is a city well worth wandering around. It's a beautiful
+place. Little chilly, you know, February, but still can't complain. The other thing that I noticed,
+the other thing I noted to myself was, if you ever go to Fosden, make sure you stay right
+through to the end, preferably leave the following day. I know both you and I left on the
+Sunday, actually before the event had finished, I think. There were quite a few interesting things
+going on into about five, six in the evening, and then possibly after, you know, you could have
+gone and helped dismantle it all if you had been so inclined. So staying to the end seemed
+like a desirable thing. If I ever go back, then I would definitely do that. I think there
+is something else that was special about that, is they got to know each other. The little
+links were taking us across these projects, and that was really nice, because what you get
+the impression that often we would be going back to places of work, where they might be a
+little bit isolated from a nesting place. Yes, it was a great melting pot, I think, for
+all sorts of meetings and discussions, and I think many, many of these sorts of conferences
+are, but particularly this one. So, yeah, so your overall impression was obviously very
+positive, then the venue was great, and obviously the content was brilliant. But what about
+talks? Was there anything? What in particular? Because you were, you would actually base yourself
+outside Brussels, hadn't you? So you were, you wouldn't be able to get into the earliest
+of talks in the morning. Yeah, no. Because they did start fairly, fairly sharp.
+You did, actually, they were pretty full-on. Well, I had had a couple of things that I was
+particularly interested in. One was the tricky area of using video and within the Linux
+environments and sound. I've got this little project of wanting to work with video
+and sound and record observations about people in the video for educational purposes, so
+that if you do a real-world link from a classroom to something out in the real world, you've
+got, if you record that, you've got, you've got an object to work with. And the young
+people who are involved in a link like that can actually talk about cognitive processes
+within it. So, for instance, if they're engaging with somebody about a question that's
+to do with politics or an understanding of an issue, that they recognize that that's
+going on at that point in the clip and in the teacher can see how deep their understanding
+is of what was going on and whether or not they've made some curricular requirements.
+So the use of video in classrooms right now is just, it's just a real future possibility
+for showing young people the world as it is and for them to be able to comment and question
+that world. And I was looking to find Linux tools that are robust rather than the commercial
+tools that you would use or add from right. And I think they are starting to come along,
+but I don't know that they're 100% safe just yet or robust, but it was brilliant to go
+and see the people, the work that people have been doing with video for Linux, for instance,
+stunning amount of work going on with that. The codex, the amalgamation of different software
+to cover every form of sound, every form of video, every possible output, beautiful work
+from people who are just interested in doing it as a challenge. And hopefully they can
+monetize it for themselves as well. And they do. But not these gigantic colossal sums of
+money that your large organisation is trying to make from people. Yeah, just very off-putting
+if you. Yeah. That's more educational. That's cool. It takes more budgets and so on.
+Yeah. Good, good. Okay. Well, I was going to just mention a few things that I'd been
+to see some of the specific talks. I had decided to go along to one of the keynotes. There
+was a keynote about an exercise which had been undertaken to look for style and grammar
+errors in the English Wikipedia, which you would think must be fairly challenging. Boy,
+did it sound like it was a challenge, but it seemed to have done some amazing work. Not
+all of which I understood I have to admit. It was, it was well worth listening to that
+particular talk. There was a few other keynotes that I would like to have gone to if it didn't
+get to, but I had, on my list of things to see, I wanted to go and see some of the post-gress
+database stuff and, naively, I tuddled along to the first one of these, which I talked
+about using Jason in post-gress. And it was so full that it was overflowing. And there
+was no way at all you'd get in there. So that sort of set the trend a bit. So quite a
+lot of really interesting looking talks. You either had to be camping out there for an hour
+before. You just gave up and went and had a coffee and waited for the video to come along.
+Well, you see, but that's the exciting thing. Did they've videed them all? Yeah, absolutely.
+And so it was all revealed to people. And the speed with which they went up was, there
+was amazing too. That's my support with that. So yeah, so I ended up going, aiming to go
+to talks and then hop me along to something else and just stand there. I went to listen to
+some guy talking about a visual editor for Wikipedia, which sounded really good. If you've
+ever edited Wikis, they're not the pleasant thing to work with. So something, something
+visual would be very, very nice. And I also went to talk about the Post-Fix MTA, but it's
+also a week's event. Somebody I'd known about for quite some time, he's been, he has been
+a big, big name in the in the Unix world for quite some time. Quite interesting to hear him talk.
+That room was, there was enough seats. But it was, the church was one of the biggest rooms,
+obviously, knowing they would have a big, big turn out for that. And it was, it was really good.
+Yeah. Well, it was a colossal number of talks. And then here you speak, I remember some of
+the other ones that really struck stuck out for me. What database is an area that I'm really
+interested into? And to see the different forms of language, query language that are being
+evolved right now, and queries that will search for ordinary text, or through ordinary spoken or
+written text, across paragraphs. And with all technical functionality of safe specs of camera,
+lanes, and focal distances all built in with the way that manufacturers write these things down
+with their colons and slashes and all this sort of stuff, built in to kind of template for search.
+It's amazing how young people, well, the modern generation of hackers or developers or
+pushers or pioneers are actually pushing search in exactly the same kind of way that Google is.
+I mean, and this is all going to be open source. People are going to learn all these
+brilliant search methods. They'll go into the various different means of searching,
+just over text. The other one for me that was really outstanding was the number of ways they've
+got visualising data. Yes, yes, it's interesting. You say like, because I had put down on my list of
+things to go and find out about. There was a talk called the Power of Graphs to analyse biological
+data. And as a one-time biologist, I thought, well, I'm not saying to say I'm no idea what it is,
+go along and listen. And I found it quite fascinating. I know nothing really about bioinformatics,
+which is what this was. But it's largely about dealing with human or some kinds of data and
+getting sufficient information out of it to make meaningful analyses, meaningful decisions
+about what it means and what to do about it. We're talking about genetic data relating to various
+cancers and so forth, and how you could identify various attributes. You could spot that maybe
+there was a promeness to a cancer in a population of people that hadn't been appreciated before,
+based on things which were using a graphical analysis, doing a drawing effectively a picture
+of the data. Which was utterly amazing. I don't think I would ever get my head around exactly
+how to work with it, but I found it quite fascinating that this is the work that's being done.
+And again, search, the new means that they've got of search, big data, the fact that a lot of
+it's statistical, but they will then render that in a way that you can visually picture something.
+And then the choice, the fact that it's so much complex search is taking place in
+kind of genetic structure. And then there's all this other and another scale altogether,
+just looking at people's buying and where they're going and what their interests are, so that
+we're doing it in the macroscopic scale. And also in the super macroscopic scale,
+same things, but it's not a little bit main blowing, but from the very, very small to the very,
+very low. Absolutely. I was taken with you talking about databases, the prevalence of these
+no SQL databases. I tried to go to the talk on schema design in MongoDB to find that it was
+oversubscribed, but three times judging by the number of people waiting to get into the room.
+Didn't get to that, but you know a lot of the stuff was being built on top of MongoDB and
+equivalents. I think that's the cat, by the way, we're in my house at the moment. Cat is
+demanding attention. So yeah, that was, I know, again, very little about
+no SQL database, is it an error in you? No, it's what, but you can see whether that's coming from
+that's big data and data science, not that area, they have to have these things in fact. I mean,
+it's just a great way to set up your own alternative to Google to be able to do all these
+wonderful things that Google has made a business out of. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'd like to get more
+into this a bit more about it, I have to say. So yeah, the other thing I was going to mention was
+being a bit of a pearl fanatic. I tried to go a few of the pearl talks. I only got one actually
+at the end of the day. It was really hard to get to everything with the talks and all the tables
+which were, which had some amazing stuff. It had the music. I know that Ken has done a whole series
+of interviews with people. I think he went around all of the, all of the different tables and spoke
+to pretty much everybody but what they were doing. Fascinating stuff. But yeah, so I went to
+listen to talk about Net LDAP, which is a pearl interface, the LDAP directory system, which
+was interesting, but just for me, I don't have anything else. But I had decided to go and
+join in with the key signing process on the Sunday afternoon, which pretty much blocked me out
+from going to a number of talks that I'd wanted to go to. I've got to have idea because it was a
+great exercise. I found it most interesting. It meant some very interesting people there as well.
+How long were you there all together? About two hours, I think, in total. Yeah, it was slower than
+I expected it to be, but I think there was a fair number of people there. It was brilliant to
+go. Logistics of it was quite difficult to get right. They did a damn good job, I want to say.
+Yeah, so it was good to go there, but would it have been nice also to listen to some of the other
+talks that I've never got to? It wouldn't have been possible. Was it 5,000 plus talks?
+No, it's 5,000 people. So 500 was so talks? 400 lectures, lots of hackers, lots of beer.
+There was a fair, but yeah, it was a lot on Friday night, actually. There was a big beer
+do on Friday night, that was quite something. But a fair bit of beer floating around in the
+place itself. So today is 400 talks, 200 of the, how could you possibly get to? I know, I know, I know,
+it's just mad. Yeah, I think you mentioned the, just going back to the venue, the way they did
+the food there was quite something. I had not envisaged. I thought they were going to have
+some canteens or something open. They're being a university. Well, I think that would have been
+a cost. I'm keen to think they must have thought we have to do this on a shoestring. So probably
+they invited all the, but but difference to the United Kingdom and the country like Brussels,
+Belgium, the quality of the food I thought was pretty good. It was damn good, yeah, yeah, yeah,
+and if anybody's maybe looked at any of the photographs that are available on liquor and so
+for that's quite a lot of them. It was a big, as a courtyard in the university, where a bunch of
+fast food vendors had been, been wheeled up in their various trailers and whatever. Vegan soup,
+yeah, just the burgers that were just, you're just epicurean, you're just lovely to look at.
+That was great, yeah, and Belgian waffles. What's a Belgian waffle?
+Yeah, it was, it was quite something. Yeah, I had not envisaged such thing. I was quite, quite over
+100, and of course it was mobbed. Absolutely, absolutely. 5,000 people.
+And everybody being black or grey or a little stubborn beard. It was a wonderful thing. I'm so glad I
+attended. Really good. So, would you go back? Really go back? Yes, yes, yes, yes, definitely.
+First of all, I mean, you get a bit isolated when you are, or you're interested in open-source
+software, but it does seem to have a real life in a way that it didn't have one generation ago.
+Yeah. There are ways that people can make money from it. There's a global community. It's
+instantaneous, they're in touch, they're in this thing with, for instance, what you even do with
+mumble and people just be able to talk around the planet at the same time. It's a much more connected
+organized group of people working on things now than it was in the past. So, that's quite inspiring.
+It's nice to see the physical bodies and all that stuff. They're there, but it's also nice to know
+that they will disperse and that they will still continue to work in their own, you know,
+particular areas of gigantic interest on their own. That was, I liked strangely enough,
+I liked a human part of it. Yeah, more than anything we do, yes. It was, they would have
+been a time I would have been daunted by such a group of things, a lot of hackers, but really,
+there were some great people that had, people that I did get to speak to and so on, and particularly
+in the key signing thing. Really, really great, great people. I'm glad to hear you met. Yeah, I'm glad
+you made the programme, but I'd like to hear that. I'm looking forward to that. It's June,
+next week, I think. Oh, good luck. Yeah. Okay, well, thanks Tom, that's good. It was fun to be
+there. I'm glad you managed to make it. It was fun to meet up with you there. Hang out a bit
+and stuff. So, yeah, well, let's hope we can do it again next year. Next year. All right.
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