Episode: 1624
Title: HPR1624: Penguicon 2015 Call for Talks
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1624/hpr1624.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:59:10

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It's Thursday, Wednesday, 3rd October 2014.
This is an HPR episode 1,624 entitled,
Penguin 2015 Call for Torx.
It is hosted by AYUKA and in about 16 minutes long.
Feedback can be sent to Muilnik at Muilnik.com
or by leaving a comment on this episode.
The summary is, I am looking for people
who can prevent TX-FOS Torx at Penguin 2015.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
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Hello, this is AYUKA.
Welcome to Hacker Public Radio
and another exciting episode.
This is not part of any of my series,
but I want to talk a little bit about PenguinCon 2015,
which is coming up.
I know we're still in 2014,
but I happen to be the person in charge of the tech track.
So I need to be working on things right now.
We've talked about PenguinCon before.
A couple of times I have posted reviews of PenguinCon,
most recently the one that we had last early May of 2014
and recorded a show about all of that.
And that was a great deal of fun.
So for those of you who are not familiar,
PenguinCon is an unusual kind of event
because it combines two different things.
One is a lot of technology with a real focus,
as you might guess from the name, on free and open source
software.
This is a focus that's been there from the very beginning
because one of the people who was involved several of the people
who were involved early on in setting this up,
people like Eric Raymond and Rob Landley.
And if you are familiar with open source software,
those are probably names that you are very familiar with.
But the other thing is that it's also a science fiction
convention with everything that's involved there.
So there's going to be gaming and movies and sci-fi authors.
There's going to be costumes and anime.
And Lord knows what else.
I think there's probably a good 8 to 10 different tracks
going on here.
Science is a wonderful one.
I always try to get some of the science talks.
So there's a lot of stuff going on.
And it's a really, really wonderful event
that I think if you're in the area,
you might want to make some time in your schedule
to come and attend.
The 2015 event is going to be April 24th through 26th
at the Western Hotel in Southfield, Michigan.
That's the same place that the 2014 event was held.
We had a very good experience there
and decided to go back.
So that's going to be a good thing.
And this is for those of you who don't know,
Southfield is a suburb of Detroit.
And so if you're, you'd be within a day's drive easily
if you were anything from Chicago to Pittsburgh
to Kentucky, Tennessee.
I mean, any of those places could put you
within a day's drive of the Detroit area or Ontario, Canada,
which is actually not at all far from Detroit.
So I don't expect people are going to be flying over
from Europe for this event.
But if you are in the Midwest United States,
this is an event that's worth coming and attending.
And a number of podcasters are going to be involved.
So I've already got four talks, and I'll probably
get more from the Sunday morning Linux review folks.
Last night, I was talking to people at the Linux link
tech show and trying to get some of those folks involved.
So what I'm looking for right now is talks.
So this is the opening of the call for talks phase.
In any event like this, you have to start lining up
your speakers and start building out your schedule.
And this is no different.
Last year, we had just for the tech track
that I'm responsible for.
We had about 66 hours of programming.
And we really start late in the afternoon on Friday
and run through mid afternoon on Sunday.
Furthermore, we usually don't start anything
before 10 o'clock in the morning.
So if you start looking at how many talks we had just for tech,
and how many time slots there were,
you would have to say that on most slots,
most one hour slots, there would be
at least three different tech talks going on,
not to mention all of the other tracks.
So if you were to come to an event like this,
you would certainly have a wide variety of things
to choose from.
And that's good.
So I noticed last year, this past event,
one of the things that I heard from people
was the complaint that there is two talks going on
at the same time that I want to go to.
Well, as a programmer, that's the kind of problem
you'd love to have.
The more I hear that, the more I know
I'm putting a lot of good stuff out there for people.
The other thing that I noticed,
and this was a problem for a number of the speakers,
was that the rooms were really crowded.
Again, that's a really good problem to have as a programmer
because that means, again, it tells me
that I'm putting stuff out there
that people are interested in.
So I need to do that again this year.
And I've been given the go-ahead
by the board of directors,
the committees, and chairs, and all of that
that said, at least as much as you did last year,
if you can do even more, that'd be great.
Because we really want to make sure
that this tech track is the largest track going on
at PenguinCon and that it amounts
to roughly half of the event.
So that means we've got to get a lot of good talks going in here.
And that's why I'm recording this particular show
because I want to see how many people I can get.
And I know there's a lot of people that are listening to this
that are within driving distance of this event.
And so I want you to come.
And maybe even if you have to fly,
I was talking to Flying Rich from the Linux link tech show.
And if he comes, he's probably gonna have to fly in
from Florida, but he might do that
to put on a talk for us, which I'm hoping will happen.
Yeah, if it doesn't, it doesn't.
But we're really open to having all sorts of people come in.
Now we do have a theme this year.
And the theme is biotechnology and medicine.
And what we're looking at there
is there have been so many interesting developments
in technology as it applies to biology, medicine, health,
things like that.
You think about 3D printing of organs,
which is starting to happen.
You think about implanted devices,
which is becoming ever more important.
You could make the argument that the human race
is slowly becoming cyborgs without even intending to.
Now myself, I'm a diabetic.
Fortunately, I am not insulin dependent at this point.
And if I take care of myself, I hope to avoid that.
But I know a lot of diabetics now have implanted insulin pumps.
I think a lot of people may be familiar
with implanted pacemakers and other kinds of devices.
And what kind of software runs all of these things
in the issue, is it something that's programmable?
And if so, if it is programmable,
is there any security on it?
If you can get in with a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi
or something and access the device,
could a hacker get in there and do something that would kill you?
There's a ton of really interesting issues here.
So, I'm hoping we can get a few people
that are gonna be talking about things like this.
But that's not to say that every talk has to have
that specific focus.
I'm really interested in getting a lot of variety.
So, I've been already talking to people
about things involving cloud computing,
security, hardware hacks.
Basically, if you're listening to hacker public radio,
if it would be of interest to you,
having a talk on it would be of interest to me.
So, that's really the way to think about this.
So, while we have a general event theme,
I'm gonna get all kinds of talks
and I'm really looking forward to all of that.
Now, this year we are experimenting with a new process
to gather our talk proposals.
And it's using a program called Tuxtracks.
And that allows us to collect information online.
So, you can put in a proposal
and give me all the information and then I can log in
and take a look at that.
And I do monitor that several times a week
to see what has come in over the transform, so to speak.
One of the nice things that allows
is a kind of a social interaction
in which people who are just thinking about attending,
Penguin Con, can go in there.
And I think each person gets like five votes.
So, they can pick five different talks
and say, yeah, these are ones I definitely wanna go to.
And that's a signal, then, to those of us
who are programming, that, hey, here's something
that is attracting some attention.
So, even at this early stage,
I'm seeing certain suggested talks
that are getting four, five, six votes in favor.
And we're just opening up at this point.
So, that tells me right away,
here's something a lot of people
are really interested in doing.
And so, I would wanna program stuff like that.
So, I have links to all of this.
The site for Penguin Con itself is
2015.pengwakon.org.
And that's the general site for Penguin Con.
And that will let you take a look at the hotel information
and anything else that you need to know about.
Then there's also a site for the Tuxtracks
and it's pengwakon.tuxtracks.org.
So, you know, those are the two places
you might wanna take a look at.
And if you encounter any problems at all,
please do not hesitate to contact me directly.
My official pengwakon email is tech.
www.pengwakon.org.
So, anything you send to that address,
I monitor that mailbox on a daily basis.
I will know about it.
So, this is my official 2015 call for talks episode
of Hacker Public Radio.
And this is Ahuka reminding everyone
to support free software.
Bye-bye.
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