hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1473.txt

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

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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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