hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2315.txt

Episode: 2315
Title: HPR2315: Penguicon 2017 Report
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2315/hpr2315.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 01:13:51

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This is HBR episode 2,350 entitled Penguin 2017 Report.
It is hosted by Huka and is about 20 minutes long and can remain a explicit flag.
The summary is Penguin 2017 took place on April 28, 30, 2017 in Southfield, Michigan.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15.
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Hello, this is Huka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode.
And this time what I want to do is give you the report, as I like to do every year, on what I did at PenguinCon.
And PenguinCon took place over the weekend of April 28th through 30th of this year, 2017.
And it's a huge event, there's probably a total of 500 hours of programming if you look at all of the different tracks.
So joining in even a fraction of the possible activities is about the best you can do, so you're always having to make choices.
This was also my final year as track head for the tech track position that I have held for four years now.
I need to refocus my attention and I also tend to think that these conventions are better served by the regular infusion of new blood.
So it seemed like the right time to move along.
I will of course continue to attend each year, as indeed I did before becoming part of the staff.
And I will be available to answer questions or provide support to my replacement.
And I've already registered for next year's event, so I will be attending as I love to do.
This is, to me, it's my home event.
So everyone has some place they consider home and for me, among tech events, this is my home.
Now PenguinCon starts on Friday evening.
And in past years, I've been able to grab dinner near my office and then go up the road to PenguinCon, which is really just up the road from my office.
But this year I had a physical therapy appointment after work, so I was rushing around a bit.
I did get to PenguinCon in time to pick up a whiteboard for the use of one of our guests of honor, Sumana Hari Haraswara.
She gave a talk called Things I Wish I Had Known About Open Source in 1998.
The reference here is to when she started in Open Source software and the lessons she had learned.
I'm really glad I started my PenguinCon with this talk.
She was a very engaging speaker and had some valuable lessons to share.
She had a very interesting approach to it.
She had prepared 30 different short, and when I say short, say three minutes, she had about 30 of these things that she could have done.
And what she did is she numbered them one through 30, and then it was up to people in the audience to call out a number.
And the use of the whiteboard was so that we had the numbers one through 30, and as she did each one, we erased that number for the whiteboard so that it was no longer available.
So there was a lot of different things, and it was a lot of fun.
And after that, I went to the Ubuntu release party, which was in the hotel bar to catch up with some friends.
And this is another thing that has become kind of an annual event.
I did pick up a lanyard from canonical and got to meet up with some people.
And then, you know, I realized I was really tired because it's not just the end of a long week.
I mean, Friday evening is going to be a little bit tiring anyway, but the physical therapy tends to wipe me out.
So at that point, I decided, you know, I'm going to go home, get a good night's sleep, and get ready for the next day.
Now, Saturday, I went back in the morning, had a very nice breakfast at the hotel. They have a great breakfast buffet.
With a number of things I can actually have, that's a story for another day, which I will get to, I am diabetic.
I could have raced through this to get to panels, but instead took my time, and at 11 a.m., I went to the Women in Tech panel.
This was put together by Jennifer Klein from Grand Circus, a local training company that also offered several coding workshops at the event.
This panel had a couple of colleagues from Grand Circus, a lady who was an entrepreneur, someone from Google, and Google has a local office in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
So that's something that we can call on. So it was a good panel. I enjoyed the discussion. They did a great job.
Now, that was followed by a panel on distributed game development to benefits of open source.
Now, the interesting to some people twist is that the panelists, who are Adina Shanholz, Amanda Lang and Rachel White, all work for Microsoft.
Now, I know there are some people in the open source community that still think of Microsoft as the evil empire. I think there is change happening.
And if they want to discuss the benefits of open source, I am happy to encourage that.
I had my first Microsoft speaker two years back, and what I said then, and I have stuck to, is if you're talking about open source, you are welcome to submit a proposal.
I mean, that's the understanding we're an open source event.
But, you know, this is an example of I think some of the change that was happening. So these ladies did a great job talking about open game development, and even demonstrated some games they created, showed how they had done it, where the resources could be accessed if someone wanted to create their own game.
So it was a very interesting panel.
After that, I went to a panel on creating web comics, logistical nonsense and shameless self-promotion with Erica Wagner and Laura Kaskas.
They have a comic I really like called Sidekick Girl, but this panel focused on the production issues, web hosting, stuff like that.
You know, they've been doing this for, I think, seven, eight years maybe, you know, turning out one every week.
And, you know, they had a lot of good things to say about if you wanted to get into doing something like that, what are some of the considerations.
Then I went to a talk called Marching Toward the World Brain, chaos and self-organizing networks by Michael Group.
He gave a great talk, looking at some of his own experiments, and the biggest problem I could see was that the room was too small.
There were more people on the floor or against the wall than were in the seats.
But Michael's talk looked at network theory to see how a computer network could be decentralized and still be programmable and have goals.
Then James Valeroy made a presentation on Freedom Box, Libre Personal Server.
Now this is a project to provide a completely open personal server, which will have its first release in Debian Stretch, and which can be run on a Raspberry Pi.
I was very interested since I see a couple of needs that I have, which might be met by a free open source server platform.
So I was glad to have that talk and see what was going on there.
Then at 4pm I went to a panel on Ancient Egypt.
Again, it's one of the things that makes Pentagon so wonderful to me is you can have all the technical stuff, but there's other stuff too.
Most people have more than one facet to their personality and have more than one interest in life.
Ancient Egypt is something that I'm interested in.
My first degree was in history, and it's still a bit of a passion for me.
So this panel on Ancient Egypt, they looked at misunderstandings about Ancient Egypt.
One of the panelists was a professor from the University of Michigan.
They did some serious myth busting, starting with no pyramids were not grain storage facilities.
For those of you outside the United States who wonders where that came from, believe it or not, we had a presidential candidate last year,
say that they were grain storage facilities, and is now the secretary of housing and urban development.
Yeah, well, what are you going to do?
They kind of went through a lot of the sort of mythologies about these things.
The pyramids were not built with slave labor.
Workers were paid a wage and stuff like that.
Following this, I went looking for the Trichorder Project demo. I never did find it.
And so, you know, at this point, it's like a little after five. I decided to go to the consweet and get some food.
And I'll give full props to the consweet for having stuff I could eat like fruit and vegetables.
Now, I have not been to a tech convention that has anything like the consweet, so just a small sideline here.
Some tech conventions are free. So, for instance, Ohio Linux Fest, which I was involved with for a number of years and still love to go to.
And I'm a great supporter of.
It's very important to them that the, that event is available free of charge to people.
It's a task that you register ahead of time, so they have a sense of how many people are coming and can make preparations.
Penguin Com is not free. In fact, it's not even free if you're a speaker.
They expect the people who come there to speak to register and buy a badge and all of that kind of stuff.
And it's generally depending on when you do it. I mean, if you waited until the day of the event to just walk in and buy a badge across your $50.
I usually get it in advance, and so I paid $35.
And I say, yes, I paid $35. I was on the staff, and I paid $35, which is fine because that's how it works.
Now, one of the things you get for this is that they, you know, in addition to paying for the all of the conference space and all the other things,
is they have this thing called the consweet.
And, you know, it's not intended to be something that you're going to live off of.
But, you know, they do have food and drink available that is just part of your admission.
You know, when you buy the badge, you get the access to the consweet.
So all they do is they have someone sitting at the door just checking to see if you've got a badge.
And if you do, fine, go in. They've got some beer. They've got some soft drinks.
And, you know, finger food, stuff like that.
So, again, I was, I was real happy like the fruit and vegetables, as I mentioned before, I'm diabetics.
So, you know, I can't have candy or potato chips or what have you.
So, little, little fortification there. After that, it was on to scientific Linux.
And this is a distro based on Red Hat that was developed at Fermilab just outside of Chicago,
which is a major particle accelerator facility.
Now, they had the need for lots of computers to handle the enormous data being generated and analyze it.
And, turned to Linux as the solution.
So, we were able to get Connie C, who was the founder and Abani King, who took over his team lead when Connie retired.
So, this was very authoritative.
So, scientific Linux may have started at Fermilab. It has spread to other facilities. It's a great resource.
And this is something I've been trying to get a hold of for a few years.
And it was just trying to track down email addresses and what have you.
So, I was really happy, and again, this is another one where the room was just way too small for the number of people.
And, you know, as someone who was involved in the programming, you do the best you can.
We had a facility there that allowed us to get away from the really noisy part of the convention, but the rooms were a little smaller.
And so, you know, maybe I'd do it differently if I had it to do over.
Now, after that, there was scheduled a panel on the works of Miyazaki Part II.
I was at Part I last year. My wife and I love Miyazaki films.
But the panel was canceled when the main presenter had to stay with a sick child.
So, instead, I wandered over to a panel with Karen Burnham and Bob Trembley on space travel woes with and without potatoes.
This reference to the Martian for those of you who don't know what the potatoes thing is about.
Now, Karen formerly worked for NASA and then moved out to Michigan to work at Ford.
And Bob is with the Warren Astronomical Society and is sort of a fixture at local conventions, bringing the science particularly astronomy.
And often brings telescopes and he jokes that every time he shows up with the telescope, it gets cloudy and starts to rain.
But, you know, I remember doing some solar astronomy a couple of years ago.
And, you know, you need special filters and, you know, you never look directly at the sun without knowing exactly what you're doing.
But it was interesting to take a look at the sun through the equipment that he had set up.
So, this particular time again, it just, it was one of those rainy, overcast weekends in Michigan that one has.
So, we didn't get outside too much, but their panel was great and there are two people that have really good stuff to share.
And, you know, Karen's been to several of these now, I think, you know, because she lives in the area now.
I'm sort of hoping she will also be a fixture at our local convention scene.
Then I went to a presentation all about the tricorder project with Peter Jansen.
Now, this was our hack of honor this year at Penguin Con.
And Peter told us the story of how he decided to create a tricorder.
Now, in this case, it was not a medical tricorder, but it was a handheld multi-instrument device with things like GPS, temperature sensors, magnetic sensors, and so on.
Peter explained exactly how he did it.
And, you know, told some interesting stories, you know, he is a professor.
And apparently, if you're a professor at a legitimate university, you can order radioactive material through the mail and they'll deliver it without question.
I'm not sure they'd do that for me, and I'm not sure they should.
So, anyway, by this point, it had been a long day Saturday, so it's time to go home.
Now, Sunday started out like Saturday with a breakfast at the hotel restaurant.
And then on to astronomy 103 with Bob and Connie Trembley.
Bob Trembley was one of the two people in the panel on space travel was on Saturday.
Connie is his wife, and she teaches middle school science classes.
This really kind of turned into a group discussion because, you know, they didn't really have a whole lot of pre-plan material.
It sort of looked like this is one of those things that was just thrown into a hole in the schedule at the last minute.
So, you know, we had a general discussion.
I was able to recommend some podcasts and video casts that they were not aware of.
And, you know, that was good.
You know, there's some really good science stuff available on YouTube.
I'm not sure people always know about things like PBS Space Time and stuff like that.
It's really very, very good.
Then I went to a talk called Red Decentralizing the Web by Ed Platt.
Ed is a fellow who is local now.
I think when I first encountered him, he was at MIT.
So, he's getting his doctorate.
And he looked at the problem of social media being controlled by a few large companies and presented alternatives.
Now, I've actually written to Ed and said, Ed, the stuff you did would be of great interest to the hacker public radio community.
A, would you consider doing a show, which I would love it if he would?
But B, if that doesn't work, would it bother you if I took your material and did, you know, a show or two about this stuff?
Because I think it's really interesting. And I want to check out some of the alternatives he mentioned, such as mastodon.
And you may have heard of that. It's kind of a federated alternative to Twitter.
I've given up on Twitter, but I might like mastodon. So, interesting to check that out.
After that, it was on to breaking into bots by Gabrielle Krivaker.
Her focus here was on creating bots that could answer questions and otherwise converse.
And she demonstrated some tools she used to do this, how to set up your bot in the cloud.
A very interesting presentation.
And I had intended after that to go to another Miyazaki panel, but this too was canceled for the same reason, because the same presenter with the sick child.
I really hope these panels get rescheduled for next year, because it's one of the things I really love.
Well, standard by 3pm on Sunday, it was closing ceremony's time, and after that I went home.
I was pretty tired by this point, which raises the question, how is it that sitting on your ass all day is so tiring?
And I was looking forward to relaxing a bit.
Before I left the con, I made sure to purchase my pass for 2018, because PenguinCon gets better every year, and I want to be there to see what the next team comes up with.
So, with that, this is Ahuka signing off for Hacker Public Radio, and reminding you, as always, to support free software.
Thanks. Bye-bye.
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