- The Linux Foundation has announced its 2013 conference schedule, the first of which is the Android Builder’s Summit and the Embedded Linux Conference, co-located during the week of February 18-22 at the Parc 55 Hotel on Union Square in San Francisco, CA. There will also be a Yocto Project Developer Day at the location on Tuesday February 19, details to come. The CFP for the both conferences is open now through January 4, so get those talks in.

- OSCON has announced its CFP as well, open now through February 4. The conference will take place July 22-26 in Portland, Oregon. 

- During the weekend preceding OSCON on July 20-21, the 6th annual Community Leadership Summit will be held. This free event is a really fantastic place to learn more about community management and share best practices. If you happen to be in the SF Bay area, there will also be a regional event in early February – watch this space for details.

The Yocto Project is providing a full day of embedded Linux training FREE OF CHARGE in Barcelona, Spain, the day after the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, on 8 November, 2012. More information here or contact me in the comments below.

(Full disclosure: I am the community manager for the Yocto Project)

This week I have been in Portland attending OSCON and the Community Leadership Summit while my wife and my son are at home doing their thing. As we were talking the other night, it occurred to her that there are many, many other families who are chugging along this week without a spouse, many women and men who are functioning essentially as single parents, many of them with jobs themselves. She came up with a corker of an idea.

We are big fans of Matt Harding, of Where the Hell is Matt fame. His simple movies of doing silly dances with people all over the world are a testament to the global community we all belong to. My wife’s idea is to create a similar video showing all of us coming home from these trips and reuniting with our families, set to music – just a short reminder that even though we may not know each other or have exactly the same experience, we are all in this little boat together.

If you would like to participate, please send me email at jefro@jefro.net.

Also, in addition to a link to the Google Calendar version, there is also now a calendar embedded on the page. In the future I may provide this information only in a Google calendar and/or iCal, as the textual calendar is difficult to maintain. If anyone has an opinion on this, I’d be glad to listen.

More info on this conference at http://open.nasa.gov/summit, registration at http://opensourcesummit.eventbrite.com/

For more information on open source conferences see the Open Source Conferences calendar. It also contains a Google Calendar to which you can subscribe.

Thanks to alert reader Jeremy, who noticed the old date on the Open Source Conferences page.

1. Two 800k Mac floppy disks from 1990

2. One QIC-24 tape, also from 1990, from my tenure at a Santa Cruz-based computer company which shall remain nameless

3. One 4mm DAT tape, 2GB (DDS1) from 1995 which contains my backups from my tenure at Cygnus Support, which became Cygnus Solutions and was then purchased by Red Hat in 1999

First, the Mac floppies. They contain some, though sadly not all, of my (UUCP!) email from UCSC in the late 1980s as well as college papers, Usenet memes, and burp sounds that my roommate added to my collection of data when I wasn’t looking. I had a Mac Classic for which I believe I paid over $1400.

I have now discovered that the “classic” Macintosh could read and write single-sided double-density (400k), double-side double-density (800k), and high-density (1.4mb) floppy disks. It was able to write 800k to DSDD floppies in a time when most were 720k by using variable motor speeds in its floppy drives, thereby rendering those floppies unreadable by any machines other than Macs. Unthinkingly, I stored my precious backups on 800k disks and have thus been searching for a working 16+ year old Mac to read them, with the help of my son’s electronics lab teacher, my good friend and ex-college roommate who works at Apple (and who I think wants his burp noises back), and the random local community. I now have three non-working older Macs partially disassembled in my office.

The latest score is interesting, though – I have discovered a cache of old backups on ZIP 100 disks which contain most, but tantalizingly not quite all, of the information on those Mac disks! Now I simply need to figure out if the remaining miscellaneous data is worth the effort. As a bonus, if I do get an old Mac working, I will be able to play Dark Castle again, a game which I humbly refer to as “Freshman Year”.

Next up, the QIC-24 tape. For those who are not familiar, QIC stands for “quarter-inch cassette”, meaning a cassette with 1/4″ magnetic tape. This is a similar tape to that found in standard audio cassettes, but in a very sturdy aluminum-and-plastic cassette that you could use to ward off intruders.  These same tapes are still being used for backups worldwide. I have no doubt that the data is safe there – but QIC-24 is very ancient format and modern drives cannot read it. I discovered this by attempting to read the tape in the one drive that exists in my local area, which happens to belong to my one local client. Unfortunately, their tape drive is new enough that it no longer reads QIC-24.

The DAT tape is more interesting, as I purchased an older DAT drive on eBay at one point but never got it working. Two days ago I was able to source a SCSI card and managed to get the drive up and working on a Linux PC, and “mt status” returns information about the drive, but “tar” or “dd” on the tape only returns “Input/Output Error”, indicating that the drive is bad or dirty… or the tape is no longer recognizable. My next step is to clean the drive, and if that doesn’t work I will take my friend Beth’s offer up on a working DAT drive and give that a shot.

So… if you have any advice on where to find a QIC-24 drive, or how to get an old, dirty DAT drive working, I would be most grateful.

There have been a lot of changes this year, most notably the Embedded Linux Conference moving from April up to February and also moving location from San Francisco to Redwood Shores, CA, USA. This is a premier annual meeting of embedded Linux engineers, and I am pleased to announce an addition this year. On Tuesday, February 14, the Yocto Project presents a Developer Day, a full day of embedded Linux training, free of charge. Seating is limited, so register early and get more information on the Yocto Project Developer Day page at the Linux Foundation.

I will be attending and speaking at several of these conferences. If you see me, say hi!

Now the summer conference season is upon us, despite the odd weather. Summer brings my three favorite events – CLS, OSCON, and LinuxCon – as well as Linux Plumbers Conference, and it forecasts the busy fall season as well. Here are some details on the big ones for embedded Linux.

OSCON

For open source junkies, the Mecca of open source conferences is O’Reilly Media‘s OSCON which is held in Portland every summer, this year July 25-29. OSCON draws thousands of people every year, and with good reason – it is the largest annual mixture of industry and “pure” open source ventures to talk specifically about open source. You will find everything here, from expo hall to half-day tutorials, presentations to BoFs, lightning talks to after-parties, and never a dull moment. This year, O’Reilly is also co-locating two new conferences, OSCON Data and OSCON Java, which cover (naturally) open data and the Java language. This makes the week intensely busy, so keep a close eye on the schedule.

I’ll be at OSCON all week, talking about the Yocto Project as an opener for our premier build engineer Beth Flanagan talking about the Yocto Project Autobuilder, as well as at a (planned) evening BoF. It is also my intention to reprise the popular Hallway Hoedown afternoon jam session from last year, and possibly a music BoF, so bring an instrument! (Day & time TBA.)

I will also be attending the Community Leadership Summit during the weekend prior to OSCON. This is a free conference where community leaders can come together and share best practices, swap stories of good and bad experiences, and network with each other. The crowd is always very vibrant, and it isn’t just technical communities – we have had participants from all walks of life. If you manage a community, please check it out or write to me for more information. It is a free event, but please be sure to register.

The one thing about OSCON is that it is somewhat expensive, but I can help with that. Contact me by email or in the comments below for a registration code worth 20% off.

Also, join the social networks surrounding OSCON if you enjoy couch surfing or linking up with friendly, like-minded strangers to share housing, as that is quite common with this event. And for food, the Portland food carts are legendary, mystical places where everything is tasty, healthy, and cheap. Be sure to follow @oscon on twitter, and watch #oscon for late-breaking information.

LinuxCon North America, Vancouver, BC

LinuxCon is the premier general Linux event of the year, and this year is a doozy. As most (probably all) of the readers of this blog already know, this year is the 20th anniversary of the Linux operating system, and while Linus himself is celebrating with a no-stress major revision, the Linux Foundation has taken it upon themselves to throw a huge party in Canada.

LinuxCon starts off with a grand educational event – the “Linux Learners” Student Day – put together by the very good folks at Oregon State’s Open Source Lab. Then the conference itself begins, featuring keynotes from several Linux luminaries, a Q&A with Linus and Greg Kroah-Hartmann, a panel called “20 Years of Linux” with Eben Moglen (Software Freedom Law Center), Jim Zemlin (Executive Director, Linux Foundation), and Jon “Maddog” Hall, and several tracks of presentations.

Oh, and in case that wasn’t fun enough, don’t just fly to Vancouver – go to Portland instead and take the LinuxCon or Bust Bus for several hours of fun through the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Then on Wednesday night, the event of the year is the Linux “Roaring 20′s” 20th Anniversary Gala at the Commodore Ballroom, with a full dinner buffet, open bar, live jazz, and casino – you can event rent 1920s attire to complete the picture.

I’ll be participating in a 2-hour hands-on Yocto Project presentation with Saul Wold, one of the project’s lead engineers. There will also be a Yocto Project Community BoF, and several Yocto Project folks available during the event for one-on-one discussions.

Fall 2011

Some fantastic conferences are coming up in the fall: Linux Plumber’s Conference, Open Hardware Summit in New York (CFP is open through July 1!), ARM TechCon, Open World Forum in Paris, and the big Linux Foundation events in Prague: Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELC-E), LinuxCon Europe, and the Kernel Summit, plus LinuxCon Brazil in November, to name just a few. Watch this space for more information in an upcoming post.

Also keep in mind that you can follow all of these conferences from my open source conferences page, which contains a link to a Google Calendar that tracks them as well.

Ain’t it fun being social?