Sat, 24 Sep 2005
Organising A Meeting with PledgeBank
One of the great things about sites like PledgeBank is that they provide a
single service and they they do it well enough that it can be bent slightly
to serve another purpose. I organise the occasional meeting for techies and
one of the few major worries is "what happens if no one turns up?". It's
not a complex fear but it can result in some sleepless nights.
It's not even just a case of "will I look like an idiot if this goes wrong?". If you've snagged non-local speakers it can become a major worry. They've given their time, often for free, to come down, pay their own travel and deliver a talk. The worst thing that could happen is no one turns up!
This is where pledgebank comes in. I've been considering holding some evening meets in London for different tech crowds. They would be short, two talks (45 minutes each with a ten minute break) and then to the pub for food, drink and conversation. Getting the first one off the ground will be difficult because people don't know if anyone else will go.
I'm thinking of putting up a pledge containing the speakers, topics and location. Put it up two-three months in advance and close it two weeks to a month before the night. If it's got 20 people do it. If not drop it and try and come up with different topics. It might also be worth setting up some kind of alternate date with a "I'd come to this if it was at the second choice date." option. The idea's got some kinks to work out but it seems like a good idea. To me...
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Posted: 2005/09/24 10:43 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
KProbes -- I Finally Get It!
Back in April of 2001 GLLUG had a meeting, in the CFC preview cinema, which
featured a talk by Richard Moore of IBM. Now the speaker obviously knew his
stuff, he was a little dry but obviously passionate and enthusiastic about
his material. The topic was a new way of debugging the Linux Kernel; it was
called DProbes.
Now while I understood most of the talk, I'm not a kernel guy so bits were over my head, the idea seemed like a good, if quite ambitious one. DProbes would allow kernel developers to pull out what was actually going on when things were executing by creating instrumentation points in the code. Like watch points in a normal debugger. And while the idea was sound it was only really useful to kernel developers. A niche in a niche so to speak.
Over the years since, I've been fortunate enough to see Richard present updated versions of the talk as work's progressed on the software. This year, at the UKUUG Linux con in Swansea, I saw him present what are now called KProbes. And I finally "got it". Solaris has something called DTrace. It's a way of pulling out low level details from pretty much anything in the system. Metrics and information that's never been available in the past can now be pulled out. And Linux can do it as well; just not from as many places.
Now I don't know whether DTrace has opened my eyes to the potential of KProbes or the KProbes people have seen what DTrace can do and adjusted their presentation but I think KProbes is one of the more important Linux projects happening at the moment. The ability to pull out real data, to such an incredibly fine grained level, is something every admin should want and every developer should be aware of.
It's weird how a talk I sat through four years ago is now one of the topics I'm most interesting in.
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Posted: 2005/09/24 10:00 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Updates to PlanetGLLUG and IIS-Resources GM Script
Well Planet GLLUG has been running
for a couple of days without any glitches, except for some, er,
interesting, HTML running from one persons postings to another. I've also
replaced some of the images with much better versions contributed from
Simon Morris. Now some (maybe) interesting tidbits:
43.8% of the visitors to PlanetGLLUG are using Linux vs the 42.1% that are running Windows; it's always nice to see people dogfooding. Even more surprising is that the most popular web browser used by the Windows viewers is... FireFox! We're also the top hit in Google for 'planet gllug' which might help spread the word a bit.
The other, much smaller, update is that the IIS-Resources Printer Redirect Script no longer has the printer dialog pop up. A small code snippet from Gunnar Hansson helped fix this for me.
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Posted: 2005/09/24 09:45 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
