Mechelen und Brüssel

Anlässlich der FOSDEM 2014 ging's nach Brüssel - und zuvor noch ein kleiner Abstecher nach Mechelen.

Das Rathaus am Grote Markt in Mechelen

Die Sint-Rombouts-Kathedraal mit ihrem imposanten Turm

Alte Werbung über einer Eckkneipe

In Mechelen gibt's viele alte Mauern und ruhige Höfe

Der Kleine Beginenhof

Melaan - im Sommer soll hier das Leben toben

Hinterhof beim Großen Beginenhof

Die Stadthäuser Sint Jozef, De Duivel und Het Paradijs

Die Dijle beim Vismarkt

Mein Zimmer im Martin's Patershof, einer ehemaligen Klosterkirche

Flohmarkt auf dem Place du Jeu de Balle in Brüssel

Port de Hal/Hallepoort

Auf dem Friedhof von Ixelles/Elsene

FOSDEM 2014

What a start with my trip to FOSDEM 2014: Having had an accommodation in Mechelen about 30 kilometers away from Brussels, I woke up much later than expected, hurried to the station and got quite a late train to Brussels. In Brussels I tried to get ticket for public transportation valid for several days ... but at the tourist information that kind of ticket was out of stock and the credit card terminal was broken - ok, I got a different ticket. Then I had to take the bus to ULB, where FOSDEM took place as usual. Of course, the bus was late :-) Finally, I made it to FOSDEM, but the configuration management developer room was totally overcrowded - I tried to get in, but finally I changed my schedule and skipped many of the talks I originally wanted to attend :-(

Trying to enter the configuration management devroom

So, here are the talks I've attended on Saturday:

• Making the Linux Kernel better (without coding) was about using the crowd to improve hardware support for certain devices. Taking an USB camera, which was not suppported by the Linux kernel, as an example Wolfram Sang showed a way how to gather information in order to configure a generic USB device driver to recognize that particular model - finally, he could demonstrate how his camera worked with the generic USB driver.
• Tom Tromey showed in Your Application versus GDB how Python scripts can be used to enhance GDB e.g. with pretty-printing or frame selection for debugging programs. A live debugging session of a small program was included.
• The classification problem: challenges and solutions - External node classification, the CFEngine way by Marco Marongiu was about how to provide external node classification by an external script or parser for CFEngine like Hiera does this for Puppet.
• In NixOS: declarative configuration Linux distribution Nix, NixOS and NixOps were introduced. Domen Kožar explained Nix, a standalone package manager using a DSL to provide functional programming behavior like lazy evaluation and treating the package target location as immutable. Different profiles, i.e. package versions use filesystem links, and garbage collection just checks for files not being referenced anymore. NixOS uses Nix as package manager and systemd for service control, and defines system configuration in a declarative way. Finally, NixOps is a way to provision NixOS machines in the cloud supporting different cloud providers.
• Service orchestration in the cloud with Juju by Marco Ceppi: Juju is not a configuration management system, it's service orchestration, and it uses so-called Charms, which can be implemented in any programming language and where configuration management can be leveraged. Charms implement what is run when the orchestration triggers certain actions like depending one service on another or scaling a certain service.

For Sunday I've chosen quite an interesting selection of different talks, but the NoSQL, Go and Python developer rooms were so overcrowded, that I ended up with just a few talks I've attended:

• I've started with attending a track of various lightning talks - for me, the most interesting one was Babelfish for DevOps: syslog-ng by Peter Czanik: He presented different use cases for syslog-ng like filtering, anonymization and switching storage backends. He also mentioned an interesting project based on syslog-ng: enterprise log search and archive (ELSA).
• In Concurrent Programming Made Simple - The (r)evolution of Transactional Memory transactional memory was introduced by Nuno Diegues and Torvald Riegel as a way to manage concurrency programmatically.

Conclusion: Lot of interesting talks, lots of people - too many for me. In my opinion this does not scale anymore for an onsite conference. So, I will attend the next FOSDEMs via hooking into the livestreams.

Not served at FOSDEM and completely unrelated to the well-known Linux distribution

Brüssel, Bruxelles, Brussel, Brussels ...

Da ich am vergangenen Wochenende die FOSDEM 2012 besucht habe und noch nie zuvor in Brüssel war, bin ich ein wenig früher angereist und ein wenig später abgereist, um mir einen Eindruck von Brüssel verschaffen zu können ... zum Glück ging mein Flieger am Freitag früh genug, um dem am selben Tag folgenden Schneechaos zuvorzukommen.
Die Altstadt und das Stadtzentrum kann man bequem zu Fuß erforschen - für alles weitere kann man das gute Netz an öffentlichen Verkehrsmitteln nutzen ... hier hilft einem die Brussels Card, Kosten zu sparen (neben freiem Eintritt in zahlreiche Museen und Rabatte in diversen Geschäften).

Ein Blick in die Galeries Royales

Auf dem Grande Place

Auf dem Place Royale

Sehr zu empfehlen ist das Comic-Museum. Das Magritte-Museum habe ich am Freitag leider nicht mehr geschafft - und montags ist es geschlossen :-(

Auf dem Weg zum Comic-Museum ...

... und im Comic-Museum

Überall findet man historische Gebäude (neben einigen Bausünden der Sechziger Jahre und der folgenden Jahrzehnte), mit Comicfiguren verzierte Häuserfassaden und die obligatorischen Pralinen- und Schokoladenläden - typisch sind auch die "Fritten"läden und die Verkaufsstände für Waffeln. Die Stadt verströmt einen weltoffenen Flair, der den französischen Einfluss erkennen lässt. Auffällig sind auch die zahlreichen begrünten Plätze und Parks.

Verzierte Hausfassade ...

... und noch eine

Im Stadtpark mit Blick auf den Königspalast ...

... und um 180 Grad gedreht mit Blick auf das Parlament

Da ich leider sowohl im Ausland als auch im Inland schon Gegenteiliges erlebt habe, muss ich an dieser Stelle das Sofitel Le Louise außerordentlich loben: ein freundlicher und aufmerksamer Service, ein großes und sauberes Zimmer, freies WLAN, ein superleckeres und reichhaltiges Frühstück und eine gute Lage.

FOSDEM 2012 ...

Last weekend FOSDEM 2012 took place at the area of the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) - and it's been the first time I've been there. All in all it's been a great and well-organized conference with lots of interesting talks - unfortunately with many interesting ones in parallel ... so, I've missed a lot of them. Here are the talks I've attended.

• On Saturday:
• Ensuring uptime in a small startup: A good talk about some principles on how to ensure uptime during schema updates - based on PostgreSQL, but applies to any relational database.
• An introduction to Ada 2005 and Ada 2012: A time shift back into my days at the university - at least concerning the presentation style: good didactics and very old-style slides. I've never coded in Ada. So, this talk gave me a rough introduction.
• Why Java for Linux Applications?: A very personal talk about the speaker's learnings when trying to develop a GUI for an existing set of programs - and why he failed with C and Gtk+ ending up with Java and Swing.
• Debian packaging for beginners: As I'm working a lot with RPM packaging and have never done packages for Debain-based systems so far, this talk was a good introduction for me.
• Linux Containers and OpenVZ: Nothing really new for me, but a good overview of the current state and the upcoming features.
• Garbage Collection Visualization, GCSpy and NetBeans in tandem: I expected a bit more hands-on, as I spent a lot of time on GC optimization for various JVM scenarios. But GCSpy seems to be a project worth looking at in the near future.

Winter impressions at the ULB area

• On Sunday:
• Sphinx Users stories and How to offload MySQL server with Sphinx: Very interesting for me, as I'm using Sphinx for enabling fast full-text search on email data stored in a MySQL database.
• MySQL HA reloaded - old tricks and cool new tools to guarantee high availability to your MySQL Servers: A good and surely quite complete overview about the possibilities to ensure MySQL high availability and their limitations.
• Works with persistent graphs using OrientDB: A short and hands-on introduction into OrientDB.
• Bringing monitoring into the 21st century - How to predict problems before they arise: A good talk about adaptive monitoring and why fixed thresholds can be misleading.
• DevOps is not an absolute. It's a range.: A really cool talk about the different nuances of DevOps inspired by real-world experiences.
• The Apache Cassandra storage engine: Not so interesting for me, as I've never used Cassandra before.
• Configuration management and deployment with RPM and YADT: The project I'm partially working on for my current employer. A colleague of mine held this talk and made a good job.

Besides the talks there were many booths from a lot of vendors and organizations.

Beastie, the mascot of BSD operating systems