thinktime

The Problem

Video playback looks better with a higher scan rate. A lot of content that was designed for TV (EG almost all historical documentaries) is going to be 25Hz interlaced (UK and Australia) or 30Hz interlaced (US). If you view that on a low refresh rate progressive scan display (EG a modern display at 30Hz) then my observation is that it looks a bit strange. Things that move seem to jump a bit and it’s distracting.

Getting HDMI to work with 4K resolution at a refresh rate higher than 30Hz seems difficult.

What HDMI Can Do

According to the HDMI Wikipedia page [1], HDMI 1.3–1.4b (introduced in June 2006) supports 30Hz refresh at 4K resolution and if you use 4:2:0 Chroma Subsampling (see the Chroma Subsampling Wikipedia page [2] you can do 60Hz or 75Hz on HDMI 1.3–1.4b. Basically for colour 4:2:0 means half the horizontal and half the vertical resolution while giving the same resolution for monochrome. For video that apparently works well (4:2:0 is standard for Blue Ray) and for games it might be OK, but for text (my primary use of computers) it would suck.

So I need support for HDMI 2.0 (introduced in September 2013) on the video card and monitor to do 4K at 60Hz. Apparently none of the combinations of video card and HDMI cable I use for Linux support that.

HDMI Cables

The Wikipedia page alleges that you need either a “Premium High Speed HDMI Cable” or a “Ultra High Speed HDMI Cable” for 4K resolution at 60Hz refresh rate. My problems probably aren’t related to the cable as my testing has shown that a cheap “High Speed HDMI Cable” can work at 60Hz with 4K resolution with the right combination of video card, monitor, and drivers. A Windows 10 system I maintain has a Samsung 4K monitor and a NVidia GT630 video card running 4K resolution at 60Hz (according to Windows). The NVidia GT630 card is one that I tried on two Linux systems at 4K resolution and causes random system crashes on both, it seems like a nice card for Windows but not for Linux.

Apparently the HDMI devices test the cable quality and use whatever speed seems to work (the cable isn’t identified to the devices). The prices at a local store are $3.98 for “high speed”, $19.88 for “premium high speed”, and $39.78 for “ultra high speed”. It seems that trying a “high speed” cable first before buying an expensive cable would make sense, especially for short cables which are likely to be less susceptible to noise.

What DisplayPort Can Do

According to the DisplayPort Wikipedia page [3] versions 1.2–1.2a (introduced in January 2010) support HBR2 which on a “Standard DisplayPort Cable” (which probably means almost all DisplayPort cables that are in use nowadays) allows 60Hz and 75Hz 4K resolution.

Comparing HDMI and DisplayPort

In summary to get 4K at 60Hz you need 2010 era DisplayPort or 2013 era HDMI. Apparently some video cards that I currently run for 4K (which were all bought new within the last 2 years) are somewhere between a 2010 and 2013 level of technology.

Also my testing (and reading review sites) shows that it’s common for video cards sold in the last 5 years or so to not support HDMI resolutions above FullHD, that means they would be HDMI version 1.1 at the greatest. HDMI 1.2 was introduced in August 2005 and supports 1440p at 30Hz. PCIe was introduced in 2003 so there really shouldn’t be many PCIe video cards that don’t support HDMI 1.2. I have about 8 different PCIe video cards in my spare parts pile that don’t support HDMI resolutions higher than FullHD so it seems that such a limitation is common.

The End Result

For my own workstation I plugged a DisplayPort cable between the monitor and video card and a Linux window appeared (from KDE I think) offering me some choices about what to do, I chose to switch to the “new monitor” on DisplayPort and that defaulted to 60Hz. After that change TV shows on NetFlix and Amazon Prime both look better. So it’s a good result.

As an aside DisplayPort cables are easier to scrounge as the HDMI cables get taken by non-computer people for use with their TV.

• [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI
• [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_subsampling
• [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort

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Background Knowledge

The Dunning Kruger Effect [1] is something everyone should read about. It’s the effect where people who are bad at something rate themselves higher than they deserve because their inability to notice their own mistakes prevents improvement, while people who are good at something rate themselves lower than they deserve because noticing all their mistakes is what allows them to improve.

Noticing all your mistakes all the time isn’t great (see Impostor Syndrome [2] for where this leads).

Erik Dietrich wrote an insightful article “How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner” [3] which I recommend that everyone reads. It is about how some people get stuck at a medium level of proficiency and find it impossible to unlearn bad practices which prevent them from achieving higher levels of skill.

What I’m Concerned About

A significant problem in large parts of the computer industry is that it’s not easy to compare various skills. In the sport of bowling (which Erik uses as an example) it’s easy to compare your score against people anywhere in the world, if you score 250 and people in another city score 280 then they are more skilled than you. If I design an IT project that’s 2 months late on delivery and someone else designs a project that’s only 1 month late are they more skilled than me? That isn’t enough information to know. I’m using the number of months late as an arbitrary metric of assessing projects, IT projects tend to run late and while delivery time might not be the best metric it’s something that can be measured (note that I am slightly joking about measuring IT projects by how late they are).

If the last project I personally controlled was 2 months late and I’m about to finish a project 1 month late does that mean I’ve increased my skills? I probably can’t assess this accurately as there are so many variables. The Impostor Syndrome factor might lead me to think that the second project was easier, or I might get egotistical and think I’m really great, or maybe both at the same time.

This is one of many resources recommending timely feedback for education [4], it says “Feedback needs to be timely” and “It needs to be given while there is still time for the learners to act on it and to monitor and adjust their own learning”. For basic programming tasks such as debugging a crashing program the feedback is reasonably quick. For longer term tasks like assessing whether the choice of technologies for a project was good the feedback cycle is almost impossibly long. If I used product A for a year long project does it seem easier than product B because it is easier or because I’ve just got used to it’s quirks? Did I make a mistake at the start of a year long project and if so do I remember why I made that choice I now regret?

Skills that Should be Easy to Compare

One would imagine that martial arts is a field where people have very realistic understanding of their own skills, a few minutes of contest in a ring, octagon, or dojo should show how your skills compare to others. But a YouTube search for “no touch knockout” or “chi” shows that there are more than a few “martial artists” who think that they can knock someone out without physical contact – with just telepathy or something. George Dillman [5] is one example of someone who had some real fighting skills until he convinced himself that he could use mental powers to knock people out. From watching YouTube videos it appears that such people convince the members of their dojo of their powers, and those people then faint on demand “proving” their mental powers.

The process of converting an entire dojo into believers in chi seems similar to the process of converting a software development team into “expert beginners”, except that martial art skills should be much easier to assess.

Is it ever possible to assess any skills if people trying to compare martial art skills often do it so badly?

Conclusion

It seems that any situation where one person is the undisputed expert has a risk of the “chi” problem if the expert doesn’t regularly meet peers to learn new techniques. If someone like George Dillman or one of the “expert beginners” that Erik Dietrich refers to was to regularly meet other people with similar skills and accept feedback from them they would be much less likely to become a “chi” master or “expert beginner”. For the computer industry meetup.com seems the best solution to this, whatever your IT skills are you can find a meetup where you can meet people with more skills than you in some area.

Here’s one of many guides to overcoming Imposter Syndrome [5]. Actually succeeding in following the advice of such web pages is not going to be easy.

I wonder if getting a realistic appraisal of your own skills is even generally useful. Maybe the best thing is to just recognise enough things that you are doing wrong to be able to improve and to recognise enough things that you do well to have the confidence to do things without hesitation.

• [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
• [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/yy24ef23
• [4] http://tinyurl.com/y8ffr5yk
• [5] https://www.girlsguidetopm.com/10-tips-to-overcome-imposter-syndrome/

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With a bit of tinkering one can use the https://github.com/bmellink/IBusBM library to send information back to the remote controller. The info is tagged as either temperature, rpm, or voltage and units set based on that. There is a limit of 9 user feedbacks so I have 3 of each exposed.


To do this I used one of the Mega 2650 boards that is in a small form factor configuration. This gave me 5 volts to run the actual rc receiver from and more than one UART to talk to the usb, input and output parts of the buses. I think you only need 2 UARTs but as I had a bunch I just used separate ones.

The 2560 also gives a lavish amount of ram so using ROS topics doesn't really matter. I have 9 subscribers and 1 publisher on the 2560. The 9 subscribers allows sending temp, voltage, rpm info back to the remote and flexibility in what is sent so that can be adjusted on the robot itself.

I used a servo extension cable to carry the base 5v, ground, and rx signals from the ibus out on the rc receiver unit. Handy as the servo plug ends can be taped together for the more bumpy environment that the hound likes to tackle. I wound up putting the diode floating between two extension wires on the (to tx) side of the bus.



The 1 publisher just sends an array with the raw RC values in it. With minimal delays I can get a reasonably steady 120hz publication of rc values. So now the houndbot can tell me when it is getting hungry for more fresh electrons from a great distance!

I had had some problems with the nano and the rc unit and locking up. I think perhaps this was due to crystals as the uno worked ok. The 2560 board has been bench tested for 30 minutes which was enough time to expose the issues on the nano.

Similarly to what I wrote for Fedora 29, here is how I was able to create a Fedora 31 LXC container on an Ubuntu 18.04 (bionic) laptop.

Setting up LXC on Ubuntu

First of all, install lxc:

apt install lxc echo "veth" >> /etc/modules modprobe veth

turn on bridged networking by putting the following in /etc/sysctl.d/local.conf:

net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

and applying it using:

sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.d/local.conf

Then allow the right traffic in your firewall (/etc/network/iptables.up.rules in my case):

# LXC containers -A FORWARD -d 10.0.3.0/24 -m conntrack --ctstate RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT -A FORWARD -s 10.0.3.0/24 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -d 224.0.0.251 -s 10.0.3.1 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -d 239.255.255.250 -s 10.0.3.1 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -d 10.0.3.255 -s 10.0.3.1 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -d 10.0.3.1 -s 10.0.3.0/24 -j ACCEPT

and apply these changes:

iptables-apply

before restarting the lxc networking:

systemctl restart lxc-net.service Create the container

Once that's in place, you can finally create the Fedora 29 container:

lxc-create -n fedora31 -t download -- -d fedora -r 31 -a amd64

To see a list of all distros available with the download template:

lxc-create -n foo --template=download -- --list

Once the container has been created, disable AppArmor for it:

lxc.apparmor.profile = unconfined

since the AppArmor profile isn't working at the moment.

Logging in as root

Starting the container in one window:

lxc-start -n fedora31 -F

and attaching to a console:

lxc-attach -n fedora31

to set a root password:

passwd Logging in as an unprivileged user via ssh

While logged into the console, I tried to install ssh:

$ dnf install openssh-server Cannot create temporary file - mkstemp: No such file or directory

but it failed because TMPDIR is set to a non-existent directory:

$ echo $TMPDIR /tmp/user/0

I found a fix and ran the following:

TMPDIR=/tmp dnf install openssh-server

then started the ssh service:

systemctl start sshd.service

Then I installed a few other packages as root:

dnf install vim sudo man

and created an unprivileged user with sudo access:

adduser francois -G wheel passwd francois

I set this in /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

GSSAPIAuthentication no

to prevent slow ssh logins.

Now login as that user from the console and add an ssh public key:

mkdir .ssh chmod 700 .ssh echo "<your public key>" > .ssh/authorized_keys chmod 644 .ssh/authorized_keys

You can now login via ssh. The IP address to use can be seen in the output of:

lxc-ls --fancy

A few months ago I was helping Gerhard, OE3GBB, track down some FreeDV 2020 sync issues over the QO-100 satellite.

Along the way, we investigated the phase noise of the QO-100 channel (including Gerhards Tx and Rx) by sending a carrier signal over the link, then running it through a GNU Octave phase_noise.m script to generate some interesting plots.

Fig 1 shows the spectrum of the carrier, some band pass noise in the SSB channel, and the single sinewave line at about 1500 Hz:

Fig 2 is a close up, where we have shifted the 1500 Hz tone down to 0 Hz. It’s not really a single frequency, but has a noise like spectra:

Figure 3 is polar plot or the I and Q (real and imag) against time. A perfect oscillator with a small frequency offset would trace a neat spiral, but due to the noise is wanders all over the place. Fig3A shows a close up of the first 5 seconds, where it reverses a few times, like a wheel rotating forwards and backwards at random:


Figure 4 is the “unwrapped phase” in radians. Unwrapping means if we get to -pi we just keep going, rather than wrapping around to pi. A constant slope suggests a constant frequency segment, for example in the first 5 seconds it wanders downwards -15 radians which suggests a frequency of -15/5 = -3 rads/sec or -3/(2*pi) = -0.5 Hz. The upwards slope from about 8 seconds is a positive frequency segment.

Figure 5 is the rate of change phase, in other words the instantaneous frequency offset, which is about -0.5 Hz at 8 seconds, then swings positive for a while:

Why does all this matter? Well phase shift keyed modems like QPSK have to track this phase. We were concerned about the ability of the FreeDV 2020 QPSK modem to track phase over QO-100. You also get similar meandering phase tracks over HF channels.

Turns out the GPS locking on one of the oscillators wasn’t working quite right, leading to step changes in the oscillator phase. So in this case, a hardware problem rather than the QPSK modem.

Links

QO-100 Sync Pull Request (with lots of notes)
FreeDV 2020 over the QO-100 Satellite
Digital Voice Transmission via QO-100 with FreeDV Mode 2020 (Lime Micro article)

On the eve of moving to Ottawa to join the Service Canada team (squee!) I thought it would be helpful to share a few things for posterity. There are three things below:

• Some observations that might be useful
• A short overview of the Pia Review: 20 articles about digital public sector reform
• Additional references I think are outstanding and worth considering in public sector digital/reform programs, especially policy transformation

Some observations

Moving from deficit to aspirational planning

Risk! Risk!! Risk!!! That one word is responsible for an incredible amount of fear, inaction, redirection of investment and counter-productive behaviours, especially by public sectors for whom the stakes for the economy and society are so high. But when you focus all your efforts on mitigating risks, you are trying to drive by only using the rear vision mirror, planning your next step based on the issues you’ve already experienced without looking to where you need to be. It ultimately leads to people driving slower and slower, often grinding to a halt, because any action is considered more risky than inaction. This doesn’t really help our metaphorical driver to pick up the kids from school or get supplies from the store. In any case, inaction bears as many risks as no action in a world that is continually changing. For example, if our metaphorical driver was to stop the car in an intersection they will likely be hit by another vehicle, or eventually starve to death.

Action is necessary. Change is inevitable. So public sectors must balance our time between being responsive (not reactive) to change and risks, and being proactive towards a clear goals or future state.

Of course, risk mitigation is what many in government think they need to most urgently address however, to only engage this is to buy into and perpetuate the myth that the increasing pace of change is itself a bad thing. This is the difference between user polling and user research: users think they need faster horses but actually they need a better way to transport more people over longer distances, which could lead to alternatives from horses. Shifting from a change pessimistic framing to change optimism is critical for public sectors to start to build responsiveness into their policy, program and project management. Until public servants embrace change as normal, natural and part of their work, then fear and fear based behaviours will drive reactivism and sub-optimal outcomes.

The OPSI model for innovation would be a helpful tool to ask senior public servants what proportion of their digital investment is in which box, as this will help identify how aspirational vs reactive, and how top down or bottom up they are, noting that there really should be some investment and tactics in all four quadrants.

My observation of many government digital programs is that teams spend a lot of their time doing top down (directed) work that focuses on areas of certainty, but misses out in building the capacity or vision required for bottom up innovation, or anything that genuinely explores and engages in areas of uncertainty. Central agencies and digital transformation teams are in the important and unique position to independently stand back to see the forest for the trees, and help shape systemic responses to all of system problems. My biggest recommendation would be for the these teams to support public sector partners to embrace change optimism, proactive planning, and responsiveness/resilience into their approaches, so as to be more genuinely strategic and effective in dealing with change, but more importantly, to better plan strategically towards something meaningful for their context.

Repeatability and scale

All digital efforts might be considered through the lens of repeatability and scale.

• If you are doing something, anything, could you publish it or a version of it for others to learn from or reuse? Can you work in the open for any of your work (not just publish after the fact)? If policy development, new services or even experimental projects could be done openly from the start, they will help drive a race to the top between departments.
• How would the thing you are considering scale? How would you scale impact without scaling resources? Basically, for anything you, if you’d need to dramatically scale resources to implement, then you are not getting an exponential response to the problem.

Sometimes doing non scalable work is fine to test an idea, but actively trying to differentiate between work that addresses symptomatic relief versus work that addresses causal factors is critical, otherwise you will inevitably find 100% of your work program focused on symptomatic relief.

It is critical to balance programs according to both fast value (short term delivery projects) and long value (multi month/year program delivery), reactive and proactive measures, symptomatic relief and addressing causal factors, & differentiating between program foundations (gov as a platform) and programs themselves. When governments don’t invest in digital foundations, they end up duplicating infrastructure for each and every program, which leads to the reduction of capacity, agility and responsiveness to change.

Digital foundations

Most government digital programs seem to focus on small experiments, which is great for individual initiatives, but may not lay the reusable digital foundations for many programs. I would suggest that in whatever projects the team embark upon, some effort be made to explore and demonstrate what the digital foundations for government should look like. For example:

• Digital public infrastructure - what are the things government is uniquely responsible for that it should make available as digital public infrastructure for others to build upon, and indeed for itself to consume. Eg, legislation as code, services registers, transactional service APIs, core information and data assets (spatial, research, statistics, budgets, etc), central budget management systems. “Government as a Platform” is a digital and transformation strategy, not just a technology approach.
• Policy transformation and closing the implementation gap -  many policy teams think the issues of policy intent not being realised is not their problem, so showing the value of multidisciplinary, test-driven and end to end policy design and implementation will dramatically shift digital efforts towards more holistic, sustainable and predictable policy and societal outcomes.
• Participatory governance - departments need to engage the public in policy, services or program design, so demonstrating the value or participatory governance is key. this is not a nice to have, but rather a necessary part of delivering good services. Here is a recent article with some concepts and methods to consider and the team needs to have capabilities to enable this, that aren’t just communications skills, but rather genuine and subject matter expertise engagement.
• Life Journey programs - putting digital transformation efforts,, policies, service delivery improvements and indeed any other government work in the context of life journeys helps to make it real, get multiple entities that play a part on that journey naturally involved and invested, and drives horizontal collaboration across and between jurisdictions. New Zealand led the way in this, NSW Government extended the methodology, Estonia has started the journey and they are systemically benefiting.
• I’ve spoken about designing better futures, and I do believe this is also a digital foundation, as it provides a lens through which to prioritise, implement and realise value from all of the above. Getting public servants to “design the good” from a citizen perspective, a business perspective, an agency perspective, Government perspective and from a society perspective helps flush out assumptions, direction and hypotheses that need testing.

The Pia Review

I recently wrote a series of 20 articles about digital transformation and reform in public sectors. It was something I did for fun, in my own time, as a way of both recording and sharing my lessons learned from 20 years working at the intersection of tech, government and society (half in the private sector, half in the public sector). I called it the Public Sector Pia Review and I’ve been delighted by how it has been received, with a global audience republishing, sharing, commenting, and most important, starting new discussions about the sort of public sector they want and the sort of public servants they want to be. Below is a deck that has an insight from each of the 20 articles, and links throughout.

This is not just meant to be a series about digital, but rather about the matter of public sector reform in the broadest sense, and I hope it is a useful contribution to better public sectors, not just better public services.

There is also a collated version of the articles in two parts. These compilations are linked below for convenience, and all articles are linked in the references below for context.

• Public-Sector-Pia-Review-Part-1 (6MB PDF) — essays written to provide practical tips, methods, tricks and ideas to help public servants to their best possible work today for the best possible public outcomes; and
• Reimagining government (will link once published) — essays about possible futures, the big existential, systemic or structural challenges and opportunities as I’ve experienced them, paradigm shifts and the urgent need for everyone to reimagine how they best serve the government, the parliament and the people, today and into the future.

A huge thank you to the Mandarin, specifically Harley Dennett, for the support and encouragement to do this, as well as thanks to all the peer reviewers and contributors, and of course my wonderful husband Thomas who peer reviewed several articles, including the trickier ones!

My digital references and links from 2019

Below are a number of useful references for consideration in any digital government strategy, program or project, including some of mine

General reading

• Some Pia Review articles:
  • Apolitical public sectors – The useful benefit of equally serving three masters
  • A primer for public engagement – Participatory public governance
  • Government as a Platform  – the foundations for Digital Government and Gov 2.0
  • Trust Infrastructure for the 21st Century
  • The myth of IT procurement: how to avoid sprinting off cliffs
  • The unintended consequences of New Public Management and how to ensure best public good
  • Enabling innovation and collaboration across the public sector
  • How to scale impact through innovation and transformation
  • How to avoid change for change’s sake
  • What does open government mean for digital transformation
  • Government 2.0: the substance behind the semantics
  • Designing better futures to better inform the present
  • The future of service delivery isn’t websites or apps – preparing for personal AIs
  • Systemic challenges for digital public sector reform
• Optimistic futures – blog post with predictions by Pia
• Embracing Innovation in Government: Global Trends 2019 – OECD Report
• NSW Gov AI analysis and scan
• Emerging Tech Primers by the NSW Policy Lab: Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Rules as Code

Life Journeys as a Strategy

Life Journey programs, whilst largely misunderstood and quite new to government, provide a surprisingly effective way to drive cross agency collaboration, holistic service and system design, prioritisation of investment for best outcomes, and a way to really connect policy, services and human outcomes with all involved on the usual service delivery supply chains in public sectors. Please refer to the following references, noting that New Zealand were the first to really explore this space, and are being rapidly followed by other governments around the world. Also please note the important difference between customer journey mapping (common), customer mapping that spans services but is still limited to a single agency/department (also common), and true life journey mapping which necessarily spans agencies, jurisdictions and even sectors (rare) like having a child, end of life, starting school or becoming an adult.

• Pia Review article that talks about the collaboration benefits of Life Journeys
• A Life Journeys Primer that explains some of the methods and approach (content developed at NSW)
• Birth of a Child life event information from NZ
• The Citizen research work in NZ that kicked off their Life Journey program

Policy transformation

• Transforming Public Policy article (Tim De Sousa and Pia Andrews article)
• A full report on the Policy Lab transformation done in NSW Government
• A useful Harvard article on Agile Policy

Data in Government

• Public Data report from Australian Gov
• Data users and virtualised architecture – resource created by Pia Andrews
• Sharing data is no panacea – Pia Review article on balancing data sharing with verifiable claims and other methods

Designing better futures to transform towards

If you don’t design a future state to work towards, then you end up just designing reactively to current, past or potential issues. This leads to a lack of strategic or cohesive direction in any particular direction, which leads to systemic fragmentation and ultimately system ineffectiveness and cannibalism. A clear direction isn’t just about principles or goals, it needs to be something people can see, connect with, align their work towards to (even if they aren’t in your team), and get enthusiastic about. This is how you create change at scale, when people buy into the agenda, at all levels, and start naturally walking in the same direction regardless of their role. Here are some examples for consideration.

• Designing better futures including links to the Optimistic Futures work
• Preparing for Personal AIs – a future focused approach that is a little more within reach for folk.

Rules as Code

Please find the relevant Rules as Code links below for easy reference.

• Better Rules and Legislation as Code presentation – an explainer presentation deck I did that I keep up to date with new links and references
• Rules as Code article with Tim De Sousa about the benefits and opportunities
• The first Better Rules Discovery Report from NZ (Nadia Webster) & video by MBIE
• Better Rules Workshop Manual (by Hamish Fraser & Nadia Webster, NZ)
• Rules as Code Handbook (Tim De Sousa) & Better Rules guide (Hamish Fraser)
• The NSW Rules as Code Emerging Tech Primer (the NSW Gov Policy Lab)
• An international Better Rules community forum

Better Rules and RaC examples

• Accident Compensation Act (NZ) Better Rules Discovery Report (ACC)
• Applying Rules as Code for city planning & consenting (Wellington Council)
• NZ SmartStart:https://smartstart.services.govt.nz/ with “financial help” function
• Rapu Ture: NZ Rules Explorer: http://www.rules.nz
• NSW OpenFISCA API code: http://github.com/digitalnsw/openfisca-nsw
• ‘Cereal’ – Active Kids calculator demo: https://digitalnsw.github.io/cereal/
• NSW Rules Explorer: http://nsw-rules.herokuapp.com/
• Openfisca https://fr.openfisca.org/
• “Help Me Plan” concept prototype (2017) that informed subsequent work.
• NZ Rates Rebates Act, the rules as code (calculation, variables) & an easy to use calculator that helps citizens understand how the rules apply to them before applying, noting the same backend RaC tool then supports many tools.
• Mes Aides – a tool for French Citizens to understand the services and taxation implications for their personal circumstances without having to logon.
• The Rules as Code work from the Service Innovation Lab in NZ Govt.
• The Financial Help calculator on the SmartStart (birth of a child life journey) service in NZ.
• Openfisca country packages for reuse & reference, & project documentation.

On a Linux system if you upgrade a shared object that is in use any programs that have it mapped will list it as “(deleted)” in the /proc/PID/maps file for the process in question. When you have a system tracking the stable branch of a distribution it’s expected that most times a shared object is upgraded it will be due to a security issue. When that happens the reasonable options are to either restart all programs that use the shared object or to compare the attack surface of such programs to the nature of the security issue. In most cases restarting all programs that use the shared object is by far the easiest and least inconvenient option.

Generally shared objects are used a lot in a typical Linux system, this can be good for performance (more cache efficiency and less RAM use) and is also good for security as buggy code can be replaced for the entire system by replacing a single shared object. Sometimes it’s obvious which processes will be using a shared object (EG your web server using a PHP shared object) but other times many processes that you don’t expect will use it.

I recently wrote “deleted-mapped.monitor” for my etbemon project [1]. This checks for shared objects that are mapped and deleted and gives separate warning messages for root and non-root processes. If you have the unattended-upgrades package installed then your system can install security updates without your interaction and then the monitoring system will inform you if things need to be restarted.

The Debian package debian-goodies has a program checkrestart that will tell you what commands to use to restart daemons that have deleted shared objects mapped.

Now to solve the problem of security updates on a Debian system you can use unattended-upgrades to apply updates, deleted-mapped.monitor in etbemon to inform you that programs need to be restarted, and checkrestart to tell you the commands you need to run to restart the daemons in question.

If anyone writes a blog post about how to do this on a non-Debian system please put the URL in a comment.

While writing the deleted-mapped.monitor I learned about the following common uses of deleted mapped files:

• /memfd: is for memfd https://dvdhrm.wordpress.com/tag/memfd/ [2]
• /[aio] is for asynchronous IO I guess, haven’t found good docs on it yet.
• /home is used for a lot of harmless mapping and deleting.
• /run/user is used for systemd dconf stuff.
• /dev/zero is different for each map and thus looks deleted.
• /tmp/ is used by Python (and probably other programs) creates temporary files there for mapping.
• /var/lib is used for lots of temporary files.
• /i915 is used by some X apps on systems with Intel video, I don’t know why.

• [1] https://doc.coker.com.au/projects/etbe-mon/
• [2] https://dvdhrm.wordpress.com/tag/memfd/

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My last post was read directly (as opposed to reading through Planet feeds) a lot more than usual due to someone sharing it on lobste.rs. Presumably the people who read it that way benefited from reading it and I got a couple of unusually insightful comments from people who don’t usually comment on my blog. The lobste.rs sharing was a win for everyone.

There are a variety of plugins for social media sharing, most of which allow organisations like Facebook to track people who read your blog which is why I haven’t been using them.

Are there good ways of allowing people to easily share your blog posts which work in a reasonable way by not allowing much tracking of users unless they actually want to share content?

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Start: Feb 4 2020 18:30 End: Feb 4 2020 20:30 Start: Feb 4 2020 18:30 End: Feb 4 2020 20:30 Location:  Kathleen Syme Library, 251 Faraday Street Carlton VIC 3053 Link:  http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/community/hubs-bookable-spaces/kathleen-syme-lib...

LUV Meet & Greet and General Discussion

This is a casual gathering of LUVers to meet and greet and have a general discussion!

There is no talks scheduled but there might be lightning talks. So, if you have a topic of interest you like to share with others or have a challenge that you want to get experts' opinions on, this would be a great opportunity.

If you have never used Linux or have never been to a LUV meeting, you are more than welcome to join us! We look forward to seeing you at the meeting.

Where to find us

Many of us like to go for dinner nearby in Lygon St. after the meeting. Please let us know if you'd like to join us!

Linux Users of Victoria is a subcommittee of Linux Australia.

February 4, 2020 - 18:30

read more

As I was an organiser of the conference this year, I didn’t get to see many talks, fortunately many of the talks were recorded, so i get to watch the conference well after the fact.

Conference Opening

That white balance on the lectern slides is indeed bad, I really should get around to adding this as a suggestion on the logos documentation. (With some help, I put up all the lectern covers, it was therapeutic and rush free).

I actually think there was a lot of information in this introduction. Perhaps too much?

OpenZFS and Linux

A nice update on where zfs is these days.

Dev/Ops relationships, status: It’s Complicated

A bit of  a war story about production systems, leading to a moment of empathy.

Samba 2020: Why are we still in the 1980s for authentication?

There are a lot of old security standards that are showing there age, there are a lot of modern security standards, but which to choose?

Tyranny of the Clock

A very interesting problem solving adventure, with a few nuggets of interesting information about tools and techniques.

Configuration Is (riskier than?) Code

Because configuration files are parsed by a program, and the program changes how it runs depending on the contents of that configuration file, every program that parses configuration files is basically an interpreter, and thus every configuration file is basically a program. So, configuation is code, and we should be treating configuration like we do code, e.g. revision control, commenting, testing, review.

Easy Geo-Redundant Handover + Failover with MARS + systemd

Using a local process organiser to handle a cluster, interesting, not something I’d really promote. Not the best video cutting in this video, lots of time with the speaker pointing to his slides offscreen.

 

For my ETBE-Mon [1] monitoring system I recently added a monitor for the Linux load average. The Unix load average isn’t a very good metric for monitoring system load, but it’s well known and easy to use. I’ve previously written about the Linux load average and how it’s apparently different from other Unix like OSs [2]. The monitor is still named loadavg but I’ve now made it also monitor on the usage of memory because excessive memory use and load average are often correlated.

For issues that might be transient it’s good to have a monitoring system give a reasonable amount of information about the problem so it can be diagnosed later on. So when the load average monitor gives an alert I have it display a list of D state processes (if any), a list of the top 10 processes using the most CPU time if they are using more than 5%, and a list of the top 10 processes using the most RAM if they are using more than 2% total virtual memory.

For documenting the output of the free(1) command (or /proc/meminfo when writing a program to do it) the best page I found was this StackExchange page [3]. So I compare MemAvailable+SwapFree to MemTotal+SwapTotal to determine the percentage of virtual memory used.

Any suggestions on how I could improve this?

The code is in the recent releases of etbemon, it’s in Debian/Unstable, on the project page on my site, and here’s a link to the loadave.monitor script in the Debian Salsa Git repository [4].

• [1] https://doc.coker.com.au/projects/etbe-mon/
• [2] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/11/01/load-average/
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/y9ywdcow
• [4] http://tinyurl.com/yx4qlzy7

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A few weeks ago (okay, close to six), I put up a firmware build for the Raptor Blackbird with close-to-upstream firmware (see here).

Well, I’ve done another build! It’s current op-build (as of this morning), but my branch with patches for the Raptor Blackbird. The skiboot patch is there, as is the SBE speedup patch. Current kernel (works fine with my hardware), current petitboot, and the machine-xml which is straight from Raptor but in my repo.

Versions of everything are:

$ lsprop /sys/firmware/devicetree/base/ibm,firmware-versions/ skiboot "v6.5-209-g179d53df-p4360f95" bmc-firmware-version "0.01" occ "3ab2921" hostboot "779761d-pe7e80e1" buildroot "2019.05.3-14-g17f117295f" capp-ucode "p9-dd2-v4" machine-xml "site_local-stewart-a0efd66" hostboot-binaries "hw011120a.opmst" sbe "166b70c-p06fc80c" hcode "hw011520a.opmst" petitboot "v1.11" phandle 000005d0 (1488) version "blackbird-v2.4-415-gb63b36ef" linux "5.4.13-openpower1-pa361bec" name "ibm,firmware-versions"

You can download all the bits (including debug tarball) from https://www.flamingspork.com/blackbird/stewart-blackbird-2-images/ and follow the instructions for trying it out or flashing blackbird.pnor.

Again, would love to hear how it goes for you!

This post is an attempt to collect a set of general hints and tips for resumes and interviews. It is not concrete truth though, like all things this process is subjective and will differ from place to place. It originally started as a Google doc shared around a previous workplace during some layoffs, but it seems more useful than that so I am publishing it publicly.

I’d welcome comments if you think it will help others.

So something bad happened

I have the distinction of having been through layoffs three times now. I think there are some important first steps:

• Take a deep breath.
• Hug your loved ones and then go and sweat on something — take a walk, go to the gym, whatever works for you. Research shows that exercise is a powerful mood stabiliser.
• Make a plan. Who are you going to apply with? Who could refer you? What do you want to do employment wise? Updating your resume is probably a good first step in that plan.
• Treat finding a job as your job. You probably can’t do it for eight hours a day, but it should be your primary goal for each “workday”. Have a todo list, track things on that list, and keep track of status.

And remember, being laid off isn’t about you, it is about things outside your control. Don’t take it as a reflection on your abilities.

Resumes

• The goal of a resume is to get someone to want to interview you. It is not meant to be a complete description of everything you’ve done. So, keep it short and salesy (without lying through oversimplification!).
• Resumes are also cultural — US firms tend to expect short summary (two pages), Australian firms seem to expect something longer and more detailed. So, ask your friends if you can see their resumes to get a sense of the right style for the market you’re operating in. It is possible you’ll end up with more than one version if you’re applying in two markets at once.
• Speaking of friends, referrals are gold. Perhaps look through your LinkedIn and other social media and see where people you’ve formerly worked with are now. If you have a good reputation with someone and they’re somewhere cool, ask them to refer you for a job. It might not work, but it can’t hurt.
• Ratings for skills on LinkedIn help recruiters find you. So perhaps rate your friends for things you think they’re good at and then ask them to return the favour?

Interviews in general

The soft interview questions we all get asked:

• I would expect to be asked what I’ve done in my career — an “introduce yourself” moment. So try and have a coherent story that is short but interesting — “I’m a system admin who has been working on cloud orchestration and software defined networking for Australia’s largest telco” for example.
• You will probably be asked why you’re looking for work too. I think there’s no shame in honesty here, something like “I worked for a small systems integrator that did amazing things, but the main customer has been doing large layoffs and stopped spending”.
• You will also probably be asked why you want this job / want to work with this company. While everyone really knows it is because you enjoy having money, find other things beforehand to say instead. “I want to work with Amazon because I love cloud, Amazon is kicking arse in that space, and I hear you have great people I’d love to work with”.

Note here: the original version of the above point said “I’d love to learn from”, but it was mentioned on Facebook that the flow felt one way there. It has been tweaked to express a desire for a two way flow of learning.

“What have you done” questions: the reality is that almost all work is collaborative these days. So, have some stories about things you’ve personally done and are proud of, but also have some stories of delivering things bigger than one person could do. For example, perhaps the ansible scripts for your project were super cool and mostly you, but perhaps you should also describe how the overall project was important and wouldn’t have worked without your bits.

Silicon Valley interviews: organizations like Google, Facebook, et cetera want to be famous for having hard interviews. Google will deliberately probe until they find an area you don’t know about and then dig into that. Weirdly, they’re not doing that to be mean — they’re trying to gauge how you respond to new situations (and perhaps stress). So, be honest if you don’t know the answer, but then offer up an informed guess. For example, I used to ask people about system calls and strace. We’d keep going until we hit the limit of what they understood. I’d then stop and explain the next layer and then ask them to infer things — “assuming that things work like this, how would this probably work”? It is important to not panic!

Interviews as a sysadmin

• Interviewers want to know about your attitude as well as your skills. As sysadmins, sometimes we are faced with high pressure situations  — something is down and we need to get it back up and running ASAP. Have a story ready to tell about a time something went wrong. You should demonstrate that you took the time to plan before acting, even in an emergency scenario. Don’t leave the interviewer thinking you’ll be the guy who will accidentally delete everyone’s data because you’re in a rush.
• An understanding of how the business functions and why “IT” is important is needed. For example, if you get asked to explain what a firewall is, be sure to talk about how it relates to “security policy” as well as the technical elements (ports, packet inspection & whatnot).
• Your ability to learn new technologies is as important as the technologies you already know.

Interviews as a developer

• I think people look for curiosity here. Everyone will encounter new things, so they want to hear that you like learning, are a self starter, and can do new stuff. So for example if you’ve just done the CKA exam and passed that would be a great example.
• You need to have examples of things you have built and why those were interesting. Was the thing poorly defined before you built it? Was it experimental? Did it have a big impact for the customer?
• An open source portfolio can really help — it means people can concretely see what you’re capable of instead of just playing 20 questions with you. If you don’t have one, don’t start new projects — go find an existing project to contribute to. It is much more effective.

I’ve decided to change my rating system

• 5/5 = Brilliant, top 5 book of the year
• 4/5 = Above average, strongly recomend
• 3/5 = Average. in the middle 70%
• 2/5 = Disappointing
• 1/5 = Did not like at all

Far Futures edited by Gregory Benford

5 Hard SF stories set it the distant (10,000 years+) future. I thought they were all pretty good. Would recommend 4/5

Farmer Boy: Little House Series, Book 2 by Laura Ingalls Wilder

A year in a life of a 9 year old boy on a farm in 1860s New Year State. Lots of hard work and chores. His family is richer than Laura’s from the previous book. 3/5

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

A quick (4h) overview and introduction of our current understanding of the universe. A nice little introduction to the big stuff. 3/5

The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West by David McCullough

The Story of five of the first settlers of Marietta, Ohio from 1788 and the early history of the town. Not a big book or wide scope but works okay within it’s limits. 4/5

1971, Never a Dull Moment: Rock’s Golden Year by David Hepworth

A month by month walk though musical (and some other) history for 1971. Lots of gossip, backstories and history changing (or not) moments. 4/5

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

A guide to cutting down electronic distrations (especially social media) to those that make your life better and help towards your goals. 3/5

Today I’m delighted to announce the next big adventure for my little family and I.

For my part, I will be joining the inspirational, aspirational and world leading Service Canada to help drive the Benefits Delivery Modernization program with Benoit Long, Tammy Belanger and their wonderful team, in collaboration with our wonderful colleagues across the Canadian Government! This enormous program aims to dramatically improve the experience of Canadians with a broad range of government services, whilst transforming the organization and helping create the digital foundations for a truly responsive, effective and human-centred public sector

This is a true digital transformation opportunity which will make a difference in the lives of so many people. It provides a chance to implement and really realise the benefits of human-centred service design, modular architecture (and Government as a Platform), Rules as Code, data analytics, life journey mapping, and all I have been working on for the last 10 years. I am extremely humbled and thankful for the chance to work with and learn from such a forward thinking team, whilst being able to contribute my experience and expertise to such an important and ambitious agenda.

I can’t wait to work with colleagues across ESDC and the broader Government of Canada, as well as from the many innovative provincial governments. I’ve been lucky enough to attend FWD50 in Ottawa for the last 3 years, and I am consistently impressed by the digital and public sector talent in Canada. Of course, because Canada is one of the “Digital Nations“, it also presents a great opportunity to collaborate closely with other leading digital governments, as I also found when working in New Zealand.

We’ll be moving to Ottawa in early March, so we will see everyone in Canada soon, and will be using the next month or so packing up, spending time with Australian friends and family, and learning about our new home

My husband and little one are looking forward to learning about Canadian and Indigenous cultures, learning French (and hopefully some Indigenous languages too, if appropriate!), introducing more z’s into my English, experiencing the cold (yes, snow is a novelty for Australians) and contributing how we can to the community in Ottawa. Over the coming years we will be exploring Canada and I can’t wait to share the particularly local culinary delight that is a Beavertail (a large, flat, hot doughnut like pastry) with my family!

For those who didn’t pick up the reference, the blog title had dual meaning: we are of course heading to Ottawa in the Spring, having had a last Australian Summer for a while (gah!), and it also was a little call out to one of the great Canadian bands, that I’ve loved for years, the Tragically Hip

C is Not a Low Level Language [1] is an insightful article about the problems with C and the overall design of most current CPUs.

Interesting article about how the Boeing 737Max failure started with a takeover by MBA aparatcheks [2].

Interesting article about the risk of blood clots in space [3]. Widespread human spaceflight is further away than most people expect.

Wired has an insightful article about why rich people are so mean [4]. Also some suggestions for making them less mean.

Google published interesting information about their Titan security processor [5]. It’s currently used on the motherboards of GCP servers and internal Google servers. It would be nice if Google sold motherboards with a version of this.

Interesting research on how the alleged Supermicro motherboard backdoor [6]. It shows that while we may never know if the alleged attack took place such things are proven to be possible. In security we should assume that every attack that is possible is carried out on occasion. It might not have happen when people claim it happened, but it probably happened to someone somewhere. Also we know that TAO carried out similar attacks.

Arstechnica has an interesting article about cracking old passwords used by Unix pioneers [7]. In the old days encrypted passwords weren’t treated as secrets (/etc/passwd is world readable and used to have the encrypted passwords) and some of the encrypted passwords were included in source archives and have now been cracked.

Jim Baker (former general counsel of the FBI) wrote an insightful article titled Rethinking Encryption [8]. Lots of interesting analysis of the issues related to privacy vs the ability of the government to track criminals.

The Atlantic has an interesting article The Coalition Out to Kill Tech as We Know It [9] about the attempts to crack down on the power of big tech companies. Seems like good news.

The General Counsel of the NSA wrote an article “I Work for N.S.A. We Cannot Afford to Lose the Digital Revolution” [10].

Thoughts and Prayers by Ken Liu is an insightful story about trolling and NRA types [11].

Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful Locus article about the lack of anti-trust enforcement in the tech industry and it’s free speech implications titles “Inaction is a Form of Action” [12].

• [1] https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479
• [2] http://tinyurl.com/vdyc9um
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/unsfaqz
• [4] https://www.wired.com/story/why-are-rich-people-so-mean/
• [5] http://tinyurl.com/y78k8bqb
• [6] https://trmm.net/modchips
• [7] http://tinyurl.com/y6pno2xl
• [8] https://www.lawfareblog.com/rethinking-encryption
• [9] http://tinyurl.com/t6w3pbc
• [10] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/opinion/nsa-privacy.html
• [11] http://tinyurl.com/yy5jr3xa
• [12] http://tinyurl.com/qkhrv5g

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Writing to meet WCAG2 standards can be a challenge, but it’s worthwhile. Albert Einstein, the archetypical genius and physicist, once said, “Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.”

Hopefully, this entire book will help you better write for accessibility. So far, you’ve learned:

• Why clarity is important
• How to structure messages for error states and stress cases
• How to test the effectiveness of the words you write

All that should help your writing be better for screen readers, give additional context to users who may need it, and be easier to parse.

But there are a few specific points that you may not otherwise think about, even after reading these pages.

Writing for Screen Readers

People with little or no sight interact with apps and websites in a much different way than sighted people do. Screen readers parse the elements on the screen (to the best of their abilities) and read it back to the user. And along the way, there are many ways this could go wrong. As the interface writer, your role is perhaps most important in giving screen reader users the best context.

Here are a few things to keep in mind about screen readers:

• The average reading time for sighted readers is two to five words per second. Screen-reader users can comprehend text being read at an average of 35 syllables per second, which is significantly faster. Don’t be afraid to sacrifice brevity for clarity, especially when extra context is needed or useful.
• People want to be able to skim long blocks of text, regardless of sight or audio, so it’s extremely important to structure your longform writing with headers, short paragraphs, and other content design best practices.

Write Chronologically, Not Spatially

Writing chronologically is about describing the order of things, rather than where they appear spatially in the interface. There are so many good reasons to do this (devices and browsers will render interfaces differently), but screen readers show you the most valuable reason. You’ll often be faced with writing tooltips or onboarding elements that say something like, “Click the OK button below to continue.” Or “See the instructions above to save your document.”

Screen readers will do their job and read those instructions aloud to someone who can’t see the spatial relationships between words and objects. While many times, they can cope with that, they shouldn’t have to. Consider screen reader users in your language. Embrace the universal experience shared by humans and rely on their intrinsic understanding of the top is first, bottom is last paradigm. Write chronologically, as in Figure 5.5.

FIGURE 5.5 Password hint microcopy below the password field won’t help someone using a screen reader who hasn’t made it there yet.

Rather than saying:

• Click the OK button below to continue.
• (A button that scrolls you to the top of a page): Go to top.

Instead, say:

• Next, select OK to continue.
• Go to beginning.

Write Left to Right, Top to Bottom

While you don’t want to convey spatial meaning in your writing, you still want to keep that spatial order in mind.

Have you ever purchased a service or a product, only to find out later that there were conditions you didn’t know about before you paid for it? Maybe you didn’t realize batteries weren’t included in that gadget, or that signing up for that social network, you were implicitly agreeing to provide data to third-party advertisers.

People who use screen readers face this all the time.

Most screen readers will parse information from left to write, from top to bottom.1 Think about a few things when reviewing the order and placement of your words. Is there information critical to performing an action, or making a decision, that appears after (to the right or below) an action item, like in Figure 5.5? If so, consider moving it up in the interface.

Instead, if there’s information critical to an action (rules around setting a password, for example, or accepting terms of service before proceeding), place it before the text field or action button. Even if it’s hidden in a tooltip or info button, it should be presented before a user arrives at a decision point.

Don’t Use Colors and Icons Alone

If you are a sighted American user of digital products, there’s a pretty good chance that if you see a message in red, you’ll interpret it as a warning message or think something’s wrong. And if you see a message in green, you’ll likely associate that with success. But while colors aid in conveying meaning to this type of user, they don’t necessarily mean the same thing to those from other cultures.

For example, although red might indicate excitement, or danger in the U.S. (broadly speaking), in other cultures it means something entirely different:

• In China, it represents good luck.
• In some former-Soviet, eastern European countries it’s the color strongly associated with Communism.
• In India, it represents purity.

Yellow, which we in the U.S. often use to mean “caution” (because we’re borrowing a mental model from traffic lights), might convey another meaning for people in other cultures:

• In Latin America, yellow is associated with death.
• In Eastern and Asian cultures, it’s a royal color—sacred and often imperial.

And what about users with color-blindness or low to no vision? And what about screen readers? Intrinsic meaning from the interface color means nothing for them. Be sure to add words that bear context so that if you heard the message being read aloud, you would understand what was being said, as in Figure 5.6.

FIGURE 5.6 While a simple in-app message warning a user to save their work before proceeding is more effective, visually, if it is red and has a warning icon, as seen on the left, you should provide more context when possible. The example on the right explicitly says that a user won’t be able to proceed to the next step before saving their work. Describe the Action, Not the Behavior

Touch-first interfaces have been steadily growing and replacing keyboard/mouse interfaces for years, so no longer are users “clicking” a link or a button. But they’re not necessarily “tapping” it either, especially if they’re using a voice interface or an adaptive device.

Instead of microcopy that includes behavioral actions like:

• Click
• Tap
• Press
• See

Try device-agnostic words that describe the action, irrespective of the interface, like:

• Choose
• Select
• View

There are plenty of exceptions to this rule. If your interface requires a certain action to execute a particular function, and you need to teach the user how their gesture affects the interface (“Pinch to zoom out,” for example), then of course you need to describe the behavior. But generally, the copy you’re writing will be simpler and more consistent if you stick with the action in the context of the interface itself.

It's that time of year again. Most of OzLabs headed up to the Gold Coast for linux.conf.au 2020.

linux.conf.au is one of the longest-running community-led Linux and Free Software events in the world, and attracts a crowd from Australia, New Zealand and much further afield. OzLabbers have been involved in LCA since the very beginning and this year was no exception with myself running the Kernel Miniconf and several others speaking.

The list below contains some of our highlights that we think you should check out. This is just a few of the talks that we managed to make it to - there's plenty more worthwhile stuff on the linux.conf.au YouTube channel.

We'll see you all at LCA2021 right here in Canberra...

Keynotes

A couple of the keynotes really stood out:

• Sean Brady - Drop Your Tools - Does Expertise have a Dark Side?

Sean is a forensic structural engineer who shows us a variety of examples, from structural collapses and firefighting disasters, where trained professionals were blinded by their expertise and couldn't bring themselves to do things that were obvious.

• Vanessa Teague - Who cares about Democracy?

There's nothing quite like cryptography proofs presented to a keynote audience at 9:30 in the morning. Vanessa goes over the issues with electronic voting systems in Australia, and especially internet voting as used in NSW, including flaws in their implementation of cryptographic algorithms. There continues to be no good way to do internet voting, but with developments in methodologies like risk-limiting audits there may be reasonably safe ways to do in-person electronic voting.

OpenPOWER

There was an OpenISA miniconf, co-organised by none other than Hugh Blemings of the OpenPOWER Foundation.

• Michael Neuling / Anton Blanchard - Power OpenISA and Microwatt Introduction

Anton (on Mikey's behalf) introduces the Power OpenISA and the Microwatt FPGA core which has been released to go with it.

• Anton Blanchard - Build your own Open Hardware CPU in 25 minutes or less

Anton live demos Microwatt in simulation, and also tries to synthesise it for his FPGA but runs out of time...

• Paul Mackerras - Microwatt Microarchitecture

Paul presents an in-depth overview of the design of the Microwatt core.

Kernel

There were quite a few kernel talks, both in the Kernel Miniconf and throughout the main conference. These are just some of them:

• Aleksa Sarai - Designing Extensible Syscalls

There's been many cases where we've introduced a syscall only to find out later on that we need to add some new parameters - how do we make our syscalls extensible so we can add new parameters later on without needing to define a whole new syscall, while maintaining both forward and backward compatibility? It turns out it's pretty simple but needs a few more kernel helpers.

• Russell Currey - Kernel hacking like it's 2020

There are a bunch of tools out there which you can use to make your kernel hacking experience much more pleasant. You should use them.

• Aleksa Sarai - Securing Container Runtimes - How Hard Can It Be?

Among other security issues with container runtimes, using procfs to setup security controls during the startup of a container is fraught with hilarious problems, because procfs and the Linux filesystem API aren't really designed to do this safely, and also have a bunch of amusing bugs.

• Kees Cook - Control Flow Integrity in the Linux Kernel

Control Flow Integrity is a technique for restricting exploit techniques that hijack a program's control flow (e.g. by overwriting a return address on the stack (ROP), or overwriting a function pointer that's used in an indirect jump). Kees goes through the current state of CFI supporting features in hardware and what is currently available to enable CFI in the kernel.

• Matthew Wilcox - Large Pages in Linux

Linux has supported huge pages for many years, which has significantly improved CPU performance. However, the huge page mechanism was driven by hardware advancements and is somewhat inflexible, and it's just as important to consider software overhead. Matthew has been working on supporting more flexible "large pages" in the page cache to do just that.

• Russell Currey - The magical fantasy land of Linux kernel testing

Spoiler: the magical fantasy land is a trap.

Community

Lots of community and ethics discussion this year - one talk which stood out to me:

• Bradley M. Kuhn / Karen Sandler - Open Source Won, but Software Freedom Hasn't Yet: A Guide & Commisseration Session for FOSS activists

Bradley and Karen argue that while open source has "won", software freedom has regressed in recent years, and present their vision for what modern, pragmatic Free Software activism should look like.

Other

Among the variety of other technical talks at LCA...

• Matthew Treinish - Building a Compiler for Quantum Computers

Quantum compilers are not really like regular classical compilers (indeed, they're really closer to FPGA synthesis tools). Matthew talks through how quantum compilers map a program on to IBM's quantum hardware and the types of optimisations they apply.

• Fraser Tweedale - Clevis and Tang: securing your secrets at rest

Clevis and Tang provide an implementation of "network bound encryption", allowing you to magically decrypt your secrets when you are on a secure network with access to the appropriate Tang servers. This talk outlines use cases and provides a demonstration.

• Christoph Lameter - How to capture 100G Ethernet traffic at wire speed to local disk

Christoph discusses how to deal with the hardware and software limitations that make it difficult to capture traffic at wire speed on fast fibre networks.

Start: Jan 25 2020 12:00 End: Jan 25 2020 16:00 Start: Jan 25 2020 12:00 End: Jan 25 2020 16:00 Location:  Yarra Bank Reserve, Hawthorn

The Linux Users of Victoria Annual Penguin Picnic will be held on Saturday, January 25, starting at 12 noon at the Yarra Bank Reserve, Hawthorn.  In the event of hazardous levels of smoke or other dangerous weather, we will announce an alternate indoor location.

LUV would like to acknowledge Infoxchange for the Richmond venue.

Linux Users of Victoria Inc., is a subcommitee of Linux Australia.

January 25, 2020 - 12:00

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Start: Feb 15 2020 12:30 End: Feb 15 2020 16:30 Start: Feb 15 2020 12:30 End: Feb 15 2020 16:30 Location:  Infoxchange, 33 Elizabeth St. Richmond Link:  http://luv.asn.au/meetings/map

Film Freedom: making and releasing films with free software

Film Freedom is a documentation and development project to make filmmaking with free-software and releasing via free culture funding models more accessible. It currently includes the following development projects:

The meeting will be held at Infoxchange, 33 Elizabeth St. Richmond 3121.  Late arrivals please call (0421) 775 358 for access to the venue.

LUV would like to acknowledge Infoxchange for the venue.

Linux Users of Victoria is a subcommittee of Linux Australia.

February 15, 2020 - 12:30

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