once bitten

words and things from Edd Dumbill 
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July 9, 2010
 

Hardware hacking heaven at OSCON

OSCON this year will be a delight for anybody interested in working with hardware. A full open source hardware track offers a range of talks to get you started with hardware hacking, and gives a great insight into the current options for prototyping.

Many software developers are astonished to find that there's nothing that hard about hardware, and a few basic skills can go a long way. Some have bemoaned that you can't hack your iPhone the way you used to be able to learn with an Apple ][, but that doesn't mean there aren't options out there.

From microcontrollers such as Arduino, through to complete systems such as the SheevaPlug and BeagleBoard, there are now many accessible form factors to enable novices and experts alike to begin experimenting and prototyping hardware systems.

via radar.oreilly.com

I wrote this piece for O'Reilly Radar about the awesome hardware sessions we've got at OSCON this year.

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Filed under  //   hardware   oscon  

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July 9, 2010
 

Linux Magazine "OSCON 2010: Delightfully diversified"

OSCON 2010 kicks off Monday, July 19, in Portland, Oregon with two days of tutorials followed by three days of sessions and an expo. This year's schedule offers a nice mix of sessions led by women, ranging from highly technical topics to the perfectly practical.

via linux-magazine.com

Linux Magazine has a great overview of talks given by women at OSCON this year. As conference chairs, Allison Randal and I are always wanting more women speakers, so I hope that this will encourage others to submit talks and get involved next year too.

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August 4, 2009
 

OSCON Highlight: Testing iPhone apps with Ruby and Cucumber

This talk begins with a survey of the landscape of iPhone UI testing. We’ll discuss the work done by Dr. Nic Williams in unit-testing Objective-C code with RSpec, and by Matt Gallagher in spidering the iPhone UI with an XPath test script.

That will be a natural jumping-off point to explain why a full-fledged “GUI driver” for iPhone apps has been long in coming. We’ll look at different ways to prod at application code, and discuss the tradeoffs. Finally, I’ll introduce a simple library of Ruby glue code to connect Cucumber test scripts to the iPhone. The technique will be very basic, but just powerful enough to test a simple iPhone app.

via OSCON 2009

I just skimmed through the slides here. The iPhone testing work is inspirational stuff. Definitely going to give this a spin. There's also a nice nod to the value of XML-based UI creation.

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Filed under  //   cucumber   iphone   oscon   testing   xml  

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July 23, 2009
 

OSCON hallways, from Pinar's pictures of OSCON 2009
via flickr.com

I'm really enjoying Pinar's stylish reportage of OSCON 2009. Kinda curious to see if I get the industrial treatment too.

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July 22, 2009
 

How not to use memcached

  • (Don't) read data from memcache to write back to a database.
  • (Don't) forget the negative caching case.
  • (Don't) set the cache timeouts too low.
  • (Don't) forget to lock.
  • (Don't) store low read/write ratio data.
  • (Don't) cache data too early.
  • (Don't) store large things
  • (Don't) store images
  • (Don't) rely on memcache as a persistence layer.
    • via hachi.kuiki.net

    Slides from How not to use memcached, presented at OSCON by Jonathan Steinert from SixApart.

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    Filed under  //   memcache   oscon  

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    July 21, 2009
     

    Slides from my OSCON Chef tutorial

    Yesterday I presented "Running the Show: Configuration Management with Chef" at OSCON. 
     
    It was the second time I'd given this tutorial, having debuted it at RailsConf earlier this year. The first time out I was beset my technical problems that, frankly, knocked my confidence and ruined the flow of the tutorial.
     
    This time around I had no such issues, and everything went more smoothly. To properly show how Chef works, I'd brought with me an entire intranet of 4 virtual machines, 2 laptops and 1 plug computer complete with a local Ubuntu and RubyGems mirror. I wasn't taking any chances on having to use the internet!
     
    There's a lot of material to learn about Chef, and I could easily teach for a whole day, or even two days. I think that is probably the biggest challenge left for this tutorial, as I felt the second half tried to quickly cram in too much in order to give attendees an overview of the possibilities.
     
    You can download my slides as a PDF from the conference web site.
     
    However, if you're into learning Chef, the best place to start too is the Chef Wiki and the Opscode cookbooks, which have great examples of how to idiomatically write Chef recipes.

    My thanks to everybody who attended the tutorial!

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    Filed under  //   chef   oscon   tutorial  

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