zabbo

Well, it’s been almost three weeks since I gave a talk on CRFS at LCA 2008 and I’m just now getting around to sharing my thoughts on how it went. We’ll pretend that the delay makes the thoughts that much more.. thoughtful, but clearly that’s already not the case.

I was impressed by the quality of volunteers at LCA. On the morning of my talk they had two people in the room running the AV equipment and making sure that I got time cues. After the talk they had me put a PDF of the slides on to a USB flash drive. Within 24 hours they had both the slides and the video of the talk available for download from the conference’s programme page. People noticed, too. The next morning I awoke to find emails from people half-way around the world who had read the slides and had decent questions to ask about how CRFS works. That’s pretty great.

I am a little worried that these “linux.conf.au” links will break next year when the next incarnation of the conference builds their web site. I guess if I was clever I’d grab a copy now and serve up the talk materials locally.

I will admit to having some trouble deciding just which pieces of CRFS to try and squeeze into a short introductory talk. I tried to stick to the most fundamental basics but I’m not sure I can trust my judgment here. I have a tendency to misjudge the level of pre-existing knowledge in a given audience. I’d love to hear feedback from my colleagues who have different levels of experience with file systems.

I will also happily admit to going a little too far with LCA’s motto of being “fun, informal and seriously technical”. I really hammed it up in a few places. I felt like the audience enjoyed it but the video didn’t pick up the reasonably steady trickle of giggles from the audience so the viewer can be forgiven for thinking that I was just being a crazy person :). I think I’ll take Val’s positive characterization of the talk as “technical stand-up improv comedy” as an indication that I was doing something right.

The frighteningly keen LCA attendee may have noticed that one or two (or three) of us put “bonghits” in our talks. I blame the dangerous intersection of Dave Jones and conference subsidized bottles of wine.

As for CRFS, it continues on at full speed. There have been signs of life in the process of getting approval to release the source so maybe I’ll have something exciting to report soon. I’ve just doomed the process by typing those words, of course.

Last week I converted crfsd from being a confusing threaded process to a group of processes with explicit boundaries for sharing state. I should have called it the honorary Rusty Russell Hates Threads commit but I chickened out. Commit messages are forever!

At the moment I’m pushing to get the coherency protocol stumbling along such that the initial release can bear more resemblance to what the final CRFS system will look like. With luck I’ll make it in time.

Today I noticed that the video of the lightening talks from LCA2008 is available. It has probably been available for a while but I only just noticed :).

I was going to have you download the video that includes all the talks and skip to a particular talk that Paul Fenwick gave on greasemonkey which also mentions firebug. But a bit of searching lead me to Paul’s blog post which mentions the talk and which, in keeping with his apparent passion to make a web that doesn’t suck, includes an embedded youtube movie his talk alone. Nicely done, sir!

The audio recording does a fair job of communicating how much the audience loved the talk. I’m not sure if the audience loved the tools or hated myspace, or what, but either way I had a great time being in the audience . I wore a pretty goofy grin for most of the talk because I was happy for my friends (and loved one!) at moco.

I meant to point the talk out to them but was distracted because the video didn’t appear soon after the talk. With luck some of them won’t have seen it yet and will find some joy in hearing a few hundred people cheering at pieces of the software they work so hard on.