Conferences and 5K run/walk

I am not a runner for a variety of reasons. Turns out the problems I had growing up in gym class were more a factor of asthma than being overweight. The pounding on knees is also not my thing. I swim. I walk. I like the elliptical at the gym. Sometimes I even ride bikes or horses.

Last year though I decided to check into a conference "fun run" for charity. I asked about the time table to see if walking the fun run was an option. I had been regularly walking 5K in just under an hour. I was told "sure".

Of course, all the publicity for that year was still listed as "run". I could not talk any of my colleagues into walking with me. On race day, I did find a handful of others who did slow jog and some walking but I was still the last one to finish... in about 55 minutes. I felt wiped. It was hard to breath. But I did it. Three months later I learned that I have a dairy allergy which aggravates my asthma.

This year at the same conference, the activity was listed as a "Fun Run/Walk". I think it drew a bigger crowd. And it definitely raised a good bit of money for a really good cause - e-NABLE.

The coordinators attempted to break out the competitive runners from those that wanted a more leisurely pace. Most went out on the run. About a dozen of us headed off on a walk around the park. This time I did successfully drag a friend and also found a coworker in the group. We finished in about 50 minutes and I was still breathing. It was wonderful.

Those 5K events were 6am runs. In July, I ventured into the OSCON 5K Glow run. A much different experience. First off, It was the evening that I arrived at the conference after a coast-to-coast, two segment plane trip. So my body thought I was trying a 5K at midnight after a long travel day. More to the point of a great event though...

The "wave" ratios were Topsy-turvey from the 6am events. Only a few competitive runners with mostly leisure jogging and a lot just walking. I suspect the 90 minutes of free food and beer leading up to the 9pm start time has a bit of an impact. Turned out to be short of a 5K but that is fine [I heard last year it was well over]. The music (DJ) at the start/finish was way too loud. The cereal van (food truck) was much fun though and with plenty of dairy free and gluten free options. The taco truck also looked good but I never ventured close enough to find out if any of the options could be made gluten free and dairy free. I know they all had cheese in the description but they might have been able to leave that off. The music choices were mixed - some good, lots I did not recognize.

At LinuxCon I did a lot of walking back and forth between the venue and the Whole Foods Market. The 5K run was a morning run again but it was also listed as max of 45 minutes to complete. I slept in. I did go for a long walk (longer than my WF ventures, shorter than a 5K) once I did get up. I also have plans to try the "Data Dash" at Strata late September but that is also an early run a tight schedule.

-SML

LInuxCon 2015 - Seattle

More catching up...

LinuxCon Day1 

As usual I was awake early, very early. So a walk and a Whole Foods breakfast were accomplished in time to catch all the keynotes. The first was a snooze. I understand large sponsors getting time with a captive audiance but I really wish they would not just give a sales pitch.  They could have announced their new offering in under 5 minutes, listed the related talks and booth locations, and talked about something more interesting than price points of a mainframe.

The second keynote was "How Collaborative Systems are Reinventing Capitalism" byRobin Chase, Founder of Zipcar and Author of Peers Inc.  It was an interesting talk but not what I expected for a LinuxCon audience. By the end the loose ends did eventually tie her Peers, Inc. concept to Open Source collaboration with the idea for Peers, Peers where both innovative user experience and innovative platform environments.

The final keynote of Day 1 was "Full Sail Ahead: What’s Next For Container Technology" presented by several Docker employees and complete with live demos - always a fascinating thing made even more impressive by running smoothly. A key element here was the introduction to notary options - verified and signed containers not just trusted repositories.

Also announced at the keynotes was the Core Infrastructure Initiative which was also discussed more at the Linux Security Summit a few days later.

I ducked into a few talks on Monday including "Why be a Rock Star Developer when you can be a Willie Nelson" by Rikki Endsley but mostly I just worked the hallway track and got my slides finalized and uploaded.

The Monday Evening event, open to Speakers and VIPs, was at Chihuly Garden and Glass I was very excited for this event.  The glass is spectacular.

LinuxCon Day 2

Day 2 turned into a security day for me. 

The first Keynote was a video conference with Bruce Schneier, renowned security technologist and CTO, Resilient Systems where he discussed "Attacks, Trends and Responses". Mostly he talked about the Sony attack and how that has affected the security playing field.

In addition to my talk, I popped into a couple of other security related sessions:

Docker, Containers, and Security: State of the Union

Securing Big Data at Rest with Encryption for Hadoop, Cassandra and MongoDB on Red Hat. - Alejandro Gonzalez, Cloudera

Evening Booth Crawl was crowded and I did not find any food or drink that fits my dietary restrictions. I did finally find a quieter area and some good conversation.

LinuxCon Day 3

The most notable sessions from Day 3 were Repeatable Processes for Building Secure Containers with Ryan Jarvinen & Dan Walsh (which was really an introduction to OpenShift 3) and Container Security - Past, Present & Future presented by Serge Hallyn from Canonical.

Lunch with the Linux Foundation Instructors was a highlight of the day. I was actually most surprised that Rock Bottom Brewery could find something I could eat.  The afternoon booth drawings were a bust and I was just plain tired by the time of the evening event at the EMP Museum. My favorite was the Animation Art of Chuck Jones "What's Up Doc?" exhibit. 

-SML

Catching up - OSCON notes

Better late than never?

I enjoyed my first ever OSCON event.  Here are a few observations and a couple of reminders to self:

* In a preview of OSCON, a point was made that this year the tracks are not focused on programming language but rather on function/usage such as "mobility", "Design", and "Data". I noticed this before the article and the shift is a part of what attracted me to attend for the first time.  I was particularly interested in the "Protect" track as well as some "Data" topics.

* I started the week by attending a few of the morning talks at Open Cloud Day.

* Security focused talks attended (for CISSP CPEs).
How my POODLE lost his Xen state by seeing a Ghost, going BERserk, and getting ShellShock with a Heartbleed.

Evolution of information security threats.

Vulnerability management for open software development.

* Any slides are at: http://www.oscon.com/open-source-2015/public/schedule/proceedings

* The lunch time food was very well done, at least for my specific allergy concerns. On Day 1, everything in the "special diet" line was both gluten free and vegan.  I felt the need for a thick rare steak later but I found plenty to eat at the time. Day 2 lunch was mexican day. The mixed dishes were gluten free and vegan so I just had to avoid the side add ons: tortillas, cheese, and sour cream.

The evening events were not so well marked and not as robust in the selections that were marked as vegan and gluten free. I am so ready for the world to label "dairy free" as nicely as they have begun to identify the gluten free items.  While vegan is dairy free, dairy free does not have to be vegan.

* OSCON has an interesting dynamic but I find a number of contrasting statements.  On one hand you have the core conference focused on developers. On the other hand you have the Cultivate preconference event and a variety of talks on building community.

There were talks on sysadmins turned developers and overcoming the impostor syndrome. There were talks about the importance of new contributors and how to make them feel welcome. There were talks on the paperwork and management side of reporting and handling security vulnerabilities. In other words, many talks that are not all about programming.

Even in the keynotes and social media, there are references to inclusion, diversity, and community.
Yet in some of those same discussions, there are references to "we all have computer science degrees" and the use of #programmer along with complaints of "many people use opensource but few contribute". This last one really hit a nerve with me. It feeds my pet peeve of hearing "I cannot contribute to opensource because I don't code"  ARG! But that is rant for another post.

* I remembered to get my Fedora Badge.

-SML