Brandon Philips » Brandon Philips weblog on open source, robotics and technology

8/17/2008

Linux Plumbers Conf: speakers, early bird registration, V4L microconf

The Linux Plumbers Conf early bird registration is drawing to a close- grab a cheap seat while you still have time.

Need a bit more convincing? Check out our speakers list.

We released our speaker list this week and we have a great group. I am most excited that we are finally bringing together a few of the video4linux developers for a face to face microconf.

In particular it will be good to talk about libv4l, a low level library that does frame conversion, since nearly all video applications need conversion soon to support gspca devices. Hans De Goede started the library a few months ago and we are both working to patch applications to get support into OpenSuSE 11.1 and Fedora 10.

Having applications use a library also opens up the possibility of doing some smart things like launching a proxy server (ala. dmix, pulseaudio) and having Cheese and Skype able to use the camera at the same time. Although, it would be nice if Skype got involved so we wouldn’t have to LDPRELOAD our way in

By Brandon Philips | Posted in general | Comments (0) | Tags: linux, linux plumbers conf, lpc, v4l

2/14/2008

It’s a good time to be on Twitter

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform resting somewhere in between IRC and e-mail. It is a nice informal way of staying in touch and people are inclined to use it because of the quick and easy format.

Primarily I use twitter to stay up to date on local Portland tech but it seems that the Novell and OpenSuSE twitter users are growing.

If you want to add me on twitter my account name is philips.

By Brandon Philips | Posted in thoughts | Comments (0) | Tags: novell, opensuse, portland, suse, twitter

2/9/2008

Six Weeks to Robot at Ignite Portland

Recently I presented at Ignite Portland and a video has been published on YouTube. The event was rockin’ and being a part of the whole thing was amazing. If you weren’t able to make it you really missed out.

Luckily, we have the technology to bring the event to you! LinuxAid lovingly recorded all of the talks and posted them on YouTube. The complete collection can be found here.

If you want to dig in even further Silicon Florist has made a links arrangement of the event which includes Flickr links, blog posts and Twitter archives.

Be sure to keep your eye on IgnitePortland.com in the future so you can be a part of these great events.

By Brandon Philips | Posted in general | Comments (0) | Tags: first, igniteportland, portland, robotics, robots

1/30/2008

Come see me at Ignite Portland 2

Woo! I sent my slides off for my Ignite Portland 2 talk this afternoon (late, sorry). Assembling the twenty slides for my presentation took nearly 6 hours. You see, at Ignite the presenter has no control over the pacing; therefore, knowing exactly what you want to say and when is very important. And that takes time.

If you are unfamiliar with Ignite the presentation format consists of 20 slides that automatically advance every 15 seconds. Result: a 5 minute talk. This style of presentation is also known as pecha-kucha which is Japanese slang for chatter. My friend Ron sent me some great background articles if you are interested: here and here.

I am going to be giving a presentation on the high school robotics program known as the FIRST robotics competition. The story will be rooted in my experience mentoring Meeks Technical Team 2411

If you are free Feb. 5th come and see me and the other 13 awesome presentations! Arrive early too because hundreds of others will be swarming to get in.

Tuesday, February 5
6:00 pm to 9:00 pm (doors open at 5:15 pm)
Bagdad Theater
3702 SE Hawthorne Blvd
Portland, OR 97214
Admission is FREE
Please RSVP

By Brandon Philips | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0) | Tags: igniteportland2, oregon, portland, robotics, robots, talks

11/25/2007

suckless screen lock

A useful tool: slock is a tiny c program that locks your screen like xlock. But, with only 147 lines of very straightforward code it would be very difficult to introduce vulnerabilities

By Brandon Philips | Posted in links | Comments (0) | Tags: linux

8/24/2007

Perfection: Spoon + Dancing Robots

I am a huge fan of robots and Spoon so this video is perfection. It is too bad I will be leaving LA two days before Spoon and KeepOn play at NextFest!

Source: IEEE automation blog

By Brandon Philips | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (1) | Tags: robots, Spoon

8/17/2007

Geeky music, tools and bugs

Today’s discoveries:

TCC is a tiny C compiler that allows you to do #!/usr/bin/tcc -run at the top of C files! It is really handy for those 20 line test programs.

Things I am working on:

Today I wrote what seems like a proper solution to a QEMU bug that was causing CDROM devices to be unhappy under recent Kernel versions. The bug turns out to be really simple but it took a bit of time to learn about ATAPI and AT devices to understand what was failing.
I am also working on a patch to give quilt the ability to pull down a series and all patches via http/ftp. It is a bit frustrating being pointed at a patches/ directory but having no quick way of pulling them into your series.

By Brandon Philips | Posted in general | Comments (0) | Tags: ata, atapi, qemu, quilt, suse, tcc

7/28/2007

Life: an update

I have not blogged recently because of a number of life changes. I will try to fix that now that I have a steady location and job. To clear the air here is everything I have been doing in a chronological list.

Graduated from Oregon State University with a computer science degree.
Traveled to Vienna, Austria to visit Nisha George who is working for TTTech
Started working for SuSE Labs/Novell as a Kernel developer
Moved into a neighborhood (SE Portland) right next to Ron Jackson and Karla Beck! Ron has been a great mentor and worked with me on the Bob project
Went to a drive in theater for the first time, double feature of Die Hard 4 and Transformers, awesome!
Visited the only American owned sake brewery, Sake One, and bought a sake keg.
Went to OSCON and met a bunch of Novell and Debian people. Living in Portland is going to Rock!
Volunteering to help with the Linux Plumbers Conf

Life is good, I am having fun and I will be blogging again soon.

By Brandon Philips | Posted in general | Comments (1) | Tags: suse

6/3/2007

procmail magic: I am not afraid of lists anymore

Yesterday a number of list posts from lists I had forgotten to write a procmail rule for made their way into my inbox. I didn’t like the idea of adding yet more cookie cutter rules to my ever expanding .procmailrc to fix the issue so, I went hunting for a better solution.

After searching for a bit I found jdub’s procmail which got me most of the way there:

# MOST LISTS - Automagically handle lists
:0
* ^((List-Id|X-(Mailing-)?List):(.*[< ]\/[^>]*))
{
    LISTID=$MATCH

    :0:
    * LISTID ?? ^\/[^@\.]*
    ifup.$MATCH/

}

# MAJORDOMO - Automagically handle Majordomo lists
:0
* ^Sender:.*owner-[^@]+@[^@\+]+
* ^Sender:.*owner-\/[^@\+]+
{
    :0:
    ifup.$MATCH/
}

But, vger.kernel.org mailing lists have listname-owner instead of owner-listname so I wrote this:

# MAJORDOMO with inverse owner
:0
* ^Sender:.*-owner@[^@\+]+
* ^Sender:[     ]*\/[^@\+]+
{
    :0:
    ifup.`echo $MATCH | /bin/sed -e s/-owner//g`/
}

Does anyone know how to skip that sed call? I am not too terribly happy with it but it works.

Final result: 80 insertions, 116 deletions and it handles all of my lists- not just the ones that I remember to add. w00t

By Brandon Philips | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0) | Tags: automation, email, linux, procmail

3/21/2007

guilt: my first Debian package

Debian Logo For the last few weeks I have been working on a Debian package for guilt, a quilt like tool that works on top of a git repository.

Getting the initial package together was easy thanks to dh_make. This created the debian/ directory and basic control files that were needed to Debianize the source. After customizing all of the control files I built the package with dpkg-buildpackage and it seemed to work!

But, I quickly hit a bump in the road, lintian, the Debian package checker complained that there were no man pages.
$ lintian -c guilt_0.20-1_i386.deb W: guilt: binary-without-manpage guilt W: guilt: binary-without-manpage guilt-add ... W: guilt: binary-without-manpage guilt-top W: guilt: binary-without-manpage guilt-unapplied

Knowing the package would never get sponsored without docs I worked with Josef Sipek, guilt author, to get an asciidoc documentation system built for guilt. In a few days we had built a man page for every command in the system and the lintian warnings were gone, w00t.

With the package in good shape Debian developer Pierre Habouzit kindly sponsored my package. And today I got notification that the package has been uploaded Debian!

Next step: Become a Debian developer.

P.S. If any Debian developers from around Oregon are reading I need my GPG key signed

By Brandon Philips | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (1) | Tags: debian, fast07, git, guilt, linux