New Channel on YouTube for BSD Technical Content

Thanks to help from the Open Source Program Office at Google I was able to setup a new channel for technical BSD content without the 10 minute limit for uploaded videos. This allows us to upload high quality full hour-long videos of talks and tutorials from BSD Conferences. I've added the first four videos that Julian Elisher taped from the MeetBSD 2008 conference we recently held in Mountain View. You can view these videos at www.youtube.com/bsdconferences.

Back in April I posted here about my desire to see our video content from technical conferences available on YouTube to reach a broader audience. At the time I was impressed that we had over 10,000 views for the FreeBSD vs Linux TechTV clip, but in 8 months that number of views has reached nearly 30,000. We would be hard pressed to reach that many people by hosting the videos with the FreeBSD web site. Hosting on YouTube also brings the advantage of having clips from these videos show up in the search results for related queries, which you may be able to see with a query such as [freebsd linux techtv], and which will presumably soon be visible with queries like [freebsd clustering meetbsd].

If anyone has additional video content from previous BSD conferences that they would like to upload please let me know. I'd particularly like to see some of the talks from recent BSDCan, AsiaBSDCon, and EuroBSDCon that I missed. Thanks again to Julian for video taping so much of this content.

I leave you with Brooks Davis on Isolating Cluster Jobs for Performance and Predictability :



- Murray

FreeBSD Developer Summit at Google

I'm happy to report that our two day FreeBSD Developer Summit following MeetBSD has been a success. We had over 30 attendees from the FreeBSD Developer Community as well as engineers from Yahoo, NetApp, Isilon, QLogic, Huawei, Google, Juniper, Cisco, Facebook, ISC, Metaweb, and other technology companies using or looking at using FreeBSD. There were formal presentations on the first day, followed by less structured hacking during the second day. The agenda of talks for the first day is available here. This concludes I think the end of a very busy summer/fall period with BSD Conferences and developer summits in Ottawa, New York, Tokyo, Strausburg, and Mountain View. Next up is Ottawa and Cambridge, UK in 2009. Thanks to Leslie Hawthorne and Xin LI for their help in organizing the summit.

Strong BSD Showing at GSoC Mentor Summit

This weekend is the Google Summer of Code mentor summit. As in previous years, Google flew out a number of representatives from over a hundred open source projects to talk and brainstorm about making Summer of Code better.


The activities started last night with a hosted dinner at Amarin Thai restaurant, followed by a reception at the Tied House in downtown Mountain View (with open bar!). Kris Kennaway was visiting Google in Mountain View this past week and so was able to join us for drinks and meet some FreeBSD and Open Source developers before flying out Saturday morning. Among many others we met up with Cat Allman, Leslie Hawthorne, Pawel Solyga, Todd Larsen, Randi Harper, James Youngman, Eivind Eklund, and others. Todd and Pawel are working on the next generation summer of code web application, Melange, which will be open source and built on App Engine.

Saturday I arrived late as usual to the mentor summit. I met up with Rafal Jaworowski, Brooks Davis, and Tim Kientzle. I ran into Jeffrey Hsu representing the DragonFly BSD group, and Jacob Appelbaum and Roger Dingledine from the Tor project. Jacob worked with Bill Paul and others on the Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys work and has built a community hacker space in San Francisco. It was also great to bump into Phil Jenvey who used to work with me at Walnut Creek CDROM and BSDi a decade ago, and is now working on Jython.


In the morning I attended a session about bringing new developers into Open Source. After lunch I attended a session on the state of open source scientific computing, and I'm typing this as I prepare for the next session on Melange. Based on the discussions so far I've started writing some more process documentation for how we can run the Summer of Code program more efficiently next summer, including a Student Checklist. Apologies for the blurry photos taken in low light on an iPhone.

There are more sessions this evening and tomorrow, when Sam Leffler is expected to join us. I'll post again after the conclusion of the summit.

MeetBSD and FreeBSD Developer Summit

MeetBSD is just over one month away! If you haven't already done so, please register. I am organizing a FreeBSD Developer Summit to follow the main conference and there are still slots for developers and invited guests to take part. If you would like to present, lead a discussion, or just sit and hack with us, then please send me a mail.

Another Successful Summer of Code

I'm happy to report that we had another stellar success rate for Summer of Code students working on FreeBSD. 19 of our 21 students this summer successfully completed the program. I've collected a summary of all 19 individual projects and posted it here (freebsd.org). I also wrote a post for the Google Open Source Blog to showcase some student projects from our fourth successful summer of code. The summer has ended but many students are continuing to work on their projects. Several of these students are inevitably in the pipeline for full SVN src/ commit access, following the long line of successful FreeBSD SoC alumni before them.

Many of the mentors from different open source projects will be meeting to share ideas and best practices at the Summer of Code Mentor Summit October 25-26 at the Googleplex. Also on the calendar and relating to Summer of Code is the GSoC panel at OSBootCamp at UC Berkeley on October 30th.

meetBSD California and 15 years of FreeBSD

The meetBSD conference is coming to California! After 3 successful years in Poland, the 2008 conference will be held in Mountain View, California at the Googleplex November 15-16.

Matt Olander has arranged a private FreeBSD 15 year Anniversary Party at Zen/Buddha Lounge in Mountain View for Saturday night Nov 15th. For anyone out there who wasn't able to attend the 10 year anniversary party that Matt put together at SF's DNA Lounge, rest assured it is not to be missed. If you are feeling nostalgic, take a look at Matt Dillon's pictures from the last major FreeBSD Anniversary party (with my favorite pic attached).

Mid-term Evaluations Completed

Thanks to all of the mentors and students for submitting evaluations and program surveys for Google Summer of Code on time. I am happy to report that all evaluations and surveys have been submitted. We had one student drop-out, but the remaining 20 students received passing evaluations. Keep up the good work!