Hell Oh Entropy!

So we’re on the final day of FUDCon Pune now and I realized that I hadn’t written about my experience at the event at all. The last two days were very hectic and I got only about 6-7 hours of sleep on both days altogether.

I arrived at the venue at 7:30 AM to help out with registrations. Satya was in charge of that and we did not have any hiccups there. People trickled in fairly slowly and hence it was easier than we had thought it would be. We had a good crowd in; going by the fact that the auditorium was about half full, thee may have been over 250-300 people in there. The auditorium capacity is 900.

After a quick welcome note from the CoEP management, we kicked off the event with Jared Smith’s keynote on Fedora. Jared came up with the familiar analogy of streams to explain the way Fedora and upstream communities interact. He talked about how community members could transition from users of Fedora to contributors in Fedora. It was a great talk in general. I had one personal bone to pick in that however, which is the kind of options conveyed to students as avenues to contribute to Fedora.

I have been interacting with students on and off for about 2 years or so now and also been noticing the avenues that students seem to prefer to contribute to Fedora. One of the things I have always been concerned about in this regard is the fact that most students seem to prefer being ambassadors and volunteers and generally doing as less code as possible. In that context, stressing about non-technical ways to contribute was not something I agree with. Of course, it is not something that is wrong with Jared’s message in the talk; it is the fact that the message may be received incorrectly that I am concerned about. This is also why I am generally more inclined towards doing technical sessions instead of broad talks especially if students are the audience.

Anyway, so that was pretty much the only talk I attended, since I was the designated hall monitor for the speakers lounge. My job was to make sure that things run smoothly there and help speakers if they needed anything. While sitting there, I decided to work on the code for my exploits demo. I had wasted about 4 hours last night trying to get the shellcode exploit to work. I had found out in the end that the gold linker builds binaries without execute permissions for the stack and to et an executable stack, I would have to provide ‘-z execstack’ as an extra argument to the linker.

Huzaifa and Eugene Teo came in while I was working on this and Huzaifa introduced me to Eugene. This gave me a chance to pick their brains about the stuff I was about to do in the exploits workshop. Huzaifa pointed me to a few resources and also gave tips about various things I could add to my session to make it more complete. I gave up working on this after the crowd in the lounge increased and returned to chatting with people, some who I was meeting after a long time and others who I had met for the very first time.

I occasionally walked over to the sessions happening nearby to see how things were going and was pleasantly surprised that these sessions had good attendance too. I was concerned about the fact that we may find it difficult to direct attendees to the classrooms since they were a good 5-7 minute walk from the main auditorium and the seminar halls. On the contrary Arun Sag’s introductory session on Linux and Linux commands was hugely successful with the classroom being packed full.

So the first day of FUDCon was a good day of meeting friends for me. The second day was very hectic too and I will write a separate post about it since now it is time for me to work on Kushal’s libgqpid.