CFFPP: linux.conf.au 2010

The call for papers for linux.conf.au 2010 has been open for a few weeks, and closes soon (July 24).

I really want to encourage some talks about functional programming! The conference has a pretty strong developer focus, and most talks are about a practical topic. More importantly, we're looking for talks that inspire people to try new techniques, to approach design and troubleshooting with clarity and vigor (yarr!), to boldly consider that they should perhaps spend some time honing their craft before writing yet another application that inexplicably fails at runtime -- all in a friendly and entirely non-condescending environment of hackers having fun hacking.

Here's some suggestions for the kind of talks that I think could be interesting:

• systems programming in Haskell/OCaml/whatever: how you wrote an interface to some hardware, handled lots of IO, controlled a robot, whatever
• functional programming for kernel development: verification, security etc.
• game programming: higher order design for 3D, AI etc.
• proof vs. testing: (can anyone do a tutorial on proof without greek letters? not that Patryk Zadarnowski's talk about the Curry-Howard Isomorphism a few years ago wasn't *awesome*, but as a result of that people are clamoring (clamoring!) for some advice about how to prove their programs have no bugs).
• some ... other ... practical benefit of functional programming!

The conference is in Wellington in January. January! it'll be windy, and it's in New Zealand!

A month of Mondays

The last month or so has been fairly busy. I'll write more about each of these activities, but here's a quick summary of what I was up to (from about mid-January to mid-February):

• Attended the Foundations of Open Media Software developer workshop, which was again held during the week before linux.conf.au in Hobart, Tasmania. I had helped organize the workshop (what little I could do from Japan), gave an update on the state of liboggz and an introduction to OpenMAX.
• Participated in the Annodex Association AGM (and I got to announce the results of the election of the 2009 committee!)
• Gave a talk at the LCA OpenMobile miniconf about my work with Renesas: developing software APIs for managing the hardware codecs of the SHMobile processor series, and OpenMAX IL support.
• Chaired the LCA Multimedia miniconf, which I'd organized together with Silvia Pfeiffer
• Gave a presentation at linux.conf.au, Ogg Chopping: Techniques for Programming Correctness and Efficiency, mainly about functional programming.
• Was invited to join the W3C Media Fragments Working Group
• Got confirmation of Mozilla's funding, contracted through Wikimedia, for work on Firefox's Ogg seeking and server negotiation. Michael Dale and I were interviewed by Rodney Gedda of Computerworld: Wikipedia video gets boost with $100,000 Mozilla grant.
• Prepared and held my PhD intermediate thesis defence.

Somewhere in there I also managed to fit in a few days skiing in Hokkaido, and some time in the office in Tokyo. I've spent the last week relaxing back home in Kyoto and taking stock before getting back into things.

Break's over! onwards and upwards.

I love Mondays! Over the last two years I've learned a lot about how to get multiple tasks done in parallel -- a mix of GTD and some other techniques I've been developing. Unfortunately it sometimes means making sacrifices, like getting up in the wee hours of the morning to get work done on a ski trip; but every few months I also need a reset; I tend to go a bit crazy whenever I visit friends back in Sydney ;-)

If you've got any advice or words of encouragement please share them in the comments!

FOMS, LCA Multimedia 2008: Videos

I arrived back in Japan after a few awesome weeks in Australia for FOMS and LCA. The weather in Melbourne was great, and the food was fantastic.

Between FOMS and LCA, dozens of free multimedia software developers were in town. It was the first time that developers of Dirac, Speex, Theora, Vorbis, Ogg, and most of the Annodex crew were all in the same place, so we spent most of the week of LCA holed up in a room designing content description and packaging formats. One immediate outcome will be finalization of the Dirac mapping into the Ogg container.

I organised the multimedia miniconf on the Monday of LCA, which was jam-packed with excellent presentations and lightning talks. Thanks to everyone who came, and talked, and video recorded. There were plenty of comments along the lines of it being "pretty hardcore for a miniconf". If you are interested in helping with next year's LCA Multimedia, or have friends in Hobart who might be able to help, let's start throwing around ideas. In particular, quite a few people asked what happened to the audio miniconf parties from a few years ago, and it might be a good chance to revive those ...

Videos

The following pages contain embedded videos of the presentations from these events, and the multimedia-related presentations from LCA:

• FOMS Proceedings: introductions by the participants
• LCA Multimedia: Dirac, Xiph, EngageMedia, FFADO and many others
• Multimedia talks @LCA: PulseAudio, Ogg, Theora, Telepathy, Farsight ...

The videos on these pages are embedded with mv_embed, which supports playback via the OggPlay plugin for Firefox, vlc-plugin or generic application/ogg. mv_embed is a JavaScript library by Michael Dale of MetaVid. It is really easy to use, you just include that library (<script src="...">) and then write <video src="..."> anywhere in your page. No need to wait for native HTML5 support in your browser :-)