Travel diary: Skynet code challenge

Red Hat sponsored a Code Challenge competition at the University of Limerick campus in Ireland that coincided with the 15th anniversary of the University’s computing society, Skynet. Couldn’t make it to the emerald shores for the celebration? We’ve got the travel diary from one of Red Hat’s people on-the-scene, so you don’t miss a minute.

6:30 a.m. - No caffeine
It’s not very often you get a couple of Red Hat techies in a car without a single word being said. However for Bryn Reeves (a storage, kernel, and base OS engineer from our SEG division) and I, the combination of a 6:30 a.m. departure and no espresso or caffeine whatsoever makes for a very quiet journey. The only noticeable noises on our trip from Red Hat Ireland’s Cork office to the University of Limerick campus were my grumblings at getting stuck behind every single tractor, lorry, truck, and squad car on the road this Friday morning.

9:00 a.m. – Instant coffee
Just as we were arriving on campus, I get a call from Cian, the Vice President of Skynet, to tell me they had parking arranged–things are starting to look up!

Skynet, for those of you who don’t know, is the computer from the Terminator. In the film, it became self-aware and started to take over the planet. Skynet is also the name of the University of Limerick’s Computing Society. This weekend is their 15th anniversary and they are marking it with their SkyCon event, bringing together coders from the free software community and a few of those from the proprietary closed source world. UL graduates (and former Skynet members) have contributed significantly to the OSS world over the years–some now work at Red Hat. So it seemed fitting that Red Hat be one of the main sponsors of SkyCon.

Walking in the door, laden with display stands and Red Hat swag, we immediately spy the coffee stand. But before we let the fact that it was sachets of instant coffee and polystyrene cups disappoint us, we get diverted to the coffee dock at the end of the hall for a doppio espresso.

9:30 a.m. – The Red Hat contingent
Fuel cells recharged, Bryn and I make our way towards the rest of the Red Hat contingent. Easiest to spot, as usual, is Alan Cox, hacker extraordinaire. The trademark Fedora surrounded by a huddle of people is almost always easy to make out. Shortly after, we spot Caolan McNamara, a Red Hat desktop engineer well-known for his contributions to OpenOffice® and early work on Microsoft® Office® file format interoperability for Linux. However, more important this weekend is the fact that Caolan is a founding member and former president of Skynet.

10:00 a.m. – Code competition.
While most people shuffle in to the first of the talks, Bryn and I set up the Red Hat stand and start to litter the event building with Code Challenge leaflets. We put down two challenges for people to do over the weekend. The first was to write an IA32 Linux binary with the exact output, “Hello World\n” and then exit cleanly. Not very difficult, I agree; the real challenge was to do this with the smallest possible binary executable size! The second challenge was to write a text compression system. The winner will be the program with the best average compression over 10 documents from Project Gutenberg. The use of zlib will of course be considered cheating!

Michele Neylon from Blacknight
Photo by Ronan Kirby

3:00 p.m. – Supersize me!
I ducked out to deal with some customer issues, but made it back to the UL campus just in time for Mel Gorman’s talk, “Supersizing the Linux VM.” Another graduate of UL and former Skynet president, Mel is well-known for his work on the Linux VM and for the book Understanding the Linux Virtual Memory Manager. He presented a talk on the the use of huge pages on Linux, detailing the current state of the APIs and library support and the efficiency savings that can be realized by this support.

4:00 p.m. – Open source spam solution
Michele Nylon from Blacknight Solutions presented his guide to blocking 50,000 spams a day for your customers, using open source solutions.

10:30 p.m. – There’s a campus bar?
After eating too much Skynet birthday cake at the SkyCon banquet dinner, many of us, in true Irish Linux community fashion, adjourned to the campus bar. I shall spare you the gory details of what followed, suffice to say there was lively debate on everything you can imagine and some things you’d probably rather not.

The Skynet birthday cake
Photo by Noirin Plunkett

9:00 a.m., Saturday – Why was I programmed to feel pain?
A slow start to the morning. First port of call was Jono Bacon’s talk “How to herd cats and influence people.” (Bacon works with LUG Radio.) After that I headed over to Caolán McNamara’s talk on contributing to OpenOffice.org, followed by Ciarán O’Riordan’s talk on the GPLv3.

12:00 p.m., Saturday – But I don’t code…
Saturday’s highlight was Alan Cox’s keynote speech, “but I don’t code…”. As someone whose programming skills don’t extend far beyond the usual Perl and Shell (and very basic C & Python), it’s a topic of keen interest to me.

Stephen Shirley, Bryn Reeves and Alan Cox
Photo by Noirin Plunkett

Evangelists, lawyers, sales folk–come back! All is forgiven and it seems we need you after all. Alan’s insightful and funny talk delved into how marketing people became evangelists, then changed back to marketing again when being an evangelist became uncool. Ultimately, Alan dispelled the myth that if you’re not a kernel developer or serious code contributer, you’re surplus to requirement. The community-at-large involves people at all levels and with vastly differing skill sets, all of whom are important to the continued success of open source software. So lo and behold, I do have value. Once again I can now safely pass open windows!

2:00 p.m., Saturday – Like a lamb to the slaughter
One of the most anticipated talks was that of Bill O’Brien from Microsoft Ireland, speaking about Microsoft’s view of open source and open standards. For Laura Czajkowski, president of Skynet, this was possibly one of the most dreaded talks. Will the crowd behave? Will there be heckling? There’s a lot of open source aficionados in one place here! In the end Bill did an excellent job in front of an extremely skeptical crowd. There were some hard questions from well-informed people and he kept his composure and gave exactly the answers you would expect from Microsoft. I don’t know if the extremely large crowd that attended was there to get Microsoft’s take on things, to give him a hard time, or just for the chance to win an Xbox. He also handed out a few Vista DVDs. To bring some balance to the occasion, I took it upon myself to present Bill with a Fedora™ Core 6 DVD at the end of the talk, on behalf of the community in attendance.

6:00 p.m., Saturday – Lightning and beer
After a full afternoon, the Skynet committee decided to spice things up a bit by moving the scheduled Lightning Talks back to the bar! So with little or no opposition, we all made our way back to those familiar surrounds. After a quick refuel, we poured into a side room for the talks. Among them was Bryn’s 10-minute tale of DM-Loop, which he has been working on for the device mapper team for quite some time now. The good news: users are no longer limited to 256 loop back devices. (Though there has been a bug filed by someone who ran out of memory after creating over 11,320 loop back devices.)

With my own feet on the soap box, I extolled the virtues of scalable commodity computing using Red Hat Network® Satellite’s advanced features–like provisioning–in combination with Red Hat’s Global File System (GFS).

The most entertaining of the lightning talks was that of Noirin Plunkett. With an energy that literally filled the room, she spoke about technical documentation. She reminded us of how fun and exciting it can be and gave advice on improving documentation. We learned that if we properly document the way we would like our documentation created, people will happily do the rest for us. This is something I plan to test very soon. Also, if anyone has a tape of this talk, there could be money made selling it to an energy drink company for commercial use.

9:00 p.m., Saturday – How geeky are you?
During the initial courses of the evening meal, the committee and sponsors set about composing a geek quiz to take everyone through dessert and coffee. In addition to the Skynet committee and Red Hat sponsors, people from a list of companies that reads like the NASDAQ ticker developed many of the questions. Admittedly some of the questions were quite obscure, but with the amount of hand-held technology in the room, we were not expecting a massive amount of honesty. Questions included:

• How many RPM packages make up the the RHEL 4 AS x86 distribution?
• What is 10E100 called? (extra marks for correct spelling)
• Where in your PC would you expect to find a trellis encoder?
• How many registered .ie domain names are there?
• Who founded Red Hat?

Of course, given the target audience, a certain amount of nitpicking was expected and received. Most teams did very well, though one team did get disqualified–the team from LUG Radio. The Skynet president insisted it was not because of the LUG Radio crew’s constant refusal to use her proper surname on air and in person (they instead called her some sort of Russian automatic weapon), but because they did not put their correct names on the top of the answer sheet. I think the jury is still out on that one!

9:00am, Sunday – Groundhog day
Sunday started in much the same way as Saturday – slowly! One good thing had happened, though. Someone (you know who you are) had resisted the temptation to order room service breakfast to my room for 6am, as had been threatened!

12:00 p.m., Sunday – Fun in the Sun.
The day’s two keynote speakers were Simon Phipps from Sun and Val Henson from Intel.

Simon, a self-proclaimed former evangelist, spoke with great enthusiasm about Sun’s open source initiatives and Open Office, going into the reasoning behind their open sourcing of technology like Java and Solaris. Though he did concede that only about 30 people from outside Sun have actually been contributing to Open Solaris.

Val, with her third talk of the conference, spoke on the psychology of kernel developers. Val suggests that kernel developers tend to be perfectionists, pragmatic, paranoid, pedantic, proud, and pointilist.

4:00 p.m., Sunday – And the winners are…
When we arrived on Friday, we’d handed out leaflets of the two code challenges. The first, as set by Bryn Reeves, was to have the smallest IA32 binary executable cleanly-exiting Hello World program. Bryn, through his toying, managed to get it down to about 132 bytes. I should point out, however, that he spent a week playing with it to get it to that size. The winner of this competition was Tim Kersten, with a binary size of just 352 bytes. The second competition, as set by Alan Cox, was to get the best text compression on documents from Project Gutenberg. This particular challenge was won by Stephen Shirley (pictured in the group photo above, with Bryn Reeves and Alan Cox).

5:00 p.m., Sunday – The long road home. Knowing we had a long drive ahead of us, Bryn, Alan and I all crammed in to my car for the long journey back to the UK. Leaving Limerick on the west coast of Ireland, we drove cross country to Rosslare Co. Waterford, on the east coast, where we took the car ferry to Pembrokeshire in Wales. Having deposited Alan somewhere along the the start of the M4 and Bryn somewhere along the end of the M4, I finally arrived home at 6:15 a.m.–oh so very very tired.

All in all, it was a fantastic weekend for the many hundreds of people who made the trip to Limerick. It was both educational and fun for everyone. Personally, I find these things very inspiring and motivational, with so many like-minded people bouncing great ideas around. Well done to everyone in UL and Skynet. I look forward to the 20th birthday celebration.

About the author

When I’m not buried deep in a bike engine rebuild or following the Munster and Ireland rugby teams, I can be found chasing around Europe, Middle-East and Africa for Red Hat. I’m an EMEA Alliance Manager, looking after one of the big OEMs. Previously I was a Senior Consultant for our professional services division in Europe.

This entry was posted by Ronan Kirby on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 8:56 am and is filed under events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.