mikas blog

DebConf 16 in Capetown/South Africa was fantastic for many reasons.

My Capetown/South Africa/Culture/Flight related lessons:

• Avoid flying on Sundays (especially in/from Austria where plenty of hotlines are closed on Sundays or at least not open when you need them)
• Actually turn back your seat on the flight when trying to sleep and not forget that this option exists *cough*
• While UCT claims to take energy saving quite serious (e.g. “turn off the lights” mentioned at many places around the campus), several toilets flush all their water, even when trying to do just small™ business and also two big lights in front of a main building seem to be shining all day long for no apparent reason
• There doesn’t seem to be a standard for the side of hot vs. cold water-taps
• Soap pieces and towels on several toilets
• For pedestrians there’s just a very short time of green at the traffic lights (~2-3 seconds), then red blinking lights show that you can continue walking across the street (but *should* not start walking) until it’s fully red again (but not many people seem to care about the rules anyway :))
• Warning lights of cars are used for saying thanks (compared to hand waving in e.g. Austria)
• The 40km/h speed limit signs on the roads seem to be showing the recommended minimum speed :-)
• There are many speed bumps on the roads
• Geese quacking past 11:00 p.m. close to a sleeping room are something I’m also not used to :-)
• Announced downtimes for the Internet connection are something I’m not used to
• WLAN in the dorms of UCT as well as in any other place I went to at UCT worked excellent (measured ~22-26 Mbs downstream in my room, around 26Mbs in the hacklab) (kudos!)
• WLAN is available even on top of the Table Mountain (WLAN working and being free without any registration)
• Number26 credit card is great to withdraw money from ATMs without any extra fees from common credit card companies (except for the fee the ATM itself charges but displays ahead on-site anyway)
• Splitwise is a nice way to share expenses on the road, especially with its mobile app and the money beaming using the Number26 mobile app

My technical lessons from DebConf16:

• ran into way too many yak-shaving situations, some of them might warrant separate blog posts…
• finally got my hands on gbp-pq (manage quilt patches on patch queue branches in git): very nice to be able to work with plain git and then get patches for your changes, also having upstream patches (like cherry-picks) inside debian/patches/ and the debian specific changes inside debian/patches/debian/ is a lovely idea, this can be easily achieved via “Gbp-Pq: Topic debian” with gbp’s pq and is used e.g. in pkg-systemd, thanks to Michael Biebl for the hint and helping hand
• David Bremner’s gitpkg/git-debcherry is something to also be aware of (thanks for the reminder, gregoa)
• autorevision: extracts revision metadata from your VCS repository (thanks to pabs)
• blhc: build log hardening check
• Guido’s gbp skills exchange session reminded me once again that I should use `gbp import-dsc –download $URL_TO_DSC` more often
• sources.debian.net features specific copyright + patches sections (thanks, Matthieu Caneill)
• dpkg-mergechangelogs(1) for 3-way merge of debian/changelog files (thanks, buxy)
• meta-git from pkg-perl is always worth a closer look
• ifupdown2 (its current version is also available in jessie-backports!) has some nice features, like `ifquery –running $interface` to get the life configuration of a network interface, json support (`ifquery –format=json …`) and makotemplates support to generate configuration for plenty of interfaces

BTW, thanks to the video team the recordings from the sessions are available online.

This entry was posted by mika on Tuesday, July 19th, 2016 at 22:48 and is filed under Computer, Debian, English, Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.