Tuesday

06 Sep 2007 Not much interesting talks on tuesday, except for 2 I didn't want to miss.
During the day, a lot of important people showed up because the Linux Kernel Summit will start tomorrow. I recognized Alan Cox right away, and Linux Torvalds arrived some time later on.

It's nice how these people don't assume they're better than everyone else :) They just stayed around in the lobby, talking to whomever wanted to and posing for pictures with everyone.

Anyway, the talks (both in the afternoon):

A Gentle Introduction to Software Defined Radio - Bdale Garbee (HP / Debian)

This talk was about software defined radio using almost no hardware. The idea is to push all analog parts of a radio out of the design as much as possible, and replace them by digital "blocks" which can be implemented as software on a computer. I should read up on this because it looks really interesting. Being able to listen to any digital signal (like GPS, radar, DVB-T, ...) without having to buy specific hardware for it, sounds very appealing.

How to Manage Patches with Git - James Bottomley (Steeleye)

About the birth and functioning of Git. Git is the source control system of the Linux kernel. Unlike systems like CVS or subversion, Git doesn't work with differences between files, but just stores the entire kernel tree as a single node in the versioning tree. To avoid needing a huge disks to store everything, the system is very optimised to avoid duplicate files and such, and uses compression techniques on nearly-equal files to save a lot of space.

After this talk, there was a Git BOF which Linus himself would lead. But I still have no idea what BOF is ;) Maybe some brainstorm session ?