FOSDEM 2015: more boring shit

Let's take a look at my annotated copy of the FOSDEM 2015 main talk schedule, shall we?

Keynotes

Welcome to FOSDEM 2015
Gross.

Identity Crisis: Are we who we say we are?
Some random nobody wants you to know you cannot trust programmers if they have jobs.

What is wrong with Operating Systems (and how do we make things better)
It's the guy with the self-rhyming name, back again to talk about operating systems from the perspective of "someone dumb enough to write kernels in javascript."

Closing FOSDEM 2015
Back to the helpdesk, attendees!

Languages

Modularizing C Software with Apache Celix
Remember the "service-oriented architecture" buzzwords? So do they, and they'd like to make C more like Java. And not just ANY java, but Glassfish.

The Story of Rust
Hilariously, this talk's description is blank; it may as well be titled "The Future of Rust."

Design and Implementation of a Perl Number Theory Module
A math nerd incrementally improves well-understood math software, and the resulting talk is put in the "Languages" section as filler. It doesn't matter which section it goes in, because nobody cares or will attend.

Get ready to party!
2015 IS THE YEAR OF PERL 6 ON THE DESKTOP!!!! Perl programmers don't want it, but haskell kids are glad to finally have a REPL that is fully portable (runs on both Ubuntu AND Arch).

Performance

Building High-Performance Language Implementations With Low Effort
JIT JIT JIT JIT JIT JIT JIT CACHE MISSES JIT JIT JIT JIT JIT JIT JIT BLLBLBLBLBLBLBLBBLBL

IgProf The Ignominous Profiler
CERN spent shitloads of money reimplementing perftools; researchers attempt to justify further grant requests by waving 64-bit ARM chips around and waggling their eyebrows.

Superoptimization
How fast can your code go?
This talk is the reason FOSDEM does not use an optimizing conference scheduler (in early experiments the optimizer kept canceling this guy's plane tickets).

Ubiquitous Performance Analysis and System Introspection
An introduction to Performance Co-Pilot and Systemtap
Red Hat seriously really actually wants you guys to take systemtap seriously. It's a really great tool for where are you going please come back we're so lonely

Time

Precise time: from CPU clocks to hacking the Universe
Adventures of a time nut
I do want to make fun of this guy, but the talk description is so incredibly boring that I have no idea what he's on about. Sorry. Also: did this talk actually require three goddamn titles?

Computers, Clocks and Network Time
Everything you never wanted to know about time.
Honestly, what is it with this multi-line talk naming trend? What actual value does the half-assed "clever" subtitle give anyone? Name your talks what you're talking about and get on with obsessing about how your PTP hobby is so much better than NTP (side note: who cares)

Technical Aspects of Leap Second Propagation and Evaluation
See? This is a well-titled talk. It's concise, and it describes exactly what the speaker will discuss. With a title like this, I can tell at a glance that this is some heartbreakingly dull bullshit that I will care about in the event that it matters ever.

Ntimed an NTPD replacement
Poul-Henning Kamp apparently got sick of installing ntpd patches, and I guess didn't like openntpd for some reason, so he's rolling his own. See how interesting computer time issues are?

NTF's General Timestamp API and Library
Direct quote: "most current timestamps don't have enough information in them to be useful, and they don't 'age well'"... I would attend this talk just to discover what horrible decisions this man has made in his life that led him to write a speech about it. It's a timestamp, man. We got this.

Typesetting

SDAPS
Surveying made easy
Another shitty two-line title, this time about GNU/Scantron.

Introducing SILE: A New Typesetting System
Some bullshit about XML and "borrows extensively from TeX." You can identify people who are bad at TeX because they spend all their time overriding TeX's layout output; someone apparently got sick of doing that and made a typesetting system only a micromanaging bureaucrat could love.

Algorithmic Graph Drawing in TikZ
Lua shit for idiots.

Hardware

A GPS watch made of free software and hardware

No.

lowRISC
The path to an open-source SoC
RISC fanboys get mad that the Raspberry PI is not RISC-V. They design a logo and some vaporware CPUs.

BERI
An open RISC softcore for research and experimentation
"softcore" is used here not to mean "boring porn" but instead to mean "a computer that you can put on an fpga but is not worth actually making."

FreeCAD
a hackable design platform
This is the software you use to draw the shitty products you will make into fragile, creaky reality with your overpriced 3d printer.

Security

The CHERI CPU
RISC in the age of risk
Some confused computer nerds are convinced that security problems come from bad CPU design instead of shitty programming. "Heartbleed" is namedropped to make the research seem interesting or relevant, but it doesn't work.

Keccak and SHA-3: code and standard updates
From the Keccak Code Package to a wide range of cryptographic applications
Apparently these speakers are paid per word of talk title. Also, they would like you to care about FIPS 202 for free.

Miscellaneous

Automating Attribution
Giving credit where credit is due
The Creative Commons assholes present an absolute onslaught of super shitty software and services to enable DeviantArt users and Tumblr users to FINALLY ascertain who stole whose Downton Abbey/Clockwork Orange erotic crossover .gif collection.

A new version of Firefox is available
Releasing Quality Firefox Products
The first hypothetical talk in FOSDEM; the speakers discuss an alternate universe wherein Firefox isn't an embarassing failure of The CADT Development Model and money-grubbing Silicon Valley jerkoffmanship.

Five-year anniversary bonus: Lightning Talks



Lightning Talks Welcome
HI GUYS LET'S [clock buzzer]

Developing FOSDEM Companion
How to build a nice, modern schedule app for Android
Alternate subtitles:



Ultra - Smallest. Web server. Evar.
Does not include spellcheck.

How adblockers work
The ad blockers block the ads. They do this by identifying the ads, and then blocking them. In this manner, adblockers block the ads.

A Whirlwind Introduction to OpenUI5
The Responsive, Enterprise Strength HTML5 Toolkit
Reminder: javascript is not "HTML5".

All about Hack in 15 minutes
Why you should consider Hack over PHP
The subtitle was "why you should consider suicide over PHP" but that topic kind of speaks for itself

CockroachDB
towards an Open-Source Spanner
From the Very Literal Subtitle department: attending this talk means you will actually physically be facing toward an open-source spanner.

GCompris goes Qt Quick with the help of KDE
GCompris is educational software for children 2 to 10
GCompris is the educational software equivalent of those film strips that never synced up to the audio but the teachers made you watch them anyway because they had a friend on the production team.

Requirements Bazaar
How to encourage users to tell us what they really need!
"Otherwise, we might accidentally include a feature they want, or leave useful functionality in place!

Scalable Video Conferencing with Jitsi Videobridge
Using Simulcast, DataChannels and adaptive streaming for Free scalable conferencing
hahahahahahahahah

XMPP and Android
Creating stable, reliable, push-enabled and battery friendly XMPP connections on Android
push-enabled... battery friendly... Android... XML parsing.


Matrix.org - a new open standard for distributed, real-time communication
Solving the fragmented online communication space with an open standard
Yet another VoIP over HTTP solution only twelve idiots will ever use.

Yatta: A Real-Time Framework for Peer-to-peer Group Editing on Arbitrary Data Types
Enabling real-time collaboration on the Web
damn man I ask for A Real-Time Framework for Peer-to-peer Group Editing on Arbitrary Data Types every christmas and my parents just keep buying me socks

Building an Open Source VoIP hardware phone
Fortunately, you only need to make twelve (see above)

codebender: Arduino programing, online
Learn how to program an Arduino faster and easier, online, using codebender
The problem with my current AVR toolkit is that I don't have to upload everything to someone else's server.

Rizzly: Event Driven Microcontroller Programming
A new programming language for event driven programming of 8 bit microcontroller.
Has three reserved words: WAITFORIT, OKGOQUICKNOWNOW, and SHITYOUMISSEDITHOLDON

Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter
A flying open source PCB
so, you just throw a PCB, or

LLVMLinux
The advantages of using clang for the kernel
AKA "The disadvantages of Linus only ever installing one C compiler"

Pretty-printing kernel data structures
Reusing D-Trace technology in unexpected places
I'll show you an unexpected place to shove your D-Tra-- oh, you're way ahead of me

Validate your gerrit patches automaticly using magic hooks
hook framework to test patches as part of gerrit system
Yes, automate code review. That's 100% not totally against the whole idea, moron.

LuaRocks - fostering an ecosystem of Lua modules
Creating the package manager for the Lua language
Hooray, a language-specific package manager. This is fresh and exciting

How to create your own Exchange compatible backend
Dive into the OpenChange REST API
How to create your own backend-compatible backend

JMAP
A better way to interface with email
Let's take IMAP, keep all the shitty parts, wrap it in JSON, and format the specification in the manner of a middle-school book review! click here to sign up for my newsletter (currently down)

Mail2Voice: an accessibility approach to mail
FINALLY blind people can use email. weird how nobody's ever worked on this before

Agora Voting
An end to end verifiable system
Bringing democracy and accountability to mom's basements everywhere

Hacking ceof
Enhancing the decentralised anonymous chat tool
the only thing better than chatting with people you can't authenticate is making direct connections to their computers to do it

Improving Key Signing Parties
Tools to make them easier, more secure, and much faster
Home Depot sells a kit to improve key signing parties. It's a CLOSED sign and some nails

Cloud Computing: The Next Generation
Federation of the Cloud
I AM CAPTAIN JOYENT PICARD OF THE USS ENTERPRISE-GRADE, FLAGSHIP OF THE UNITED FEDERATION OF DEVOPS [fart noise]

All your cycles are belong to us
Volunteer computing in the age of the ubiquituous browser
folding@home.js

Datacenter Provisioning and Orchestration
"walls, floor, ceiling, air conditioning, some wires and shit -- and as usual, the CTO is soloing. I mean like existentially"

Fabricate your automated devops environment using python
fabric is your (devops) friend
Now taking bets on how much febreeze is involved

Upgrade-UX
Upgrade-UX is a software framework to update or patch Unix systems
"we're too cheap to buy red hat support -- use this unsupportable garbage to make up for it"

Elvish
an experimental Unix shell
Speak friend and despair

SatNOGS - Global Network of Ground Stations
Creating a full stack of destributed ground station management.
There is like a 100% chance that this project will rename itself when the sheltered Eurocrackers behind it are told what "nog" means and how offensive it is (trigger warning: computer nerds are clueless)

OpenBazaar
Decentralized markets for online trade
Drugs. Drugs drugs drugs bitcoin, drugs drugs kiddie porn bitcoin bitcoin.

Open source is not only for geeks and idealists in the (danish) health sector
A presentation of the OpenTele project and other health related projects by the 4S organisation
Unfortunately, this lightning talk ended before the dork could finish saying the title.

Free and open-source software for medical imaging
Bringing technological independence to hospitals
Putting your life in the hands of some incompetent Belgian fop

Leihs, the leading free equipment booking system
It took us eight years to get it right. What we learned about being a FOSS project.
not a mis-paste. it took them EIGHT YEARS to learn how to keep track of their shit.

Data, data and data about your favourite community
programming is hard, let's obsess about the commit logs

Open source home automation
by OpenMotics
Their starter pack is eight hundred euros.


Open source Kodi mediacenter (XBMC) past, present and future
Past: small success. Present: failed rebranding. Future: getting run out of town on rails by a sea of $10 android chromecast sticks