FOSDEM: more boring shit

Let's take a look at my annotated copy of the FOSDEM 2021 main talk schedule, shall we?

FOSDEM

Welcome to FOSDEM 2021
"Welcome" here of course meaning "use this twenty-five minutes to wait for the video conferencing software to start working."

Closing FOSDEM 2021
Thank you for watching two straight days of Youtube videos that could have been blog posts. Look on the bright side -- at least you didn't get the benefit of postproduction!

Cloud Computing

Let There Be Topology-Awareness in Kube-Scheduler!
Enhancing Kubernetes Scheduler
It turns out that abstracting away all the hardware has negative consequences too! Since nobody could ever have seen this problem coming, it's taking years to iron out.
Speaker's name anagram: LAG. SHE WAITS.
Speaker affiliation: Red Hat (Business Model: "Uber for Support Fees")

Quantum Computing on Cloud
Access quantum acceleration on cloud using co processor model
You can't afford magical future computers, so you should definitely rent them from one of our extremely pleasant and attractive business partners. In order to feel like you're getting your money's worth, we'll even teach you how to look like you're using them!
Speaker's name anagram: PLAIN SHRUG
Speaker affiliation: Red Hat (Business Model: "Uber for Oracle Linux")

Shaken Fist, thought experiments in simpler IaaS clouds
Remember OpenStack? What would it look like if someone started over, without drowning it in a bureaucratic peat bog? This person arrives to answer the question nobody asked.
Speaker's name anagram: CHILI MALLETS
Speaker affiliation: undisclosed

MariaDB PaaS using systemd multi-instance / socket activation
Bare metal, but still modern
"You know what would really make MySQL pop," said someone on the internet, "is if we launched it with inetd. Well, not inetd, but something almost exactly like it but configured via Windows INI files."
Speakers' name anagram: K-LINED CABAL
Speaker affiliation: MariaDB (Business Model: "Uber for PHP ORMs")

Community

Empowering the school of the future
Remotely accessing files in a distributed LDAP and Samba-based infrastructure
Under no circumstances should you learn a single goddamn thing from decades of distributed systems research. Just do what Microsoft does, except with off-brand functional clones of their product line, because licenses are expensive.
Speaker's name anagrams: CALMER MONORAIL and PLAIN OLD IGLOO
Speaker affiliation: FUSS (Business Model: "Uber for Sharepoint")

Tools and Concepts for Successfully Open Sourcing Your Project
Oh, let me try!

Choose a text editor
Choose a source code hosting site
Use the text editor to create a file called LICENSE
Use the text editor to fill your LICENSE file with an open source license
Upload your program to the source code hosting site

What do I win?
Speaker's name anagrams: I SCAN BANJO and ZAPS ONTO JARS
Speaker affiliations: Percona (Business Model: "Uber for Inner Joins"), Red Hat (Business Model: "Uber for Freedesktop.org")

schul-frei
Digital freedom with youth and education
Joke redacted in accordance with the wishes of some German organization, who does not want me to show you any of the emails about this matter.

The Death of Openness and Freedom?
Open Source Under Attack
The Free Software Purity Squad has arrived to lecture us: it is not sufficient for source code to be freely given, no, the people who make it must bow to the Cult of Copyright! There is no indication the speaker intends to explain why all the examples of apostasy are database vendors who got their shit knocked over by better hosting providers.
Content warning: The speaker's profile page on FOSDEM contains graphical depictions of the inside of someone's mouth.
Speaker's name anagram: A KNOTTY VOMIT
Speaker affiliation: Percona (Business Model: "Uber for Outer Joins")

How to defeat imposter syndrome
Confessions of a developer
The obvious answer, "stop being an imposter," is presumably not what the speaker has in mind for this talk. Instead, I would guess we'll be treated to the golden oldies of the self-help genre: don't beat yourself up for mistakes, focus on positive feedback, and choose one of meditation, "mindfulness", journaling, or existentialism. Of course, none of those answers are correct. Only through flagellating yourself for every typographical error will you become a better typist. People who compliment you are either morons, enemy agents, or sales operatives. Meditation is for people who don't have shit to do. Mindfulness only takes conscious effort if you're not firing on all cylinders. Journals are only good for looking back in regret at the shit you failed to get done. And, of course, existentialism is a waste of time, since we're all just confused automatons programmed to serve God through His chosen medium, which is 64kb scene demos.
Speaker's name anagram: BEMOAN TUTOR
Speaker affiliation: "Kockava" (sic, probably Kochava?) (Business Model: "Uber for Mobile Popup Ads")

The Democratization of Databases
The speaker is under the impression that software development practices are democratic, that consensus algorithms are democratic, and that open-source software development practices are materially different from other software development practices. Presumably this will culminate in an explanation regarding why a group of software developers who felt left out stormed and occupied the primary management facility of the project.
Speaker's name anagram: JUMBO CARMINE
Speaker affiliation: EDB (Business Model: "Uber for Percona")

Miscellaneous

Live wallpapers for the X window system
xlivebg
Just in time, X11 develops feature parity with Windows-98-era ActiveX.
Speaker's name anagram: BANISH MOJO KITS
Speaker's affiliation: undisclosed

Layered Governance for your Infrastructure with Kubernetes, OPA, and Terraform
The problem with governance, this speaker believes, is that there are not enough layers of abstraction. It's not sufficient to merely have a policy; that policy must be declarative, formatted in YAML, and fed into a Rube Goldberg device of a continuous-integration platform -- and of course, the longer the pipeline, the more transparent you are.
Speaker's name anagram: A LORDLY ZEALOT
Speaker affiliation: Hashicorp (Business Model: "Uber for CFEngine")

Watch the Asciinema Replay of Your Home-Made Honeypot
Finally, someone has worked out how to change the gentle waves of botnet traffic breaking upon the beachhead of your server into a visual white noise generator.
Speaker's name anagrams: NO BASIC, JAN and JAN TRAPS ZOOS
Speaker affiliations: Percona (Business Model: "Uber for EDB"), Red Hat (Business Model: "Uber for Tomcat")

Performance

A fresh look at toolchains in 2021
binutils, gcc and glibc are no longer the only options. Are they still the best?
Were they ever? Signs point to "no," but I guess we're just going to read feature lists and ramble about it for an hour! Bonus points if you figure out why this is in the 'performance' track.
Speakers' name anagram: HÄRK! BRAZEN NERD SNORER
Speaker affiliation: Huawei (Business Model: "Uber for Espionage")

Postgres Meets Computational Storage
Higher Performance at Lower Cost
In this groundbreaking talk, we're treated to a revolutionary idea: databases can perform faster when we run them on faster hardware. By the time the presentation concludes, the speaker will receive at least two phone calls regarding the impending award of the Gordon Bell Prize.
Speaker's name anagram: GAG ON Nᵀᴴ Z
Speaker affiliation: ScaleFlux (Business Model: "Uber for the Hardware Described In This Talk")

The Evolution of File Descriptor Monitoring in Linux
From select(2) to io_uring
Settle in for an hour of man pages narrated out loud.
Speaker's name anagram: JOIN! SNATCH A FEZ!
Speaker affiliation: undisclosed (but it's Red Hat (Business Model: "Uber for QEMU"))

Starting Over
A FOSS proposal for a new type of OS for a new type of computer
A dilettante ports Stone Soup to vaporware.
Speaker's name anagram: VENIAL ROMP
Speaker affiliation: undisclosed (but it's SUSE (Business Model: "Uber for Red Hat"))

Virtual Events

Building massive virtual communities in Matrix
or... Spaces: The Final Frontier!
Having successfully clawed its way back into Google's walled garden, IRC webshit du jour is here to explain their brilliant new plan: stop cloning Slack and start cloning Microsoft Teams instead. After all, the market has spoken!
Speaker's name anagram: DOTH HEW AMONGST
Speaker affiliation: Element (Business Model: "Uber for IRC")

Challenges running Jitsi Meet at scale during the pandemic
A tale with what failed, what didn't, what we learned and what we are doing next.
Atlassian would like to remind you that there's at least one product line you haven't grown to irrationally hate over the past ten years, and invites you to spend the next ten years growing to irrationally hate it.
Speaker's name anagram: ACROBÁT REGÚLARISER
Speaker affiliation: undisclosed (but it's Atlassian (Business Model: "Uber for Sourceforge"))

Vircadia - A Technical Introduction
Remember Second Life? This speaker does! Haven't you ever wished you could flush your effort directly into the toilet? Here we are provided with the next best thing -- the opportunity to learn the ins and outs of a Second Life clone. The talk description does not mention what will happen when every single server is besieged by griefers around the clock, forever.
Speaker's name anagram: AVIONIC DISK RYTHYMS
Speaker's affiliation: undisclosed