antipaucity

I played with the OLPC for a little bit at the Fedora table at OLF this past weekend.

The Sugar desktop environment works on the metaphor of circles. It took me a few minutes to figure them out, but as soon as I was pointed at the right button (a dot, of all things), I was off and running.

The irony? Several years ago I had a paper published in the ACM‘s Ubiquity entitled, “Why Do Current Graphical User Interfaces Not Work Naturally & How They Can Be Fixed?“.

It’s nice to see some thoughts I once had published on ergonomics turn out to be practical in the Real World™ 🙂

As promised, some follow-up to OLF.

Chris from SmartFile gave a great talk at OLF this year on MooseFS and how SmartFile leverages it to handle their rapidly-growing storage infrastructure.

Specifically, he compared it to Ceph and GlusterFS.

In short, MooseFS provides better configurability than either Ceph or GlusterFS, runs with lower overhead, and provides more flexibility for their environment.

One of the other cool things Chris said was they adopted the BackBlaze StoragePod design for their “green monster” storage units. Nice to see open source being leveraged not just in software, but hardware, too 🙂

This past weekend I went to OLF with my friend Peter and a fella who’s now more than an acquaintance, Nathaniel – one of the lead devs for FreeIPA at Red Hat.

Got to go to a variety of great talks and sessions, met some awesome folks, and just generally enjoyed the geek weekend 🙂

I’ll be talking about the weekend at tonight’s BGLUG IRL Meeting – if you’re in the Lexington area, come on out to Eagle Creek Library at 1800 (I know – short warning … but come anyway).

I’ll post more throughout the week on the different sessions and what I learned – also, I was one (of many) who live-tweeted large portions of the fest: #olf2013 and #ohiolinux on Twitter.