Anatomy Of A Debian Package
Google engEDU
56 min – Jul 21, 2006

Google TechTalks
July 21, 2006

Jonathan Oxer is the founder and technical director of Internet Vision Technologies in Australia, as well as the current president of Linux Australia, the national organization for Linux users, developers, and vendors. He is one of the authors of O’Reilly’s Ubuntu Hacks.

ABSTRACT
Learn about the internal structure of Debian/Ubuntu packages and how to create them, starting with disection of a binary package and then going through the process of creating your own package using various build helper scripts to automate much of the process. Read the rest of this entry »

BillMonk.com
Google engEDU
40 min – Jun 16, 2006

Google TechTalks
June 16, 2006

Gaurav Oberoi & Chuck Groom
Co-Founders, BillMonk.com

ABSTRACT
The web 2.0 bubble inflates as geeks pump out an astonishing number of web-based solutions to daily problems. But a lot of these solutions only appeal to a small niche. What goes into a service that appeals to a broad range of people?

How can it start and grow without a generous helping of capital? The two guys behind BillMonk.com, a service for helping friends with the casual borrowing of money and stuff, will share their views from the trenches. They will share the story of what it took to quit their comfy jobs at Amazon, how a handful of philosophical axioms dictated the entire site design and interface, anthropological observations about the 18-26 year-old demographic with respect to money and computers, and some of the technical challenges they’ve faced. There will be room for discussion about Ruby, Linux, when to open-source parts of your platform, and business lessons for geeks. Read the rest of this entry »

Elkhound, Elsa and Cqual++: Open-Source Static Analysis for C++
Google engEDU
42 min – Apr 14, 2006

Google TechTalks
April 11, 2006

Scott McPeak

ABSTRACT
This talk will cover three pieces of infrastructure for writing static analyses for C++. All are available as open source. Elkhound is a Generalized LR (GLR) parser generator. Its input is a grammar augmented with reduction actions written in C++. The GLR algorithm works with any context-free grammar, even ambiguous grammars. The user provides additional actions to resolve ambiguities that may arise during parsing. Elsa is a C++ parser written using Elkhound. It solves many of the classic parsing challenges of C and C++ by using an ambiguous grammar, delaying much of the disambiguation until the type checking phase.

Not only does this lead to a cleaner design, the use of a parsing grammar lends itself naturally to language extensions, grammar fragments that pertain to specific language dialects (for example, GCC extensions). The use of extensions is ideal in a research setting. Finally, Cqual++ is a static analysis tool built on top of Elsa. It is a port of the older Cqual tool. It takes advantage of the Elsa extension mechanisms to process Cqual++ annotations, traverse the parsed AST, and then generate qualifier constraints that are solved by a general-purpose back end. It has been used to find a number of security bugs in the Linux kernel. Read the rest of this entry »

Seattle Conference on Scalability: Lustre File System
Google engEDU
54 min – Jun 23, 2007

Google Tech Talks
June 23, 2007

ABSTRACT

2007 Google Seattle Conference on Scalability:
Lustre File System
Speaker: Peter Braam, Cluster File Systems, Inc.

Lustre is a scalable open source Linux cluster file system that
powers 6 of the top 10 computers in the world. It is resold by HP,
SUN, Dell and many other OEM and storage companies, yet
produced by a small powerful technology company, Cluster File
Systems, Inc. This lecture will explain the Lustre architecture and
then focus on how scalability was achieved. We will address many
aspects of scalability mostly from the field and some from future
requirements, from having 25,000 clients in the Red Storm
computer to offering exabytes of storage. Performance is an
important focus and we will discuss how Lustre serves up over
100GB/sec today going to 100TB/sec in the coming years. It will
deliver millions of metadata operations per second in a cluster and,
write 10′s of thousands of small files per second on a single node. If
you like big numbers (but less than a Gogol) please come to this
talk. Read the rest of this entry »

Open Source Speaker Series: SilverStripe CMS
Google engEDU
53 min – Aug 1, 2007

Google Tech Talks
August 1, 2007

ABSTRACT

Learn about New Zealand from two of their biggest open-source developers and evangelists (and who have naturally starred in The Lord Of The Rings.)

Sam Minnee and Sigurd Magnusson are two of the three founders of New-Zealand based "SilverStripe", a company and open source project with ten students participating in this year’s Google Summer of Code.

They will share wisdom learnt managing people in an open source project, share ideas from developing a rich web interface and templating system, and stories from wearing the ring of darkness.
Sigurd has been living and breathing free software since his teens in the 1990s, discovering a 486 with Redhad Linux could run Quake fast enough to frag others at LAN games. His grandma taught him BASIC and C and got him access to a precursor of New Zealand’s first ISPs, which culminated years later with founding SilverStripe, an open source web-development company bent on making fantastic applications to simplify building and managing websites. Having let a dozen others at SilverStripe surpass him at PHP, Sigurd has now been charged with building up the SilverStripe community and producing other things, like daughters.
Sam is the lead architect of SilverStripe and has challenged the manner in which software is constructed ever since he began programming in his teens. Armed with a degree in computer science and philosophy, Sam has been mentoring and guiding the development of a dozen coders, hundreds of websites, and hundreds of thousands of lines of code. He has a firm grasp on intelligently structuring code as well as producing useful, enjoyable system interfaces, particularly helpful in the challenge of making SilverStripe a great tool for building and managing websites. Read the rest of this entry »