linux.conf.au 2015 Part-2

The second week in Auckland was for the Linux.conf.au - 2015.

During this week, I learnt how the entire timvideos system worked all together. This was from the input coming in from the speaker, the microphone sound input into the twinpack, then into a ubuntu machine running DVSwitch. Sadly, Gst-switch was not in a stable state that it could be used for the conference. This was the setup in each recording room. These outputs were sent to the NOC where the streaming system was streaming it to YouTube. These were also getting recorded in local HDD. In the night Carl and Ryan published the videos, using the recording sheets which mentioned what time the recording starts and ends.

Gst-Switch's pipelines were an issue. It was observed that after some time of running, the gst-switch process started accumulating memory. This was done till the system reached the 100% mark, or the gst-switch-ui was disconnected, which made the memory usage back to zero. Moreover, this was observed only in the 720p state, and not on the debug 300x200 resolution.

During the conference, there were a few very good talks. Some of the 'star' people included Linus Tovards, Bob Young, Eben Mogley and many more! Many talks focussed on containers, especially Docker and CoreOS. I was good to get introduced to these amazing technologies. Though I had heard of them before, but have never used them. Added to my TODO. The miniconf given on multimedia was good, though I could not attend all the sessions. Damn, there were 6 sessions going at a time, so bound to miss many! During the conference many talks were amazing, which enlightened me a lot. And a few were dull, and a few went over my head :( Overall it was an encriching experience, though I will need to watch the rest of the missed videos thanks to TimVideos who uploaded them to YouTube.

During the conference, we had Penguin Dinner at Motat. We also had a couple of Indian dinners. One of them was when Ryan decided to order some really spicy food from apparatly the best Indian place in Auckland. And it was really spicy. I had trouble with the amount of chilly, I don't know how Carl and Ryan managed to eat it. And then we finished it off with an huge glass of Mango Lassi! One day for dinner, me and Ajit tried out bacon and ramen, and it was really damn good!

While coming back, I had almost zero jet lag because I got upgraded to business class from Hong Kong to Chennai! Me, Ajit and Rohit had same flight from Auckland till Hong Kong. From there we diverged to Chennai, Hyderabad and Delhi. I was back in Chennai on 18th Jan. Ah the crappy Chennai aiport and hot and humid weather :( :(