– The Linux Foundation has announced its 2013 conference schedule, the first of which is the Android Builder’s Summit and the Embedded Linux Conference, co-located during the week of February 18-22 at the Parc 55 Hotel on Union Square in San Francisco, CA. There will also be a Yocto Project Developer Day at the location on Tuesday February 19, details to come. The CFP for the both conferences is open now through January 4, so get those talks in.

– OSCON has announced its CFP as well, open now through February 4. The conference will take place July 22-26 in Portland, Oregon. 

– During the weekend preceding OSCON on July 20-21, the 6th annual Community Leadership Summit will be held. This free event is a really fantastic place to learn more about community management and share best practices. If you happen to be in the SF Bay area, there will also be a regional event in early February – watch this space for details.

The Yocto Project is providing a full day of embedded Linux training FREE OF CHARGE in Barcelona, Spain, the day after the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, on 8 November, 2012. More information here or contact me in the comments below.

(Full disclosure: I am the community manager for the Yocto Project)

This week I have been in Portland attending OSCON and the Community Leadership Summit while my wife and my son are at home doing their thing. As we were talking the other night, it occurred to her that there are many, many other families who are chugging along this week without a spouse, many women and men who are functioning essentially as single parents, many of them with jobs themselves. She came up with a corker of an idea.

We are big fans of Matt Harding, of Where the Hell is Matt fame. His simple movies of doing silly dances with people all over the world are a testament to the global community we all belong to. My wife’s idea is to create a similar video showing all of us coming home from these trips and reuniting with our families, set to music – just a short reminder that even though we may not know each other or have exactly the same experience, we are all in this little boat together.

If you would like to participate, please send me email at jefro@jefro.net.

Also, in addition to a link to the Google Calendar version, there is also now a calendar embedded on the page. In the future I may provide this information only in a Google calendar and/or iCal, as the textual calendar is difficult to maintain. If anyone has an opinion on this, I’d be glad to listen.

More info on this conference at http://open.nasa.gov/summit, registration at http://opensourcesummit.eventbrite.com/

For more information on open source conferences see the Open Source Conferences calendar. It also contains a Google Calendar to which you can subscribe.

Thanks to alert reader Jeremy, who noticed the old date on the Open Source Conferences page.

1. Two 800k Mac floppy disks from 1990

2. One QIC-24 tape, also from 1990, from my tenure at a Santa Cruz-based computer company which shall remain nameless

3. One 4mm DAT tape, 2GB (DDS1) from 1995 which contains my backups from my tenure at Cygnus Support, which became Cygnus Solutions and was then purchased by Red Hat in 1999

First, the Mac floppies. They contain some, though sadly not all, of my (UUCP!) email from UCSC in the late 1980s as well as college papers, Usenet memes, and burp sounds that my roommate added to my collection of data when I wasn’t looking. I had a Mac Classic for which I believe I paid over $1400.

I have now discovered that the “classic” Macintosh could read and write single-sided double-density (400k), double-side double-density (800k), and high-density (1.4mb) floppy disks. It was able to write 800k to DSDD floppies in a time when most were 720k by using variable motor speeds in its floppy drives, thereby rendering those floppies unreadable by any machines other than Macs. Unthinkingly, I stored my precious backups on 800k disks and have thus been searching for a working 16+ year old Mac to read them, with the help of my son’s electronics lab teacher, my good friend and ex-college roommate who works at Apple (and who I think wants his burp noises back), and the random local community. I now have three non-working older Macs partially disassembled in my office.

The latest score is interesting, though – I have discovered a cache of old backups on ZIP 100 disks which contain most, but tantalizingly not quite all, of the information on those Mac disks! Now I simply need to figure out if the remaining miscellaneous data is worth the effort. As a bonus, if I do get an old Mac working, I will be able to play Dark Castle again, a game which I humbly refer to as “Freshman Year”.

Next up, the QIC-24 tape. For those who are not familiar, QIC stands for “quarter-inch cassette”, meaning a cassette with 1/4″ magnetic tape. This is a similar tape to that found in standard audio cassettes, but in a very sturdy aluminum-and-plastic cassette that you could use to ward off intruders.  These same tapes are still being used for backups worldwide. I have no doubt that the data is safe there – but QIC-24 is very ancient format and modern drives cannot read it. I discovered this by attempting to read the tape in the one drive that exists in my local area, which happens to belong to my one local client. Unfortunately, their tape drive is new enough that it no longer reads QIC-24.

The DAT tape is more interesting, as I purchased an older DAT drive on eBay at one point but never got it working. Two days ago I was able to source a SCSI card and managed to get the drive up and working on a Linux PC, and “mt status” returns information about the drive, but “tar” or “dd” on the tape only returns “Input/Output Error”, indicating that the drive is bad or dirty… or the tape is no longer recognizable. My next step is to clean the drive, and if that doesn’t work I will take my friend Beth’s offer up on a working DAT drive and give that a shot.

So… if you have any advice on where to find a QIC-24 drive, or how to get an old, dirty DAT drive working, I would be most grateful.

There have been a lot of changes this year, most notably the Embedded Linux Conference moving from April up to February and also moving location from San Francisco to Redwood Shores, CA, USA. This is a premier annual meeting of embedded Linux engineers, and I am pleased to announce an addition this year. On Tuesday, February 14, the Yocto Project presents a Developer Day, a full day of embedded Linux training, free of charge. Seating is limited, so register early and get more information on the Yocto Project Developer Day page at the Linux Foundation.

I will be attending and speaking at several of these conferences. If you see me, say hi!