FOSDEM 2018 talk: Perl in the Physics Lab

FOSDEM 2018, the "Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting", takes place 3-4 February at Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Campus Solbosch, Brussels - and our measurement control software Lab::Measurement will be presented there in the Perl devrooom! As all of FOSDEM, the talk will also be streamed live and archived; more details on this follow later. Here's the abstract:

Perl in the Physics Lab
Andreas K. Hüttel
    Track: Perl Programming Languages devroom
    Room: K.4.601
    Day: Sunday
    Start: 11:00
    End: 11:40 

Let's visit our university lab. We work on low-temperature nanophysics and transport spectroscopy, typically measuring current through experimental chip structures. That involves cooling and temperature control, dc voltage sources, multimeters, high-frequency sources, superconducting magnets, and a lot more fun equipment. A desktop computer controls the experiment and records and evaluates data.

Some people (like me) want to use Linux, some want to use Windows. Not everyone knows Perl, not everyone has equal programming skills, not everyone knows equally much about the measurement hardware. I'm going to present our solution for this, Lab::Measurement. We implement a layer structure of Perl modules, all the way from the hardware access and the implementation of device-specific command sets to high level measurement control with live plotting and metadata tracking. Current work focuses on a port of the entire stack to Moose, to simplify and improve the code.

Gentoo LiveDVD "Crispy Belgian Waffle", FOSDEM 2017 edition

So, FOSDEM 2017 is over, and as every year it was both fun and interesting. There will for sure be more blog posts, e.g., with photographs from talks by our developers, the booth, the annual Gentoo dinner, or (obviously) the beer event. The Gentoo booth, centrally located just opposite to KDE and Gnome and directly next to CoreOS, was quite popular; it's always great to hear from all the enthusiastic Gentoo fans. Many visitors also prepared, compiled, and installed their own Gentoo buttons at our button machine.
In addition we had a new Gentoo LiveDVD as handout - the "Crispy Belgian Waffle" FOSDEM 2017 edition. For those of you who couldn't make it to Brussels, you can still get it! Download the ISO here and burn it on a DVD or copy it on a USB stick - all done. Many thanks to Fernando Reyes (likewhoa) for all his work!

Finally, for those who are wondering, the "Gentoo Ecosystem" poster from our table can be downloaded as PDF here. It is based on work by Daniel Robbins and mitzip from Funtoo; the source files are available on Github. Of course this poster is continous work in progress, so tell me if you find something missing!

Gentoo at FOSDEM: Posters (systemd, arches)

Especially after Lennart Poettering made some publicity for Gentoo Linux in his keynote talk (unfortunately I missed it due to other commitments :), we've had a lot of visitors at our FOSDEM booth. So, because of popular demand, here are again the files for our posters. They are based on the great "Gentoo Abducted" design by Matteo Pescarin.  Released under CC BY-SA 2.5 as the original. Enjoy!

PDF SVG

PDF SVG