A conference for anything and everything ØMQ!

The Portland Linux/Unix Group Advanced Topics meeting

Software Verification and Performance Analysis using Valgrind

by Stephen Dum

Valgrind is a collection of tools to validate your (typically C or C++ compiled) program. It can validate correct usage of memory, profile your program, profile heap usage and verify proper thread usage. This talk gives an overview of valgrind and how it can be used, with emphasis on memory usage verification and profiling.

http://valgrind.org

About Steve: Spent decades dealing with large projects (multi-million lines of code) writing code, automating build processes and automated testing of the code.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne after the meeting.

Come and learn software development!

Set aside one night a week to become a better developer, pick up new skills, and get help with your projects and learning. We'll have mentors on hand and a community of other learners to meet and work with.

Learn to build things: Build websites with HTML, CSS, and Javascript Dive in to the back end with Python and Django, Ruby on Rails or others Develop desktop programs in C#, Python, C and many other languages.

Whatever language or technology you want to learn we can help!

Our event is beginner friendly, we can help get you started with programing, support your online learning, or just talk about where you are at and what comes next.

Bring your laptop, and something you want to learn, try, or build.

Come and learn software development!

Set aside one night a week to become a better developer, pick up new skills, and get help with your projects and learning. We'll have mentors on hand and a community of other learners to meet and work with.

Learn to build things: Build websites with HTML, CSS, and Javascript Dive in to the back end with Python and Django, Ruby on Rails or others Develop desktop programs in C#, Python, C and many other languages.

Whatever language or technology you want to learn we can help!

Our event is beginner friendly, we can help get you started with programing, support your online learning, or just talk about where you are at and what comes next.

Bring your laptop, and something you want to learn, try, or build.

Topic: Learn what interviewers are looking for, what sorts of questions they ask, and what they are looking for in your responses.

This is a topic learning night. Come and learn, ask questions, and become a better software developer.

Set aside one night a week to become a better developer, pick up new skills, and get help with your projects and learning. We'll have mentors on hand and a community of other learners to meet and work with.

Learn to build things: Build websites with HTML, CSS, and Javascript Dive in to the back end with Python and Django, Ruby on Rails or others Develop desktop programs in C#, Python, C and many other languages.

Whatever language or technology you want to learn we can help!

Our event is beginner friendly, we can help get you started with programing, support your online learning, or just talk about where you are at and what comes next.

Bring your laptop, and something you want to learn, try, or build.

Come and learn software development!

Set aside one night a week to become a better developer, pick up new skills, and get help with your projects and learning. We'll have mentors on hand and a community of other learners to meet and work with.

Learn to build things: Build websites with HTML, CSS, and Javascript Dive in to the back end with Python and Django, Ruby on Rails or others Develop desktop programs in C#, Python, C and many other languages.

Whatever language or technology you want to learn we can help!

Our event is beginner friendly, we can help get you started with programing, support your online learning, or just talk about where you are at and what comes next.

Bring your laptop, and something you want to learn, try, or build.

We will have a talk on a topic to be determined.

Come and learn software development!

Set aside one night a week to become a better developer, pick up new skills, and get help with your projects and learning. We'll have mentors on hand and a community of other learners to meet and work with.

Learn to build things: Build websites with HTML, CSS, and Javascript Dive in to the back end with Python and Django, Ruby on Rails or others Develop desktop programs in C#, Python, C and many other languages.

Whatever language or technology you want to learn we can help!

Our event is beginner friendly, we can help get you started with programing, support your online learning, or just talk about where you are at and what comes next.

Bring your laptop, and something you want to learn, try, or build.

Come and learn software development!

Set aside one night a week to become a better developer, pick up new skills, and get help with your projects and learning. We'll have mentors on hand and a community of other learners to meet and work with.

Learn to build things: Build websites with HTML, CSS, and Javascript Dive in to the back end with Python and Django, Ruby on Rails or others Develop desktop programs in C#, Python, C and many other languages.

Whatever language or technology you want to learn we can help!

Our event is beginner friendly, we can help get you started with programing, support your online learning, or just talk about where you are at and what comes next.

Bring your laptop, and something you want to learn, try, or build.

Come and learn software development!

Set aside one night a week to become a better developer, pick up new skills, and get help with your projects and learning. We'll have mentors on hand and a community of other learners to meet and work with.

Learn to build things: Build websites with HTML, CSS, and Javascript Dive in to the back end with Python and Django, Ruby on Rails or others Develop desktop programs in C#, Python, C and many other languages.

Whatever language or technology you want to learn we can help!

Our event is beginner friendly, we can help get you started with programing, support your online learning, or just talk about where you are at and what comes next.

Bring your laptop, and something you want to learn, try, or build.

Come and learn software development!

Set aside one night a week to become a better developer, pick up new skills, and get help with your projects and learning. We'll have mentors on hand and a community of other learners to meet and work with.

Learn to build things: Build websites with HTML, CSS, and Javascript Dive in to the back end with Python and Django, Ruby on Rails or others Develop desktop programs in C#, Python, C and many other languages.

Whatever language or technology you want to learn we can help!

Our event is beginner friendly, we can help get you started with programing, support your online learning, or just talk about where you are at and what comes next.

Bring your laptop, and something you want to learn, try, or build.

Come and learn software development!

Set aside one night a week to become a better developer, pick up new skills, and get help with your projects and learning. We'll have mentors on hand and a community of other learners to meet and work with.

Learn to build things: Build websites with HTML, CSS, and Javascript Dive in to the back end with Python and Django, Ruby on Rails or others Develop desktop programs in C#, Python, C and many other languages.

Whatever language or technology you want to learn we can help!

Our event is beginner friendly, we can help get you started with programing, support your online learning, or just talk about where you are at and what comes next.

Bring your laptop, and something you want to learn, try, or build.

Come and learn software development!

Set aside one night a week to become a better developer, pick up new skills, and get help with your projects and learning. We'll have mentors on hand and a community of other learners to meet and work with.

Learn to build things: Build websites with HTML, CSS, and Javascript Dive in to the back end with Python and Django, Ruby on Rails or others Develop desktop programs in C#, Python, C and many other languages.

Whatever language or technology you want to learn we can help!

Our event is beginner friendly, we can help get you started with programing, support your online learning, or just talk about where you are at and what comes next.

Bring your laptop, and something you want to learn, try, or build.

Come and learn software development!

Set aside one night a week to become a better developer, pick up new skills, and get help with your projects and learning. We'll have mentors on hand and a community of other learners to meet and work with.

Learn to build things: Build websites with HTML, CSS, and Javascript Dive in to the back end with Python and Django, Ruby on Rails or others Develop desktop programs in C#, Python, C and many other languages.

Whatever language or technology you want to learn we can help!

Our event is beginner friendly, we can help get you started with programing, support your online learning, or just talk about where you are at and what comes next.

Bring your laptop, and something you want to learn, try, or build.

Come and learn software development!

Set aside one night a week to become a better developer, pick up new skills, and get help with your projects and learning. We'll have mentors on hand and a community of other learners to meet and work with.

Learn to build things: Build websites with HTML, CSS, and Javascript Dive in to the back end with Python and Django, Ruby on Rails or others Develop desktop programs in C#, Python, C and many other languages.

Whatever language or technology you want to learn we can help!

Our event is beginner friendly, we can help get you started with programing, support your online learning, or just talk about where you are at and what comes next.

Bring your laptop, and something you want to learn, try, or build.

A Portland Oregon users group primarily for languages that compile to machine native format such as C, C++, and Assembly.

5:30pm Doors open, unstructured time.

6:30pm The MOS 6502 might be the most historically significant processor for one reason: It fueled the PC revolution. You have probably used a device with a 6502, and maybe even programmed one, but do you know the historical context for it and what made it successful? This talk briefly covers the following aspects of the 6502: the events that lead to its creation, the elegance of the design, and the lessons we can learn from its success.

Speaker Bio: Jason Dagit is a research engineer at Galois. He received a M.S. in Computer Science from Oregon State University in 2009. He has been active in the Haskell community since 2005 and he is currently a member of the Haskell.org committee. His areas of interest include functional programming, computer graphics, and most recently hardware design. He enjoys working in the space between pure research and industrial practice.

7:30pm Popcount as an Example Of Microbenchmarking in C

Quickly determining the number of 1 bits in a binary machine word, the so-called "popcount", has always been an interesting problem for developers. Popcount is useful in applications ranging from cryptography to games, so it is worth trying to optimize. In this talk, I will report on a number of different popcount algorithms and their C implementation performance, in the context of a "microbenchmarking" framework custom-built in C for this purpose. I will also explore the pitfalls of C in microbenchmarking and the issues, problems and relevance of microbenchmarking in general.

Speaker Bio: Bart Massey got his B.A. in Physics from Reed in 1987, having learned C while he was there. After a couple of years writing C code at Tektronix, Inc. Bart attended University of Oregon, where he received his MSCS in 1992 and his Ph.D. in 1999. For the past 14 years, he has been a Computer Science Professor at Portland State University. He still writes more C than he cares to admit.

8:30ish pm Head to an elevator. People might go someplace to continue chatting.

ARRIVING BY BIKE?

Cyclists are welcome to park their bikes in the New Relic office. Bikes are not allowed in the building lobby, however, and must use the freight elevator. To get your bike up to the 28th floor, enter the building's parking lot by going down the ramp at 5th and Pine. Go past the booth -- no need to pick up a ticket -- and turn right. Go straight until you almost run into the elevator lobby, then go right again. On the back side of the elevator block you'll see a beat up pair of double doors marked "freight elevator." You can get up by buzzing in with the intercom, and saying you're here for New Relic. Ride on up to the 28th floor, you'll easily find the bike parking.

A Huge thanks to New Relic for providing the venue and food.

Thanks to O'Reilly for sending books.

First talk at 7PM, come early to hack, or network

• 7pm Title: Restoration of a simulator of one great machine on another.

Abstract: Gordon Bell described Seymour Cray as the greatest computer builder that he knew of as demonstrated by his designs and their successors that operated at the highest performance for over 30 years. Bell was from DEC, Cray from CDC, two routine producers of beautiful architectures. I programmed both. In this talk I will review the restoration of my work based on the patterns widely used in assembler of the time. This itself is an innovation in restoration and well suited to the modern web.

Bio: Ward Cunningham has worked for and consulted to daring startups and huge corporations. He has served as CTO, Director, Fellow, Principle Engineer and Inventor. He is best known for creating wiki. He leads an open-source project rebuilding wiki to solve more complex sharing situations addressing some of societies toughest problems. Ward founded movements in object-oriented, agile software, extreme programming and pattern languages. Ward lives in Portland, Oregon and works for New Relic, Inc.

• 7:30pm Title: Building Things With SDL" (Simple DirectMedia Layer) http://www.libsdl.org/

Abstract: An overview of the Simple DirectMedia Layer and some of the things you can do with it and basic howto bits.

Bio: Jason ChampionJason Champion, Software Mad Scientist.

First talk at 7PM, come early for networking, or hacking.

Introduction to Splay Trees

What, why and how they can be used. I'll go over how splaying works, how we use it in OlegDB, why it can be a better choice than binary trees for certain situations and how the splaying algorithm can/can't be applied to other kinds of trees.

Quinlan Pfiffer: OlegDB coauthor

x86 machine language programming in the bash shell

Compilers, and assemblers are seemingly magical programs that turn text into something the CPU can process directly. I decided the best way to demystify things was to implement my own solution.

Daniel Johnson: pdxbyte founder, and full stack technology generalist

Title "A walk through the design process of a modern chip".

Speaker : Rohit Nadig

Rohit Nadig currently works as a Senior CAD Engineer at NVIDIA developing software that is used to design NVIDIA's latest generation of Graphics and Mobile chips. Prior to NVIDIA, Rohit worked at Synopsys and Intel, also developing on CAD software. While at Intel in Hillsboro, Oregon, Rohit was part of the Pentium-4 CPU design team and developed software for Power Estimation and Layout Convergence.

Join our mailing list! https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pdxbyte

Lightning Talk:

Title: Anti-Social Social Networking

Speaker: Vagrant Cascadian

Vagrant Cascadian develops and integrates free software as part of the Debian project, focusing on network booted and installation systems, and support for low-power ARM devices. Away from computers, you can find Vagrant happily getting thrown around at an Aikido dojo.

Main Talk:

Title: “Firmware: why hiding it behind the curtain and telling no one to look is doomed to failure in the advent of IoT”

Speaker: John Hawley

Open Hardware Technical Evangelist, Intel

John 'Warthog9' Hawley led the system administration team on kernel.org for nearly a decade, leading a team including four other administrators. His other exploits include working on Syslinux, OpenSSI, a caching Gitweb, and patches to bind to enable GeoDNS. He's the author of PXE Knife, a set of interfaces around common utilities and diagnostics tools needed by an average systems administrator, as well as SyncDiff(erent) a state-full file synchronizer and file transfer mechanism. He currently works for Intel working on Open Hardware, and the Minnowboard. In his free time he enjoys cooking extravagant meals and watching bad movies.

Join our mailing list! https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pdxbyte

Darrick Wong is a principal filesystem engineer at Oracle, in charge of ext4 and xfs. He will discuss new developments in the Linux storage and ext4/xfs space in 2015

Doors food networking 6PM Talk 7PM

Thanks to New Relic for sponsoring venue, food, and drinks!

Join our mailing list! https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pdxbyte

Title: Bluetooth Devices – Development, Audio Quality, and Testing

Speaker: Ken Ostrin

Ken Ostrin has 20 years of experience delivering professional software products to the market. He has worked at Audio Precision for the past 11 years building world class audio testing gear. Ken earned his degree in Computer Engineering from UC Santa Cruz.

Talk begins at 7, get there early for socializing, pizza and refreshments!

Join our mailing list! https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pdxbyte

“Reinventing black boxes”

Description: Open source has a long history of reimplementing, and reverse engineering proprietary tools. This talk will integrate the tools needed to reverse engineer into stories of how it has been done before.

Abstract: There is a constant need to provide open source glue, and alternatives to new technology. Learning how to analyze black boxes frees you from having to wait for someone else to do it. When you solve the puzzle yourself you will really understand how it works.

Reverse engineering is a lot like debugging. There are open source full development stacks including debugging for almost every operating system, and architecture. There are a few other tools you need, but with decades of reinvention the toolbox will usually have everything you need.

Since black boxes aren’t documented it’s impossible to know for sure if you will have the skills you need ahead of time. They are puzzles which might be easy, or hard. Chances are you won’t have to go it alone for long as other people, and whole communities often want the same thing that you do.

Bio: Daniel Johnson is a full stack developer who has been programming since 1990, and focused on Open Source technologies since 2003. Jobs have ranged from telephone tech support to systems administration, and freelance software development. He has spent the most time in the last few years working with Rails, AngularJS, Android, and Arduino. He was the first person to document how to use the intel real sense 3d camera with Linux.

Talk begins at 7, get there early for socializing, pizza and refreshments!

Join our mailing list! https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pdxbyte

Ricochet Robot! Do AI In C

Alex Randolph's wonderful game Ricochet Robot (Rasende Roboter) depends on a player's ability to quickly find a path through a large maze. In this talk, I describe the game, and then describe my solution to the game (the first solution I am aware of): a table that allows instant lookup of the solution to any given game position. The table is almost 1 TB uncompressed, and required around 30 CPU-days to generate.

This application is a good demonstration of why and how much AI is still done in C. I will show some techniques for clean yet highly efficient coding, demonstrate some infrastructure building and use, and discuss tradeoffs between memory use, speed optimization and easily verifiable correctness.

Bart Massey is a 15th year Assoc. Prof. of Computer Science at Portland State University. Bart has a CS PhD from University of Oregon's Computational Intelligence Research Lab. He has been programming in C for more than 30 years, and is a regular contributor to the open source community.

The meeting host for May is Crowd Compass The leading mobile app provider for conferences and meetings.

Talk begins at 7, get there early for socializing.

Join our mailing list! https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pdxbyte

abstract:

CH2O is the PhD project of Robbert Krebbers and has as its goal a formal version of the ISO standard of the C programming language. A problem with this is that the C standard is fundamentally inconsistent.

There are three versions of the CH2O semantics: a (small step) operational semantics, an executable semantics, and an axiomatic semantics (a separation logic for C). The most important properties — soundness and completeness results, subject reduction and progress, correctness of the type checker — have all been proved. All definitions and proofs have been fully formalized in Coq, without any axioms and on top of a non-trivial support library.

The CH2O project has two abstract C-like languages. A significant subset of C called “CH2O abstract C” is translated into a simplified language called “CH2O core C”. This translation is written in Coq and implicitly gives a semantics to CH2O abstract C. The rest of the formalization is all about CH2O core C.

The executable CH2O semantics has been extracted to OCaml and combined with the CIL parser to a standalone “interpreter”. This tool can be used to explore all behaviors of a program according to the C standard. Although the CH2O semantics does not yet support I/O (nor the exit function), a small hack allows the CH2O interpreter to still explore programs that call printf.

The CH2O semantics has been specifically designed to be compatible with the CompCert semantics for C. Significant differences between CompCert and CH2O are that the CH2O semantics has explicit typing judgments for everything, and that CH2O applies to any ISO compliant compiler.

bio:

I have a master degree in mathematics (my thesis was about conformal supergravity), and a PhD in computer science, both from the University of Amsterdam. I also worked as a system administrator at the University of Utrecht.

Currently I’m an assistant professor of computer science at the Radboud University Nijmegen. My research has been mainly about formalization of mathematics using interactive theorem provers, but recently I have been getting interested in practical program verification, where interactive proof is used when automation doesn’t cut it.

At the moment I am an alternate member of WG14, and I won a price in the IOCCC twice. And my favorite project is the CakeML/verified-HOL Light project.

We'll have 2 talks again this month!

Design Patterns in Rust:

Nick Cameron is a core contributor on the Rust language's language design, tools, and compiler teams. He's in town for RustConf, and will be sharing his talk on Design Patterns in Rust with us! Here's the abstract:

This talk will cover some of the common idioms and design patterns encountered when programming in Rust.We’ll work through simple idioms used in everyday programming for tasks such as object creation and customisation, resource management, and destruction. We’ll then cover more complex patterns often used in generic data structures and libraries. We’ll also discuss some of the underlying themes and why these idioms and patterns occur in Rust.

The talk will not assume previous experience with Rust. The audience will gain an understanding of programming with Rust and its strengths and weaknesses. For those learning (or intending to learn) Rust, the talk should provide a short-cut to intermediate and advanced programming skills.

Corrode: Automatically Translating C to Rust

C has been the de facto systems programming language for 44 years, which means an awful lot of useful software is written in that language. As excellent as Rust is, it doesn't have that inertia behind it. (Yet!) Rust has good FFI support for calling C functions, plus tools for automatically generating FFI bindings, which make much of that existing software usable for new Rust projects. Still, gaining Rust's full safety advantages requires rewriting existing C software in Rust, which is currently a manual, time-consuming, and error-prone process.

Corrode is a tool that aims to bridge this gap by automatically translating C source code to equivalent Rust. A Corrode-translated program is no safer than the original C was, but it gets the most tedious translation work out of the way so a programmer can focus on taking advantage of Rust's more advanced features.

In this talk we'll explore what Corrode does, and does not, do. We'll discuss interesting examples that will surprise most C programmers, while staying accessible to programmers in any language. We'll look at how Corrode has been tested: the most effective ways are methods not widely used with other software. And we'll evaluate Corrode's documentation and community-building efforts, to both show how you can contribute and suggest steps you might consider for your own projects.

Speaker Jamey Sharp is Corrode's initial author and a programmer experienced in a variety of languages including C, Java, Python, Haskell, and x86 assembly. He is new to Rust, compared to those languages, and Corrode grew out of his learning experiments. (The exercise has been very effective at finding odd corners of both C and Rust...) He recently completed a session as a Recurse Center resident, teaching advanced topics to diverse audiences of programming enthusiasts spanning every skill level, which he enjoyed tremendously.

Other information:

PDXRust meets on the first Wednesday of every month, from 6-8pm, at Mozilla's Portland space. The first hour is either lightning talks from group members or a more in-depth tutorial from a Rust expert, and the second hour is hacking and social time.

Join us in #pdxrust on irc.freenode.net (http://webchat.freenode.net/) with any feedback about what you'd like to see!

Remember that Rust's Code of Conduct defines the Rust community's expectations for participation.

Potluck and game night for Portland Coders of all flavors. Register at eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/10th-annual-winter-coders-social-and-potluck-tickets-31309764348

We meet second Mondays to discuss the first truly decentralized open source crypto project - Decred. Bringing empowerment to the community who take part in the Decred ecosystem. New contributors welcome.

A special primer from 6:15 - 6:30 PM for those interested in a short discourse on the foundations of blockchain, bitcoin and decred technology.