Index Projects Linux Confrence Australia 2009 Pycon Nz Photos

LCA2009

I decided for the upcoming Linux conference that it would not be useful to take my laptop since its battery now only seems to last 1 hour 15 min or so. Instead I have purchased an eeePC 901, a small laptop about A5 in size that is sold with Linux and has over 6 hours of battery life. In exchange I will write a conference log.

Sunday

As a flat Mendy, Chris, Matt (Molly) and my self, set off on an early start to get to the air port by 6 for a 6:30 flight.

After a stop off in Melbourne, we arrived in Hobart at the same time as many fellow delegate we took a taxi from the airport to westpoint where Chris and Mendy were staying. After getting temporary lost within the hotel we got to their room which had a great view of the harbor.

Soon after setting off on an enjoyable walk around Hobart we had our first encounter in the wild of a fellow delegate (Rob Savoye of the Gnash project) who told us there had just been a multimedia conference on that weekend. Once we arrived in the cafe district of Hobart we acquired a good feed of nachos and met up with Paul Wayper and then then latter in the meal David Tallow both of the Canberra Linux user group. We then conducted some heavy hauling of Davids bag towards the bus stop.

We found a Bus to take us back to west point where, at the heat of the day, we set off on a much less enjoyable trek up the hill towards the registration at the University of Tasmania. Proving for not the last time on this trip that I am in much need of more exercise in my life.

Having made it to the registration desk and picking up much swag goodness (and registering) we headed off towards our own accommodation further up the hill. I suffered more, must start biking to work again.

Sharing a nice six room apartment with 5 others from clug, Steve from the ANU, Mike who is Chris's boss. Tridge who is awesome and Andrew who I had not talked much to before but turned out to be a good guy.

Monday - Miniconf day one

First I went to Open Hardware Business Models where David Rowe talked about developing telephony hardware using the blackfin processor and the benefits of having your circuit diagrams in public csv.

Then I went over to Is Parallel Programming Hard, And if so why? By Paul McKenny where he discussed how paralisation is just one of many performance optimizations and is paralisation really the one for you?

After morning tea I went to see the lovely Jacinta Richardson talk about public speaking and what can be learnt from those who came before ethics.

Next I sat in on the Linux Problem Solving hour where there was a general discussion of many things people hard problems with that the many kernel experts present could throw out useful advice about, topics covered were ssd performance, network saturation, suspend resume failures.

Next Rusty Russell one of the best speakers I have ever had the pleasure to listen to and a genuine nice guy talked about Large CPUmasks, something I had previously known nothing about. But more generally about finding bad quality code in the kernel and fixing it.

After Lunch I stuck with the Kernel stream and listened to lightning talks about a series of areas that I cant remember at this moment.The final session in the Kernel stream was a Question and Answer session with 5 kernel hackers which included such things as what their worst bug was and had Linus ever flamed them (the answer to which was a unanimous yes).

Monday night we went out to a local bar for a drink, then on to an Indian restaurant for a quite nice meal with 10 others.

Tuesday

Tuesday I spend almost the entire day in the Free as in Freedom session which has a constant stream of good quality speakers.

Arthur Sale talked in "Byond Open Source" about how research papers fully funded by government organisations can get locked up into paper journals that are expensive to have subscriptions to and hinder research is many ways. He proposed systems to get around this problem with online archives of papers provided by research institutes.

After badly considering a talk on xen that was not to my taste I caught most of Laura Simes talk on.

"Future Directions of Copyright Law" sighting studies done and new laws and some of their effects.

OpenAustralias Mathew Landauer talked about his websites efforts to bring more accessibility into government and to make votes, informed votes.

Liam wyatt gave a history lesson in Gratis and Libre that was worth while.

Happened to walk in on a meeting of organisers from each of the Linux user groups and got to listen to some of the good work they are planning in collaborating together.

Lunch at the student union was pleasant with a good selection and speedy lines.

Its all fun and games until someone wants to sue you was a look by Sarah Stokely at the serious side of putting content onto the web with a focus on community media and accounts of harassment of bloggers by authorities.

The ever entertaining Jeff Waugh then gave a more humorous take on the history of copyright and talked about the power of being the medium of translation to the masses.

I spent some time with Chris and Molly who were trying to get the podcast for Distrowatch weekly out.

Another great talk by Rusty Russell on Free as in Market Property and Liberty which looked at how when copyright is involved you are never buying the whole apple and we need to keep an eye on that missing portion keeping it as small as possible since it is a abstract asset that is only of use to take away others rights not actually granting anything of value to the holder.

Interpretive dance was promised and delivered by Rusty to the amusement of all.

Finishing off with a rousing game of freedom bingo was a slightly chaotic end to a great day.

A group of us then went off and collected food and alcohol supplies for a random cook-up night in with friends new and old.

Wednesday

The first day of the official conference.

The keynote was on how some resources are scarce but love isnt one of them???

Introduction to the Rebuilt Linux Desktop by Keith Packard discussed how they had meet all their promises from last year and what that means for Intel graphics card users.

Subversion Scaling at Google by Marc Merli was aimed at people with big svn issues that would be a problem party if Kinetic ever has to even consider.

Lunch in town. Sausage spinich and cheese rolls for me

What makes the lizard roar? A tour through Mozilla Architecture by Akkana Peck who I had time to talk to at the last LCA.Website and Web Application Accessibility with Orca and Firefox by Jason White who had a personal reason for his firsthand knowledge with this software.

Crikey! Open sourcing the future of News, by Sarah Stokely and Jeff Waugh was an insight into the world of blogging and

professional journalism.

Went to the penguin dinner after Rob kindly gave up his seat to let me go and so he would have more time with his family.

Had a nice late night conversation with Kimberly, while waiting for my laundry, who works for defence and creates robot bears hopefully the two are not connected. These are the kind of discussions I value most from LCAs.

Thursday

Running late I got out of bed and down the hill in about 10 minutes.

The keynote of the day is on wikipedia. We learnt about some of the many products and companies with the word wiki in their name. We learnt about the contributions of botnets to Wikipedia (up to 60% sometimes) Wikimedia got a usability grant of an awful lot of money.

Contributing to webkit by Pierre-Luc Beaudoin taught me that there is more to webkit then Surfari and Crome.

DDX Spring is a remote control vehicle software stack. Used to control everything from submarines to helicopters to ditch diggers.

Each vehicle is made up of several components all talking together across a common stack. Lots of threads and it needs to be avoided because you want to test 20 tonne robots that could kill hundreds of people.

I finished up by catching Hugh Blemmings "Tricks of the Trade: Learning free Software Hacking from Clever people" which focused on what I find is one of the most important parts of open source, passing on the skills and tools that make creating good code easier.Wrote a simple power monitoring tool which I might expand to log and graph what performance I am getting out of my laptops.

Friday

The best Keynote of the conference was saved for last, Simon Phipps talked on a third generation of open source.

Tridge gave his obligatory talk on Samba, always worth attending, this time was on autocluster an automated testing system he used with clustered samba.

Next I went to HyKim which was Kimberly I had talked to the other night showing off her $15000 teddy bear.

After lunch I checked out Power Management to see what the pros were doing to give me the best battery performance.

After that was Champagne Usability on a Beer Budget by Raena Jackson Armitage which gave me some focus on how I should be trying to do usability testing and what to expect out of it.

Finally I attended Clutter: Open Source Bling! Which presented a promising platform to move forward with graphical acceleration.

Saturday

Checked out of my room early and took the shuttle bus down to west point with Mike, the concierge was good enough to look after our bags so we waited there for Chris, Mendy, Neill, Micheal and a few others then took the shuttle into the markets.

The selamanca markets were huge and there was heaps of food. I talked to a few of the booth attendees who had noticed all the Linux shirts around including some ladies from "In Sheeps clothing" a small business that grows wool but never kills the sheep. Letting them make clothing from the same sheep every year, Its a novel business strategy that encourages repeat business. I have seen a documentary on them at some stage in the past.

I also brought a small wooden penguin to add to Chris's collection.

I was scheduled for the same flight as Chris, Mendy and Neill but it was delayed from Hobart to Sydney, So we sat in Hobart airport playing 500 together. We finally made it onto the plane and the trip was rather uneventful until we got to Sydney where we had to run to make it onto our next plane. Then a 25 minute puddle jump to Canberra and LCA was finally over.