LCA2008 Day Two

Tuesday

I started Tuesday by going to the GNOME Miniconf in the morning. We had a talk about Conduit by John Stowers, which showed off the potential of having a generic mechanism to sync devices. It's quite nice to be able to visualise data sources and sinks, and to hook them up visually. I'm hoping that many data connectors get written so that the ease of moving data around between web2.0 applications.

Then it was Martin Sevior talking about bringing Sugar concepts (from OLPC) into the desktop. We ended up spending lots of time talking about collaboration and presence - projects like Telepathy and Empathy - to achieve our dreams. Again very nice stuff with great potential.

In the afternoon I moved over to the Gaming Miniconf, which was a lot of fun. Since OSDC 2006 I've been a big fan of pyget, so sitting in on a tutorial by Alex Holkner and Richard Jones on the topic was something I was very much looking forward to. The tute was writing a cross-platform space invaders-style game in python in less than 40 minutes! Quite amazing what can be achieved in such a short time. It helped that Alex types very fast! :-)

Brett Nash then spoke on using Enlightenment for 2d Games. Then it was back to Richard Jones for an intro to PyWeek. I wish I had the time to commit a week of evenings to try it out.

tech/linux-australia/lca2008 | 30 Jan 2008 | #

Keynotes now for your streaming pleasure!

Just a quick public service announcement - if you're not at the best technical conference in the world today, you can watch the action live streamed to your computer. See Steve Walsh's post.

Thanks LCA and AARNET for making this happen!

tech/linux-australia/lca2008 | 30 Jan 2008 | #

LCA2008 Days Zero and One

Sunday

Arriving in MEL at around 3pm on Sunday meant that I got to survey the lay of the land ahead of the unofficial conference opening on Monday (otherwise known as Miniconf days). It looks like I wasn't alone, with 80 or so others wandering around the conference venue. Rusty's & Kelly's Newcomers talk on Sunday afternoon was so full that they had to stop people going in.

But now I'm already jumping ahead of myself. I decided this year to stay at the recommended backpackers, which I have to say is interesting. The benefits are that I get a 25 minute walk to the conference venue each day, whereas the problems are that they don't servce breakfast until 8am (too late) and it's a bit too rowdy to get much sleep. Mea culpa.

Back to the conference venue - Rusty led the masses off to the pub, so it was natural to follow. Much socialising continued, including talking quite a bit to Alli, Hugh, George and Tim. I find it really interesting to find out what people have been doing with themselves since the last conference when we chatted.

Monday

Like I said, not much sleep was had, which was a bad thing leading up to my talk on Source Code Integrity and Protection with the sample toy implementation of zign. Fortunately it all went well except for a brown-bag bug that I showed everyone during the demo part of the talk. Still, I got some good feedback from people, so hopefuly the talk achieved it's pupose by making people think about the unspoken assurance of the source code they release.

More catching up with people - Andrew, Grand Pajamaran Donna, Peter, Steve, Stewart, Grant, Eric, Jon and many others. Catching up with the community from all around Australia is one of the big benefits of LCA.

The day was really a jump around the conference as I sat in on various miniconfs - Fedora for Eugene Teo's Writing System Tap Scripts which was excellent and made me realise that a whole class of difficult problems are now potentially solveable, Security for Guy Gershoni's Security Programming in Java and Damien Miller on OpenSSH which did nothing but increase my confidence in OpenSSH's design and team that are supporting it, and Debian for Martin Kraftt's Version Control Systems for Debian packaging. My brain is already full, and its only Monday :-)

The evening was spent out at the University Hotel with Eric, Dennis and Grant chatting about OCaml, writing yet another text editor, multi-national companies that move their software development offshore, Fourier transforms, low pass filters and music genres. Good food and company and a good time out!

tech/linux-australia/lca2008 | 29 Jan 2008 | #

It's not MS Comic Sans!

I can't let this accusation by Mary go. My presentation was using Marker Felt, not MS Comic Sans :-)

Sheesh :-)

tech/linux-australia/lca2008 | 29 Jan 2008 | #

Back In The Saddle Again

Yay! This morning, after a 2 week hiatus, I ran a slow 10km to dust off the cobwebs. The injury to my Lateral Collateral Ligament (LCL) in my left knee seems to have self-healed - the body feels pretty good after the run.

In the past week I did follow sjh's advice and do a little low impact cross-training, by getting back on the bike. Of course just exercising by itself is not enough - I have to geekify things - so I fitted a GSC-10 to my mtb so I could get cadence data. The mistake I made was to start Googling for target cadence ranges - let's just say I have some work to do in this area :-)

It's good to be back exercising again. A 2 week break was about 3 weeks too long.

exercise | 14 Jan 2008 | #

LinuxSA January 2008 - Running a business - the Linux Open Source Way

  Hi all,

  Time for the January meeting announcement (it's next Tuesday)...

  The usual details:

   When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
           Tuesday, 15th January, 2008
   Where:  Senior Secondary Assessment Board
           of South Australia (SSABSA)
           Boardroom (1st floor)
           60 Greenhill Road
           Wayville SA
   Cost:   FREE
   Who:    Anyone and everyone.
           No pre-registration necessary.

  Presentation:

   Laz Davila will be talking about "Running a business - the Linux
   Open Source way":

   Can Linux and Open Source tools "run a business"?

   What are the advantages and disadvantages?

   This talk presents the case study of Davtec, a local software
   development and IT support business.

   Davtec's "back-office" is made up of a collection of Linux servers -
   with staff using windows workstations and a variety of proprietary
   and open source tools.

   This presentation will give a quick rundown of the tools used to run
   the business (with interactive demonstrations of any tools of
   interest):

   - Samba / Openldap as the domain controller
   - Qmail / Clam AV / Spamassassin / Squirrelmail - Complete
     mail solution
   - Asterisk / PHP PBX interface - VOIP telephony
   - dotProject - Project Management
   - Twiki - Knowledgebase and Quality Management System 
   - Sugar - Client Relationship Management solution
   - Journyx - Timesheet system solution
   - OpManager - Network monitoring solution
   - SVN / WebSVN - Version Control
   - Eventum - Issue tracking

   Based on this, and on experiences setting up clients with Linux and
   Windows servers, the presentation will offer a set of "lessons
   learnt" - what works, what doesn't, and what we would do
   differently.

   Laz Davila is the director of Davtec, a small business he started
   four years ago, which focuses on providing systems and software
   engineering services, but also deals with IT solutions and support
   for local businesses.

   Since graduating in 1985 from Adelaide University, Laz has taken on
   many roles in software development and IT, including: software
   engineering; systems engineering; IT support and project management.

   Through his career, Laz has "grown up" with Unix and many of its
   variants, such as AT&T Sys V, BSD, SCO, Solaris, Minix and most
   recently Linux. With a "hands on" attitude and an appreciation of
   the elegance of Unix based operating systems, back in 2004 Laz
   decided to underpin his new business with a "Linux based
   back-office". His talk tonight presents lessons learnt from this
   exercise, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of
   introducing Linux into the business environment (where Microsoft is
   still "king").

  Finding the Venue and Parking:

   You can park either beneath or next to the SSABSA building.  If you
   are driving west along Greenhill road, you can turn left into the
   driveway if you are going slow enough to notice the sign and turn in
   time :-), or you can turn left at the next road, and left again to
   go along the street behind the building to access the carpark that
   way.

   If you try to enter the building from street level but the doors are
   locked, walk down the stairs and use the lift in the below-ground
   carpark.

  Pizza:

   After the meeting, please join us for pizza at San Giorgios (cnr.
   Frome Street and Rundle Street in the city).

  For more information:

   Email: organisers@linuxsa.org.au
   Web Page: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/
   Mailing List: linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
   IRC: #linuxsa on irc.freenode.net

tech/LinuxSA | 09 Jan 2008 | #

Day 4 of rest

I was a little silly recently in doing two 16km runs in 6 days - it all felt good at the time, but there were consequences. I ended up with a left-knee ligament strain, meaning that I'm taking a week or so off from running to let things return to normal (hoping that things return to normal by themselves so that I don't have to seek medical treatment :-). I'm finding it _really_ difficult to take a break - today is only day 4 - and I've got another 5 days of rest to go. I need those endorphins I get from running. Aaaaaarrrrrggggghhhhhhh :-(

exercise | 08 Jan 2008 | #

Planet linux.conf.au 2008 - Feeds welcomed!

LCA2008 Grand Pajamaran Donna Benjamin recently put out a call on [chat/mel8ourne] for LCA2008 attendees to add their feeds to Planet LCA 2008 by emailing planet at spanner linux dot org do au (just remove the spanner from the works).

I'd like to second that call, but also add that if you can provide a RSS/Atom feed that is LCA 2008-specific then please do so, e.g. my regular feed is http://www.michaeldavies.org/weblog/index.rss, but the feed up on plca2008 is http://www.michaeldavies.org/weblog/linux-australia/lca2008/index.rss (that's with pybloxsom, but a similar scheme should be applicable for your blogging system of choice).

Thanks, and see you at linux.conf.au 2008!

tech/linux-australia/lca2008 | 05 Jan 2008 | #

24 days until LCA2008

linux.conf.au 2008 is only 24 days away! That's 24 days until the security wisdom of Bruce can be heard in Melbourne, Australia.

But wait, there's more! :-) Have a look at the whole enchilada - another fun-filled, brain-exhausting, week-long party for the Australasian Free and Open-Source Community!

Bring it on.

tech/linux-australia/lca2008 | 03 Jan 2008 | #