Linux.conf.au 2007 part1

I’ve been a little slack posting about my trip to LCA2007
in Sydney. So anyway.

Saturday and Sunday

I caught an early flight ( 05:45 ) from Auckland so I only got about an hours sleep
on Friday night. For some reason the plane sat on the ground in Auckland for
a good 45 minutes but we ended up on time. I sat next to a woman who was going
over to Perth to meeting a guy she had been in a LDR with (for 3 months) for
the first time, hope that went well, she seemed nice.

Landed in Sydney and caught a Taxi ( by myself, I saw a couple of guys in
Gnome shirts at the taxi stand but didn’t feel up to asking them to share) to
Shalom College where I wa
staying. Got my room okay but there was only one other guy from LCA there.
I headed on the bus into the city ( ended up
seeing Julien Goodwin on the bus
and chatting a little to him ) to see Ed , Brent and Brent’s family for lunch etc. Nice few hours
wandering around Sydney, eating Pizza and chatting. I got back to Shalom around about
5pm and I was so tired I just went to sleep.

Me and Room in mirror
Brent's Family, Brent, Ed

On Sunday I got up, had some nice Kosher breakfast and wandered up with a couple of
people to look around the venue. There was a cricket match going on the the Oval
just outside my window, all very nice. We wandered up to the venue but it was
empty and nobody was around.

Around 1pm I caught a bus into town and then the Manly Ferry to go see my brother
at his work. After that I looked around Manly I caught the Ferry back into town
for the Sunday LCA dinner at the Lowenbrau Keller in The Rocks. Good fun and nice
food. Everyone then caught a bus back home and chatted for a bit before bed.

More later. My Photo gallery should show up here .

END

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MTA Software survey

Back in August 2006 Dan Shearer did
A comparison of Mail Transfer Agents ( part 1 , part 2 )
in which he mentioned he was interested in doing a survey of MTA software
to see what was the most common.

Some previous surveys had been done by
D. J. Bernstein but nothing big for a few years. I talked a bit to Dan Shearer
but I think he lost interest so I started myself.

However (as often happens) I only got half way though since the software I was
using had a few bugs in it. My programming skills suck so I decided last
week to rewrite the whole program in python (it is currently in perl) at some
point.

Today it looks like I have been beaten to the punch, There is an article in O’Reilly SysAdmin
titled Fingerprinting the World’s Mail Servers
by a commercial organisation that has done such a large survey.

Going though the article it looks like they did similar to what I was intending
although their numbers look a little funny in places. They don’t have full
details published so it’s hard to be sure.

The moral of the story is that some things are easy to do if you have the right
tools and skills. My problem is that since my programming skills are not
good enough I was beaten to the punch by somebody else.

I’ll still look at doing the survey later this year however.

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Lightning Talks at Linux.conf.au

On a slight spur of the moment I emailed the Linux.conf.au organisers
and offered to run a lightning talk session.

A couple of days ago they accepted so a quick bit of work and the
webpage and
Call for presentations are out.

My main concern now is to nicely fill up the session, already I have one talk
listed and another possible. Another ten or so should be about right.

I have a possible talk myself but I am trying to save that for emergancies

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