Simon Lyall's Blog

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.

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

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.

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