The keynote from Tom Limoncelli didn’t come across as well as I would have hoped. Tom’s books are really great but he was a little quiet as a speaker ( possibly caused by the sound system ). He was also talking from a Sysadmin angle which is good for me but didn’t reach 75% of the audience. I took away stuff especially the homework projects though so I was pretty happy.
The first talk I went to was on remotely managing ( across a 3G phone) a series of computers that were in a remote rural area. Really interesting, detailed and a great presentation from Thomas Sprinkmeier. Although he was a bit cagey on the purpose of the whole thing.
James Turnbull’s puppet talk was well attended and pretty good.
The Django tutorial was good although a bit over my head ( and I was feeling a little sleepy), the presenter answered a question I had though and provided a bit of insight on why a feature I was after wasn’t directly supported.
The kernel development talk from Jonathan Corbet was good. It both aimed to help potential developers get involved ( especially those from vendors ) and provided some insight for those generally interested. Comments from Linux during the talk were great as well.
I was really disappointed at the talk by Sarah Stokey and Jeff Waugh on the Crikey website and blogs. I have a rule of thumb that says if you spend more than a minute talking about your organisation (unless that is the point of the talk) then you are in trouble. However at least half the talk was on the history of the site, bios of the columnists/bloggers ( one after the other) and bits about how they got sued by such-and-such. This stuff was a total waste of the audience’s time, and nothing like what was promised in the topic description. I work on a media site and I was hoping for some actual nitty-gritty on the project, how they got some buy-in and the problems they encountered. Jeff did do a bit of this (after he spent 5 minutes making faces at the camera) and also broadly did some basic technical stuff about wordpress but I really wonder if a good talk missed out when this one was let in.
Zach has already documented the auction at the conference dinner, I’d like to add that I thought the dinner was quite nice. The food was great and overall pretty well organised.
