Simon Lyall's Blog

[Wednesday](http://linux.conf.au/programme/wednesday) is the first day of the main conference with the main speakers and
five parallel tracks. First up was [Bruce Schneier](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Schneier) doing
a talk on security theatre, security reality etc. The talk was without slides
which is fairly unusual and I found it a little hard to concentrate ( I
tried shutting my eyes even) but good and interesting content.

After that was the first of the giveaways. It has been traditional for the
last few LCA’s for prizes ( usually laptops or gadgets) to be given away
to people who are at the keynotes in order to encourage people to attend, if
you are not there when you name is called out then then next person is called.

This morning (and later in the morning) several [OLPC’s](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child) were
handed out to various mostly excited people. Later several several of the
winners gave them away to people they thought could better use them which I think
is a very good spirit.

For the first session I ended up going to a the GTK/Gnome programming tutorial
which was interesting and helpful to novice programmers such as myself. Then
after dithering between a talk on the XFS File system ( I had talking to the
presenter, Dave Chinner the previous night and it sounded interesting) and a NSS
speedup talk I ended going to the Kernel Report by Jonathan Corbet of [Linux Weekly News](http://lwn.net) ,
interesting but probably not as good as the first session since I read his column every week already.

For the next session there were several good talks listed and I went to one by
Dirk Hohndel of Intel which was advising people on how to work with hardware
vendors and giving a bit of an insiders view from hardware vendors of open source. Interest again and he definitely indicated that some of the vendors
(especially video cards and wireless) had a lot of IP tied up in drivers which
they would not be going away while most others could probably be worked with.

The last talk was a little disappointing, I went to Carl Worth’s talk on X
acceleration but found there wasn’t a lot of content. It was sort of a rundown
of 5 years or so of history followed by a summary of where their effort was
up to. Probably could have been compressed to about 5 minutes.

As a sidenote I found that I was getting quite a few questions about my Eee
at the conference so I got to practice my tour. There were at least 20 other
people with one and many of them had install alternative desktops on them
already. Asking around I’ll probably install the [eeexubuntu](http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ubuntu:eeexubuntu:home)
version of the the [xubuntu](http://www.xubuntu.org/) desktop.

The Penguin dinner this year was a little different in that it was held
at [Melbourne Night Market](http://www.qvm.com.au/night_market.php) which
is a big outdoor food hall (Which slightly reminded my of the [Hawker centres](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawker_centre) I
saw in Malaysia). There was a bit of confusion with the organisation at the start with
a giant line forming to one of the bars when there were 3 others just around the corner
along with all the food. However once that was sorted out people seemed happy.
The arrangement was that were were given 8 $5 tickets to buy food and drink with at the stalls inside.

I picked a German hot dog, some vegetarian Indian and a middle eastern meat
sandwich which all tasted pretty good and left me full. However as
[Mary Gardiner mentioned](http://puzzling.org/logs/thoughts/2008/January/31/lca2008-day3) there
wasn’t as much mixing as previously and I ended up leaving a little early. All
wasn’t lost however since I had a very interesting conversation with a Sysadmin
from [Wollongong](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wollongong%2C_New_South_Wales)
about jobs, technology, etc.

I forgot to mention that on Tuesday night I ended up sitting near
[Andrew Tridgell](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Tridgell) who had
a [Sony Reader](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Reader) that he was showing people. It
looked quite cool and apparently has a bit less DRM than usual with Sony. I
try and avoid buying Sony where possible though due to their bad reputation

Big day for me on Tuesday with the Sysadmin Miniconf happening. We (
Ewen, Andrew and myself) and the other Miniconf people all had to be in
at 8am to setup for out Miniconfs. It turned out this was a good idea
since the controls in our room were not working and one of the
University techies had to fix it remotely, the MySQL people had to move
completely when there room’s equipment didn’t work at all.

After we started our room filled right up, past overflowing so we ended
up swapping with MySQL and moving into the big theatre in the block. I
think we had close to 150 people at most talks so a big success.

Apart from a couple of small glitches (mainly with the sound) and the
printed programme being out of date the day went pretty good. Ewen and
Andrew kept things ticking over and I mostly avoided getting too
stressed, collecting slide copies and actually listening to the odd
talk.

I think the one I liked best was Lindsay Holmwood’s puppet based one in
the early sessions. It was very well presented ( Lissig style with lots
of simple slides) and the content was great. The slides from all the
talks along with video should be available on the web very soon.

The rest of the talks were all good as well, feedback from others was
pretty positive and I think I’ll definitely try and do it again next
year. Due to time constraints the maximum talk length was just 25 minutes
but keeping to this meant we got a lot more talks into the day although I
would have liked more depth sometimes.

After the end of the Miniconf I went to the Speaker’s dinner. I wasn’t
actually speaking at the conference but Miniconf organisers got invited
along too which was really cool.

The venue was nice and I got to talk to some interesting people who I
hopefully didn’t bore too much

First thing Monday I decided to go to the Virtualisation Miniconf to
something labeled “Keynote”. Unfortunately it appears their schedule was
completely screwed so one of the later talks was happening. I didn’t find
this interesting so I snuck off to Debian and caught the “State of the Debian
Project” talk which was pretty interesting.

Due to the brochure being printed a few weeks ago, the timetables from
many of the Miniconfs are out of date. While this is 100 times better than
last year when nothing had been printed it is still frustrating. The organisers
were really cool and let me print out a couple of our the Sysadmin Miniconf
schedule so I’ll hang this outside our room tomorrow to give people the
latest schedule.

At this point I really have to thank the organisers, so far they have been
incredible efficient and helpful beyond the call of duty. So when I’ve asked
for weird and non-standard stuff like printouts they have been really
nice, helpful and complete good about doing all them. I’d like to give them a
big thank you and a “You guys rock!” .

I dropped into the Multimedia Miniconf for the next session and caught
an overview of some new Dirac codecs from one of the people at the BBC
and then 3 quick talks. The first was a great update on the ogg
projects by [Chris Montgomery](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Montgomery) ,
the second was a report on a FOSS survey which was a little wasted when the
presented spent the first 10 minutes going on about her organisation and
I missed the 3rd.

For lunch ended having a very nice Italian lunch of pasta and bruschetta
( I love bruschetta) with some guys so I was a bit late back to the next
session.

I caught the end of a session at the virtualisation Miniconf ( I
apparently missed the good ones this morning) and then over to
debian for a discussion about “Why don’t the big guys love Debian”, some
good points discussed although I think some people are hung up about
shipping binary modules, for large companies that want to run Debian on
servers binary modules are not important, solid support and someone to
yell at is. For the last session I squeezed into the security Miniconf
to heard about ssh exploits

Afterward a bunch of us went to Lydon St for the Sysadmin ( and friends)
dinner. After a bit of problem with the venue we ended up in a nice
place and had a good pizza dinner with a bit of ice cream afterward

After a few problems with delayed flights I finally got into Melbourne.
for linux.conf.au. Meet some people from NZ and we shared a taxi into the
venue ( $42 total ).

I arrived around noon on Sunday and the registration for my accommodation
( Trinity ) didn’t open till 1pm so I sat in the shade chatting to people
and trying to get my cellphone to work.

My room is on the 3rd floor and a little old but nice enough, the whole
college has an old feel with hundred year old main buildings (at least
they look) 100 years old.

The conference venue is just 10 minutes walk away from Trinity so I
wandered over and signed up. I’m professional this year so a bit more
stuff than previously. After that I went with some people to Lygon St
for an ice cream.

The newcomers session was pretty good, some others have already blogged
about it. Afterward about 50 people went to a local pub (across the
road from trinity ). The pub had just opened just last week so it was
still not 100% work with staff fairly new and only a few a couple of
beers on tap. In the end I was feeling a little sick so I went home a
little early. Talked to plenty of people during the day and caught up
with a few people from previous years, this would of course be easier if
I actually could remember names and faces, roll on the Sense Cam clone

Just one day till the start of [linux.conf.au 2008](http://linux.conf.au) so
I thought I should do a few posts. This one was supposed to out yesterday
(Saturday) but I ended up getting distracted. So just pretend this was
posted 12 hours ago.

For the rest of this week I’ll be in Melbourne attended linux.conf.au and
related events. If you are new to LCA then see the [main site](http://linux.conf.au) or
read the [First timers](http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/2007/0129.html) that I
wrote a few months ago.

The Main event I am looking forward to is the [System Administration Miniconf](http://
sysadmin.miniconf.org) on Tuesday which I am helping to organise. The programme
is online [here](http://sysadmin.miniconf.org/programme08.html) although there
might be a last minute change or two.

Monday is the first day of the Miniconfs with Community Wireless, Debian,
Education, Embedded, Fedora and Multimedia, Security and Virtualisation all
happening. I’ll probably spend most of the day at the virtualisation Miniconf
but I have to do a detailed check of the other miniconf’s schedules to spot
cool talks elsewhere.

On Monday night an informal dinner has been arranged at a local Italian place
for the the Sysadmin Miniconf and anyone else who wants to attended. Details
are here