Chris's Random Ramblings
Unlike last year's LCA where I was one of the organisers, I actually managed to see quite a lot of the conference this year. Lots of interesting talks and everything went pretty smoothly. Mike Beattie and his team did an excellent job of organising it all.
I'm not having much luck with laptops at the moment. After having a couple of hard disk crashes late last year, the video chip in my laptop decided to die during the conference. Luckily I could borrow Kelly's for extended periods of time to run the hackfest as well as finish the slides for my presentation on the Friday.
At the conference I did a presentation on Managing memory in variable sized chunks. Its a technique we're experimenting with in K42 to avoid the fragmentation of physical memory. I got some pretty good feedback from people who attended to the talk so after developing the ideas further in K42, I think its something we could apply to Linux. The slides I used are available here.
The results for the LCA Hackfest were announced at the conference close. We had around 50 people participate in the competition, although some were working in teams. No one completed all of the questions, but we had many good entries.
Many thanks to Jeremy who this year again helped run the competition. Also thanks to all those from OzLabs, and to Ted Ts'o who submitted questions for the competition.
Congratulations go to Martin Pool who won the competition and Olof Johansson and John Brazel who came second and third respectively. Results for the top 10 are available here and the questions we used are here. See if you can spot any errors in the questions :-)
The prizes for the hackfest at Linux.conf.au in Dunedin have been announced. Some very cool stuff - I wish I could enter!
I've been flat out the last couple of weeks trying to get the memory fragmentation avoidance code to the point where we could get performance and fragmentation data for the talk I'm giving at Linux.conf.au. Finally managed to get some preliminary results on Thursday, so I will have something reasonable to talk about.
There will be programming competition at Linux.conf.au again this year. The Hackfest will be in a different format this year - a programming competition run over 4 hours. I've managed to con(vince) a few other people in the office to write some interesting and challenging questions. It will be interesting to see how the contestants fare. Looks like there will be some very cool prizes again this year as well.
Kelly and I leave for New Zealand tommorow morning. Unfortunately we have a 6:50am flight to Sydney so will have to be awake ridiculously early. We're spending a half a week in Auckland visiting her brother and his wife, before heading down to Dunedin to do some tourist stuff before the conference starts.
Had a long drive back to Adelaide from Canberra for Christmas to visit my parents and brother and his family. Then a few days later we headed off to Melbourne to spend New Years with Kelly's parents and then drove back to Canberra on New Years day. Lots of driving, but Kelly needs the kms for her car.
I setup some backup stuff for my Dad's linux box. We bought him a 1Gb memory stick to use to store backups instead of CD-RWs. Ubuntu has made life much easier for my Dad, but he still runs into errors that are very confusing for inexperienced users and/or require using command line tools. Ended up reformatting the memory stick to ext3 (instead of FAT) so he can just rsync important directories to the memory stick. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Ubuntu automatically mounts USB keys with the sync option.
Also went to Groggy's annual Hacker bbq on boxing day. We worked out that we've been to all of them except for the first, and this time I took Kelly along. Had a great time, though there seemed to be record numbers of flies around. Had a look at all of the horses staying at Groggy's, including one very cool horse who can wave a front hoof on command, as well as walk across a small see-saw.
I have finally put up the photos of the cottage we stayed in at the Blue Mountains in early December. Kelly took me to Clarivaux cottage which is in Blackheath and has beautiful views over cliffs into a valley. We were even lucky enough to see a lightning storm come in over the valley from the comfort of the lounge room.
