Rusty's Bleeding Edge Page

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With Alli's high-risk pregnancy, we're selling the farm and moving back to an apartment in Adelaide (where both our families are). She's moved across already, I'm staying to take care of the farm until it sells.

Unfortunately farms do not sell quickly, but it gives me time to have everyone visit (again). And now we're selling, there's less chance you'll be asked to do random tree planting or similar chores.

When Richard Guy Briggs visited last year he took some great photos, and now seems a good chance to link to them.

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Arrived for the virtualization mini-summit (alongside the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit) the week before last, and stayed around because much of IBM's kvm work is done here. Much hacking, but I should have blogged about my travel plans sooner.

I leave on Friday for San Jose (on the "Nerd bird" I'm told) for the weekend before I fly back home, but if anyone wants to catch up, send mail...

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So I've taken February off, and after Wed 6th I realized that I couldn't do that and still read my email. So I shut my laptop for three weeks and just hung out around the farm.

I've read a half-dozen or so books, cut up lots of firewood for winter, visited the Big Hole, organized a small expedition into the nearby Wyanbene Caves, kept track of my in laws' late nights playing Zelda: Twilight Princess on their new Wii, picked blackberries with various guests and done a heap of chores.

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Jeff Waugh notes that "linux.conf.au is also very cliquey", which is an exaggeration (esp. when compared with an invitation-only event), but does contain a grain of truth: although many people come to LCA for the first time every year, there is a core of Old Timers.

So while I don't think anyone is gratuitously excluded from LCA, I do worry about it. Hence we added a less-than-successful optional video submission to the call for papers, to try to reach out to great presenters who weren't well served by the submission process. I'm also running a newcomer's session to ensure everyone feels they have a good handle on the conference before it begins.

I'm certainly not the one to preach about being welcoming and inclusive, but I think it's a laudable goal.

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OK, I've wrestled with this for a while. I've been invited to a Foocamp, but I've always been nervous about cliquiness in Free Software (such as the kernel summit). I have already compromised on topic-specific events like the Virtualization mini-summit, but I wonder.

We second-tier developers often have an instinctive reaction to horde our knowledge ("it was hard to write, it should be hard to read!"). I've consciously resisted this urge, mainly by asking myself "What would Andrew Tridgell do?" (I also suspect that some day this hoarding attitude will become the litmus test for FOSS posers, so am seeking to preemptively fool it).

So am I paranoid? Are invite-only events a necessary evil? Or should I let my curiousity overcome my principles? Hey, maybe one of those web 2.0 types could help me enable comments on my blog...

Note: just noticed it clashes with LCA. No way!

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There's been some stir about the fact that you are allowed to submit a short video with your LCA talk/tutorial submission this year.

Since LCA doesn't do papers, the main point of being a speaker is to, y'know, speak. What attendees seem to want is to get access to quality information, so on the paper committee we try to judge the product of the interesting stuff the submitter knows and their willingness and ability to convey it. Judging the latter from a written submission is really hard, and we've failed horribly in the past.

As the competition for slots rises (75% reject rate last year), there's mounting pressure to play it safe and just accept the same speakers. But I know we're missing out on some great stuff: how do we give the other speakers a way to show us how great their talk will be? We thought this was an idea which might encourage more, different cool stuff.

Here's my example for an lguest talk, to show how low our expectations are. First take, self-filmed, 40 seconds long: 2MB ogg.

So if you're worried about getting accepted, I'd encourage you to spend 30 seconds telling us about your talk. Thanks!

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In three days it will have been six months since my wife and I moved out to the country.

Since then I've done lots of things that I would normally have called a professional in to do. That includes repairing fences, digging ditches, and chopping wood. The bigger things (which do take a professional) take longer out here, which is why my study is still just a large room with a desk in it. But there are grand plans...

Workwise, the move coincided with my desire to get back to some deeper hacking, and it has been very productive. I've also finally read various technical texts: "The Mythical Man Month" (excellent), "Inside the Machine" (good, if a little light for me), "The Psychology of Computer Programming" (thought-provoking) and "Hacker's Delight" (useful, but after the first half, more skimmed than read).

Downsides: 512kbit satellite is slow and not perfectly reliable, 3GB per month isn't enough and I'm not surrounded by my Ozlabian peers. I've finally started going into the office on a fixed day, so everyone knows when they can catch me, but not being able to casually chat about coding is a definite loss.

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