Free Software programmer
rusty@rustcorp.com.au
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Sat, 28 Jan 2006
linux.conf.au
This year's event was very, very good. Turned up and registered Sunday night; the registration area and University looked great. On Monday, I got up at 6:30am (4:30am Canberra time) to make penguin-shaped waffles for the organisers. The Monday brought Damien Conway's excellent presentation on Presentation Aikido. Takeaway point: use a different font for code than for showing terminal interaction in presentations. So I ducked out of that early to catch some of the Digital Arts miniconf, and to make some Damien-inspired tweaks to my presentation.
Tuesday, I spent mainly hacking, but there was a lot of buzz around about various of the miniconfs, though: the Linux in Education miniconf might explode into a sister conference next year, the Debian miniconf was enlightening, and a number of excited people described the Digital Arts miniconf to me in minute detail.
Wednesday, I decided to go to Andrew Fitzsimon's tutorial on Open Source Graphic Design which taught me about the existence of Scribus and fontforge. Wednesday night was the hackfest; I was looking forward to getting lots of ccontrol GUIs.
Thursday, Dave Miller's keynote opened. I got to do something I've always wanted to do, and introduce him. Dave gave a great talk (three, actually), and indeed, revealed that he'll be working on the Linux port to Sun's new chip (Niagra). My talk went well.
Friday, Damien Conway's keynote opened. Lighter than Dave's, but as entertaining as we've come to expect from Damien. The day is a blur, until Van Jacobson's talk on speeding Linux networks. It recieved a deserved standing ovation, only the second at LCA after Eben Moglen. I watched Dave's face, but turns out Van Jacobson had spilled the beans to him two days before. We'll see VJ's ideas in Linux in 2006.
The dinner Friday night deserves its own paragraph. We auctioned off a copy of the Lions Book, signed by various UNIX notables and LCA speakers. The proceeds were to go to the John Lions Chair for Operating Systems at University of New South Wales (UNSW). We got AU$10,000 for the from a group of ex-UNSW students. That was matched by $10,000 from Linux Australia. Then bowls were passed around, and over NZ$3000 were handed in. This $AU23,000 will be given to maddog, who will donate it to the John Lions Chair fund. Maddog is on the board of USENIX, who will match donations made by any member, giving a total raised of over AU$46,000. Well done.
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