sjh - mountain biking linux geek spice

[lca] Casa Del Gelato

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 11:33:00

Completely by accident last night after dinner, Mikal, MRD and I stumbled into Casa Del Gelato to feed MRD's Gelati habit (the man is hooked on the stuff, he seems to be on a constant sugar high here at lca due to feeding his gelati cravings).

Interestingly we had no idea that this was an award winning ice cream and gelato outlet, sold on premises and no where else. If Andrew Chalmers is to be believed this gelato wins awards and prizes in Italy so we were lucky to stumble in there by chance. Just using this as a reminder of where to get ice cream and gelato in Melbourne.

[lca] A few more days at geek Nirvana

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 10:52:00

I am wearing the t-shirt today so I should probably live up to it and write some stuff. There have been some seriously cool talks at lca. I adored the Parrot talk from Allison Randal, largely because it is incredible to see how far Parrot has come and how capable the entire set of tools based upon it now is. I am seriously tempted to show it off to some academics at work and see what they think of it for next generation language creation. At the same time yesterday there was a talk about a fire fighting robot, from what I hear this is likely one of the best talks this year. Everyone I spoke to who was at the robot talk thought it the best they have seen.

I liked the keynote yesterday from Stormy Peters, though when she mentioned the Iranian child care centre example, it sounded as if it were part of her research, the example comes from the book Freakonomics and it seemed a bit weird to have it unacknowledged. I tend to agree with a lot of what I have heard about Bruce's keynote, he was simply repeating stuff we have all seen before if we read his stuff a lot. IT was good, however alas not as cool as I suspect it could have been. I was really looking forward to his keynote so I may have built it up a bit in my expectations. However Anthony Baxter was a good keynote today also so makes up for it a bit.

Google non professional delegate party last night was alright, though the venue was a little strange, I am surprised Leslie chose it, she flew out from the US a while back to check out venues, so I imagine it did meet her requirements for the laid back atmosphere. Mikal had gone down to get the venue ready early, MRD and I wandered down to hang out with Mikal until other delegates rocked up. Around 9pm Mikal, MRD and I headed off to have dinner elsewhere and continue chatting. MRD and I spent the night learning of all manner of things that were or were not "Googly" according to Mikal. Of course with Mikal's sense of humour and heavy sarcasm who really knows what is or is not real. Fun was had, one more day of full on conference to go, fun is being had.

[lca] How not to prepare for the first day at lca

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 10:45:00

I arrived in Melbourne yesterday morning around 7:45am (06:40am flight out of Canberra) and managed to get to Melbourne Uni around 8:30am... alas I was not ready to tackle the first day at lca and the Debian Mini Conf as much as I would have liked.

On the weekend I competed in the AROC Edge of Reason 25 Hour Adventure race near Narooma on the coast. I was racing with Dave and Ben in the team My Physio Keeps Me Moving, alas the Physio got sent to Europe for work and missed the race, however I was her replacement.

The Leaderboard and results and race news are all online so you can see it took us 38 hours to complete the race trekking/running, paddling and mountain biking out through the bush and on the ocean. I had fun and had a very easy/relaxed race. I think Dave and Ben had a pretty hard time of it due to never having done such a long race before and not having the training base in them that I and many others have.

Dave and Ben's partners were both racing in the 50 hour race (longer and tougher), they were on different teams, Dave's partner Selina finished in first placed mixed (the premier category) 3rd overall in 44 hours, Ben's partner Danielle finished in 2nd place mixed, 4th overall in 45h40m. Good to see such good results for both of them.

I had been hoping to finish the race by around 2pm on Sunday so I could have a snooze for a few hours before driving back to Canberra. However with the course being longer and tougher than expected and with the speed we travelled I did not finish until 9pm, I then had to get back to Canberra, have 2 hours sleep (got home around 2:30am) and hop on my flight to Melbourne for the week of geeking it up at linux.conf.au.

With 2 hours of sleep and a little bit of activity outdoors for 38 hours non stop, when I sat down in the Debian mini conference yesterday morning I was finding it difficult to stay awake. Thus I have to admit I was a little too tired to be able to concentrate on the miniconfs all day. I am thankfully a lot better now after a full night of sleep and am enjoying the Gnome Mini Conf a lot.

[lca] lca2008 have a fantastic first keynote

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 16:28:00

So the lca2008 crew just made their first keynote announcement and man does this make me happy. Bruce Schneier will be presenting a keynote at lca2008, rock on.

When we ran lca2005 the speaker I wanted to get there most of all as a keynote invite was Bruce Schneier, we sent of an invite and also had a colleague in the crypto field ask him to attend as a keynote invite. Alas he had other commitments and was not available. Sure we had some great keynotes, Eben's for example was incredible and the standing ovation he received was well deserved, however I was always upset we had not managed to get Schneier out to linux.conf.au. Way to go Melbourne crew you make me happy.

[lca] I wonder where that email notification is

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 18:28:00

Nice to know that the early bird registration for lca2007 I made will have a 10 day payment window once they inform everyone who registered for early bird by email that we can pay.

I wonder when they will contact people and tell them they can pay? Not everyone who has registered will read blogs, nor will they all be hitting reload on the conference website every few hours, it is nice to know we gave our email addresses with our registrations for a reason. At this rate I at least will not have to get my boss to enter credit card details until the 14th of December at the earliest....

Yes this post is somewhat tongue in cheek, however I am entirely convinced they need to honour their 10 day window from the time of notification by email.

[lca] linux.conf.au is a damn good name

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 17:20:00

There has been a discussion (and in another thread) on the linux-aus mailing list sparked off by Jeff Waugh suggesting both Linux Australia and linux.conf.au should have a name change.

Personally I disagree wholeheartedly with the idea of changing the name of the conference, and though I do not have a strong opinion on changing the name of Linux Australia, I have not seen an argument with any real reasoning and well thought out points as to why it is entirely necessary. So I weighed into the discussion on Friday afternoon with a semi lengthy set of thoughts on the matter.

One thing I realise I forgot to mention is that Linux is the generic most recognised term worldwide for Open/Free Software already. Jon "Maddog" Hall reminded me of this in his response to the discussion (recommended reading). We have a well known brand with linux.conf.au, as was pointed out by Andrew Cowie, a conference can change their name as "foss.in" has from the old Linux Bangalore name they had, however their name change was in part because they saw how incredibly cool the linux.conf.au name was for a technical geeky conference.

Geeks get the idea of linux.conf.au and appreciate the conference name. If you wish to attract sponsors or delegates that do not understand the conference enough to grok this I wonder if you really wish to run linux.conf.au. There has been some suggestions of running some other event for a number of years, a new alternately focused event could utilise the potential delegates Jeff may be after (those who do not find the all encompassing geekiness or existing feeling of linux.conf.au to be their cup of tea) (and potential sponsors) and that way linux.conf.au can stay as is.

[lca] Mark Shuttleworth talk notes.

Sat, 28 Jan 2006 12:54:00

So the keynote this morning was from Mark Shuttleworth, talking about collaboration between open source projects (lca link), as I missed the best of sessions (too busy running around telling people what the best of sessions were.... oh and I guess a need to use some bandwidth before I lose it for two weeks) this is the last of the talk notes I will be uploading from lca.

[lca] Van Jacobson rocks

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 15:13:00

The next two talks I saw today were David Gibson talking about the new device trees and device tree compiler they are using for all powerpc archs (and could in theory be used for unrelated archs such as arm or x86 variants). Device Trees for embedded systems (lca link)

However the standout talk of the entire conference was probably the next one I saw. Van Jacobson, you know one of the guys that was involved with creating the Internet, and designed protocols in such a way that they do not suck and thus the Internet does not fall over. Anyway he presented a seminar with suggestions for speeding up the Linux tcp stack (lca link).

Van Jacobson had done the code, the tests and the work had really obvious merit for the conclusions, he presented to the likes of Dave M, Linus and Rusty, everyone else liked the talk too.

[lca] More trench notes.

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 11:12:00

Last night we had a rather cool Professional Delegates Networking Session, with thanks to IBM and HP for the beers and food, at the Larnarch Castle in Dunedin, neat location. This morning the keynote was from Damian Conway talking about lessons learnt (technical and social) from the perl 6 development process. Next I went to Chris Yeoh's talk about Managing Memory in variable sized chunks. Then I got to see the cool new stuff Wayne Piekarski has done in the augmented reality gear and software he has been presenting about since lca began in 1999.

I have uploaded some notes, not much from Chris' talk but a but from the rest.

Sex *and* Violence: Technical and Social lessons from the Perl 6 Development or why Larry gets the colon and we should not have called it perl 6. (lca link)
Managing Memory in Variable Sized Chunks. (lca link)
More Augmented reality Fu what cool new stuff has Wayne been able to do with it this year (lca link)

Wayne has managed to make the tinmith system a lot smaller now, to the extent the entire system fits in a bum bag sized case with some batteries mounted on the hips (2 8 Amp Hour batteries, I suspect if he used NiMH 4.4 Amp Hour cells he could get the battery packs even smaller and lighter too).

Damian Conway rocked seriously, a great speaker and I am a perl fan so it was fun to see.

[lca] Trench notes

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 15:04:00

So the title of this is somewhat incorrect, the stuff I am seeing is not a negative experience, thus not trench style, ahh well. It is really good to see linux.conf.au and attend the talks. I have for the heck of it been taking notes of most of the presentations I have been going to. Not many notes at some, such as the LA AGM, partly because more details from LA will be imparted on Saturday and partly because it is not particularly fascinating. Anyway I have placed my linux.conf.au notes (in order of seeing them) in a directory on this web server.

So far I have put notes up from

Andy Fitzimons open source graphical design applications tutorial (lca link)
Linux Australia AGM
Dave Miller's Keynote (lca link)
Dave Boutcher talking about massive virtualisation on IBM Power 5 which is useful to me for the Power 5 machines at work (lca link)
Bdale Garbee on Satellite detection and open source (lca link)
Paul Mackerras, the powerpc maintainer, talking about changes in kernel powerpc land recently. As an aside today is Paulus' birthday (there is public holiday for his birthday in Australia every year) so everyone sang a song for him (lca link)

The notes are fairly rough, and just my interpretation of things. Also I recorded stuff from the slides a bit so if you look at them when they are eventually released by the organisers there will be some overlap.

[lca] linux.conf.au 2006, bring it on

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 10:25:00

I will be using Australian times on blog entries, though I am right now in Dunedin, New Zealand for linux.conf.au 2006. This is hell fun, as I kind of had to miss the conference last year, what with running the thing I have not seen all this cool technical content since Adelaide 2004.

Mike Beattie and his crew have put on another awesome conference this year. Some of the highlights are going toe Van Jacobson (yes that Van Jacobson) with suggestions on how to improve the speed and integration of the Linux tcp stack. Damien Conway's keynote (I really tried to get Damien to lca last year but alas he had to pull out for various reasons), Dave Miller, the guy who melted all our brains at CALU in Melbourne and lca in Sydney. And a whole heap of other stuff, if you are not here, why the heck not?

Heck as Mike said in the conference handbook, they even improved on the cardboard cutout Linus technology we used in Canberra last year to the extent you can talk with Linus in a real interactive conversation, though Mike does request that no one try to fold him up and take him home in their suitcase.

Right now I have just been taking notes in a tutorial from Andrew Fitsimon on open source graphic design. Showing off the features and capabilities of inkscape, scribus, the gimp, fontforge and how to produce web and print quality stuff well. The tools are amazing, and in the hands of a graphic designer as capable as Andrew some cool stuff can be created.

Looking forward to a whole lot more cool geekery over the coming days.

[lca] Not so much pay for, more a case of implicitly support

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 10:45:00

Lindsay Holmwood seemed to think I was suggesting schools pay for conference attendance, as nice as that would be, I was not really suggesting that. I know from long experience (parents were teachers, many of my friends are teachers) how pitifully underfunded schools are so would not imagine it is possible.

What I was suggesting is that if a student wishes to attend a conference being held during school time for a week, they should be encouraged by the school and allowed the week off with no penalty or problems. This is because requesting to attend a conference shows a lot of initiative, also of course the incredible knowledge gain available from a good conference. There is an issue of what is a good conference and what is not, however the pricing of contiki style conferences (3 day marketing thingy at the beach or similar, you know what I am talking about) are priced well out of the budget of students. Most of the good conferences however appear to be priced very well, especially for students. The two examples I gave of GUADEC and linux.conf.au definitely fit the bill.

The problem as I see it is that a school, and possibly parents, would not realise the huge advantage a student would have knowledge wise by going to something like GUADEC for a week over a week of school.

[lca] Students at conferences

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 13:52:00

Yesterday I read something on p.l.o.a written by Pascal Klein, discussing a school student attending lca.

It seems obvious when you think about it, however if a highschool age student is in to Linux or related technologies and they are able to attend a nearby technical conference it should be encouraged by the school and parents. Whether the conference is linux.conf.au, GUADEC or some other equally great open source related conference. The price is low, especially for students, and in one week of conference attendance a student will gain far more interesting and technical computing related knowledge than would be obtained in any highschool or similar I can think of in a few months.

For example Bdale Garbee's daughter Elizabeth attended lca2005, initially her school appeared to be a little upset at her missing the school time, however with subsequent good marks and probably increase in enthusiasm from lca I suspect they were convinced of the benefit.

[lca] Special conference features for the little people

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 21:44:00

I notice Arjen Lentz discussing a mysql t-shirt he had on his baby daughter, I do not know if he is planing to have a line of baby clothing available for sale at the next mysql event, or is simply considering it for the mysql clothing line they have somewhere.

I do however think it is interesting to get a few special items like this for a conference or event. In the case of lca, part of what makes the conference fun is little special features organisers have at the conference or similar. Such as the Perth guys putting unusual hints in their DNS records and the hidden badge label stuff on their rego system (which we copied).

One of the cute things we (2005) did was copied an idea from the Adelaide people (2004) and got some kids clothing made up. Partly because our organising crew followed in the footsteps of the 2004 crew and their were 3 babies born to organiser's families in the course of the year leading up to lca2005 and partly because it looks cool to see babies and young kids wandering around in your geeky t-shirts. (well we all seem to think so)

It is good to see Arjen is at least working on some of these fun sort of aspects, the fun or unusual items are often one of the lasting impressions from a conference. Well that and hearing DaveM make our brains melt talking about making the Linux networking stack go even faster (CALU talk).

[lca] linux.conf.au 2006 Call For Presentations is open

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 22:48:00

Partay! The CFP for lca2006 is now open. After reading that announcement email go and submit a really cool abstract.

[lca] My lca photos online

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 14:21:00

To add to the collection (Michael Davies, Marc Merlin, and for a list) of photos from lca online. I have just uploaded a few also.

[lca] Another new talk

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 10:57:00

We had another speaker pull out, Wim Coekaerts was told by his doctor it would not be safe to fly to Australia at the moment so was unable to come over to speak. Fortunately Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell has offered to do a conference presentation on top of his Thursday morning keynote.

Tridge will be talking on Friday afternoon in MCCT1 following Mark Shuttleworth's talk from 14:30 to 15:15. The topic will be on some cool thing Tridge has been doing recently and will be a great presentation.

At the moment it appears the Friday afternoon MCCT1 stream is cursed, I just hope Jon Corbet stays in the country until Friday afternoon...

[lca] A speaker replacement

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 19:19:00

One of our speakers had to return to the US, Jimi Xenidis, we have been able to find a replacement speaker for his session in MCC T1 on Friday at 13:30 to 14:15. Mark Shutleworth has agreed to speak about his space flight experiences and Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu Linux) on Friday afternoon. I hope you all enjoy this talk as much as the other really cool stuff we have happening a the conference.

The conference program will be updated later tonight (in all supported formats including LaTeX, html, and the new iCal version for people to use in their personal organisers or Korganiser or similar)

[lca] linux.conf.au secret wmd business

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 17:23:00

Organisers moving something? (full size)

I managed to take this photo late last night of a few of the lca crew (Jeremy, Tony and Andrew) moving something that may be the secret lca plutonium stash, or it may be something harmless, who knows?

[lca] linux.conf.au 2005 is go

Sun, 17 Apr 2005 17:28:00

No one else on the ground at lca has talked about the conference yet, I guess because the rest of the crew are too busy and the delegates are too excited.

Anyway all is cool, people are here and doing early sign in, vibe is happening. I am eating lunch (yes at 5:30pm) and in a few minutes will drive to the airport to pick up some cool speakers.

I hope everyone else is having fun here too. Oh and happy wedding day Jeff and Pia.

[lca] A whole lot more information for linux.conf.au just went out

Tue, 12 Apr 2005 22:39:00

I just sent an email to the various linux.conf.au forum with more details people attending linux.conf.au need to know. Read it here if you did not receive it by email.

[lca] Mindless linux.conf.au 2005 flickr fun

Wed, 30 Mar 2005 18:30:00

So I have been seeing these spell with flickr links for a week or two now, I guess repeated exposure eventually became too much and I felt the need to type this one in.

Sourced from here.

[lca] Sold Out

Tue, 29 Mar 2005 23:09:00

I really need to go to bed, and I still have a TODO list for lca stuff for today that is unfinished, however I feel the need to mention this (even though both Mikal (with countdown) and Jeremy have already done so).

linux.conf.au 2005 sold out earlier today, we have a limit of 500 delegates imposed upon us by the largest theatre in the complex we are using for the conference. We had an alternative plan available to allow for more people we could have implemented 8-10 weeks ago, however registration numbers at the time suggested we should not, thus we stuck with our original limit of 500 delegates.

It is a good feeling to reach this point, though once more I am sure there is still a fairly large amount of work in front of us, all of you coming to the conference, are going to have a great time, if you missed out, book and pay early next year for Dunedin, New Zealand in January 2006.

[lca] Thinking along the same lines

Tue, 08 Mar 2005 18:53:00

It is kind of funny, though at times annoying, how with distributed groups of people working on similar things, there can be misunderstandings even though you are thinking along the same lines and there really ought not be. Looking at what Joey Hess has just written about a recent Debian release team meeting seemed so familiar to me.

linux.conf.au is run as a project of Linux Australia, it is however run by a team of people selected each year in a new location. Due to this the Linux Australia committee are not on the ground seeing the day to day conference business, and the linux.conf.au crew for any given year do not see the Linux Australia day to day stuff or concerns often.

Both groups of people want the same thing, a kick arse Linux conference each year, however due to the lack of face to face time and the fact that the groups have separate day to day concerns misunderstandings often happen. The good (or bad, depending how you view it) is that when such communication breakdowns or problems occur, after taking the time, or if there is face to face time, to understand what each group of people is actually talking about or saying, it usually seems we were all thinking almost identical things, but somehow the mechanism by which we communicated this did not convey this well.

We can probably all sit around over a beer sometime after the conference is over and laugh at it, and on the whole things happen the way we expect them to.

[lca] Eben and the GPL as discussed by Groklaw

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 17:09:00

Eben Moglen is a speaker at linux.conf.au 2005, delivering a keynote address. Eben is the original Author of the GNU General Public Licence and is the General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation. Thus he has a lot of experience in the licencing of free software, the theories behind the licences and also in legal issues surrounding software licenced under the GPL.

I mention all this because today I saw on Groklaw a really good article "How Not to Kill the Golden Goose" talking about why the GPL is and has been necessary and why it has allowed Linux to ignore commercial interests rather than pander to them.

The article and the comments contain some good imagery or metaphors and views. Such as pointing out how Linux is more comfortable for users than proprietary software

Proprietary software lets me use their software, but only the way they want it used. Like staying at a friend or relatives house. They want certain things in the kitchen done a certain way, and this spice goes on the right and that one next to it, and those glasses can't go in the dish washer, and this pot has to be shined with this product, blah blah. At home, I make those decisions, and if I want to stand the little bottle of basil on its head in the spice rack or throw it in the freezer or mix it with the pepper, there is nothing but common sense to stop me. Do you understand?

Or later when discussing how businesses seem so short sighted, they see this huge cash cow and wish to subvert it to their current way of doing things, even though in the long term that will kill it off.

silly. Business sees one golden egg, Linux, and all it sees is gold, this minute, and if it needs to grab it, killing the goose to get it, so what? I know it's hard to change one's way of thinking, but this is a time when you simply must. Why? Because if you shut down the way Linux was developed in some misguided attempt to bottle it, or remove the license that made it so powerful, you will destroy it. And that's just counterproductive. Instead, you need to figure out not how Linux and the GPL need to change for you, but how you need to change for it.

This is a current concern in the way businesses, end even, unfortunately, governments around the world tend to operate. Governments often do not fund education anywhere near as much as far less important services, if you remember that the more educated your populace the more productive your entire country will be, and thus more prosperous in the world, it does make one wonder about the lack of funding to education around the world. Or in Australia some obvious recent examples, the Australian government selling off Telstra, or in Canberra, the DFAT building, which was sold to private enterprise. Both these actions bring in a large immediate cash swell but in the long term (20 years or more) will cost the government (The Australian People) more. This is the same sort of mindset that seems to behind (though possibly unconsciously) a business wishing to privatise and subvert Linux, a technology that they could never afford to develop or extend into the future.

PJ writes some great stuff here, I should mention a year ago when we were discussing who the invited speakers for linux.conf.au 2005 should be, PJ was on the short list. However no one we knew had seen her speak and we could not find out easily if she would be able to deliver a great keynote. In the end we decided to invite Eben Moglen, who will bring a relevant and important perspective to the Australian and international Linux development community members attending linux.conf.au 2005, especially in light of the FTA issue in Australia and the Legal issues surrounding Linux currently.

[lca] Mikal's bra

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 19:17:00

News just in, lca 2005 crew member Mikal has just promised he will be wearing a sports bra during linux.conf.au 2005 to show off his bustline.

[lca] Funky banners

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 22:13:00

Jenny Cox kindly created a few interesting or unusual banners we could use on the lca web site. In the same way google change their banner image from time to time we thought it would be cool to have something like that for lca.

Some of them may be specific to one day but we wanted to show them all as they are pretty cool, so we simply put them up on random rotation. Each banner links to a short description of what the image is about also. Even more reason for you to go check out the conference website and sit there hitting reload, or reading a few different pages.

[lca] Speakers and Early bird

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 22:55:00

The early bird registration for linux.conf.au 2005 is closing in a few days (Jan 31 is the last day). If you have registered already but have yet to pay, unless you pay before Feb 1st you will be re invoiced for the full attendance fee. Sure even at full price lca is still one of the cheapest technical conferences to attend anywhere, and that is completely ignoring the fact that it is incredibly cool (a heck of a lot of fun), however why let the early bird rate slip past you if you can pay before the end of January.

Have a look at the speakers we have presenting at the conference this year. I dare you to survive more than the first day without having your brain melt out your ears and form puddles of brain all around the conference venue. Anyway as I say in mtb circles, fun will be had. Be there!

[lca] Speakers announced

Fri, 24 Dec 2004 13:34:00

Invited speakers appearing at linux.conf.au 2005 are Eben Moglen, Andrew Morton, Robert Love, Andrew Tridgell, Rasmus Lerdorf, Rusty Russell, and Anton Blanchard. These people and all the speakers presenting from CFP submissions are listed on our speakers page.

Many cool talks, tutorials and other stuff. Some life on lca-announce again finally with this email telling people about registrations, the speakers and prices.

[lca] Cool/Intelligent people attract Cool/Intelligent people

Tue, 21 Dec 2004 11:27:00

This train of thought came from a post made by Robert Scoble on the subject of ipods and marketing. Scoble said "Let's take a lesson from the geek dinners. I learned that if you get three people who a lot of people want to have dinner with that you'll have a large interesting group.".

He is quite correct, this is one of the things that makes linux.conf.au such a fun and interesting conference to attend. A whole bunch of cool intelligent people rock up to speak at the conference and delegates attend because they can sit around and chat with these people (and hear them speak too, but to some extent that is secondary).

[lca] Registrations

Fri, 17 Dec 2004 21:43:00

We opened linux.conf.au 2005 registrations almost exactly two days ago with out much fanfare. Our current plan is to put out a press release, announce on lca-announce and make the list of speakers live at about the same time. Already we have received around 10 registrations from delegates, about half of these have paid already (which is the point at which your place is guaranteed). I promise you will learn of all the cool speakers coming soon.

When I phrased that differently recently, saying "all the call people coming to lca", Jeremy joked, they already know the organisers will be there, so they know who the cool people will be <g>.

[lca] Speaker acks

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 11:01:00

We sent the speaker invites out at the beginning of the week. It is very cool to see their ACK's for speaking at lca come back. As Anand said, this is one of the milestones, we have a whole bunch of very cool people who have agreed to speak now.

[lca] Almost live

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 11:10:00

Our calendar suggests lca registrations will open soon. I had not seen much traffic on the list from the crew on this, so I checked to ensure we were close to schedule. The good news is the CommSecure merchant banking stuff has been arranged by LA and the crew working on the changes we need for the rego system will have something for us to test tomorrow. This means we should be able to start taking registrations at the end of the month.

[lca] We have the linux.conf.au domain back

Mon, 08 Nov 2004 12:08:00

Woohoo. Ready for the conference in April we now have the conference domain delegated to us once more. As Pia would say. Rock on linux.conf.au.

[lca] Small delay in some programme data

Thu, 04 Nov 2004 22:42:00

One outcome of the meeting tonight was we will have a delay of around 2 weeks after opening registrations before we put CFP related program data onto the lca website. Currently we are on track to open conference registrations on or around November 16 still. However we probably will not put the speakers online until the end of the month.

A press release with conference registration opening and our list of invited speakers may be a god thing soon, simply to get the word out there about the conference a bit more. There is one group of people running a conference in Australia soon claiming to be running the first "Open Source Developer's Conference", personally my view is they are smaller and focused differently to lca. However some lca crew members and various other people expressed some concern about claims along the lines of "first", considering CALU was held in Melbourne in 1999 they may have a point.

[lca] Minutes online wihin 20 minutes of the meeting close.

Thu, 21 Oct 2004 20:52:00

Yay for Tony for writing them well. We are working on the changes we want to make for the registration system for this year. Of course I felt it necessary to remind people we want some fun ideas for humorous or just quirky things for the conference which may need to be included here. Such as the cool badges they had at the Perth lca. If anyone has any ideas for in jokes, please don't hesitate to email us (organisers@lca2005.linux.org.au), if you suggest a good one we probably wont even tell you <g>

In other news, in what could possibly be a record we got through the business for tonight in 1 hour and 1 minute.

[lca] Minutes and copious action items.

Thu, 07 Oct 2004 21:17:00

Tonight's lca meeting is finished, I am sitting in the tea room at dcs still working on getting some minutes and action item data up onto our wiki and fighting sleep. Bob and Andrew are still here working on making debian more functional on Bob's tablet pc. I should seriously consider a large amount of sleep due to the solo effort at the 24 hour mtb race this weekend. However I need to get these minutes and action items out there so I can forget about it for the weekend and the rest of the lca crew can do cool stuff.

[lca] Hoping the timing works out

Wed, 06 Oct 2004 23:41:00

So the new CFP closing date is 12th October. Once this closes the CFP committee have until the beginning of November to work through submissions. Then we have until mid November to decide on the preliminary program to the extent that we have filled spots to show people when registrations open on November 16. I am hoping working out this aspect of the programming is not going to be too arduous and the somewhat tight timing of all these events works out in the end. Of course it is likely good practice for us all to try and get stuff done quickly.

Other aspects of the program can still be varied, we are considering running some sessions until 6pm, or possibly some lighting talks or poster sessions while other sessions are on. Brad Hards has been thinking of a whole lot of different variations and the pros and cons for a long time now so it will be fun to see what we decide to do when the conference rolls around.

[lca] Toys and locations

Thu, 09 Sep 2004 11:34:00

Yesterday morning Tony, Mikal, Kristy and I did some visiting for lca. Looking at the venue we will hold the Professional Delegates networking session in, and visiting a toys and other such vendor crap (as Mikal likes to call it) supplier. Overkill is hardly enough I am sure, so having 4 of the lca crew visit works fine. The venue for the networking thing is pretty cool so I think we are happy with that. Officially Mikal is the guy doing vendor crap, and thus choosing the most off putting, bright, etc shirts he can for lca organisers to wear during the conference and dealing with the toys and such we give to delegates and speakers. Everyone else wanted to come along just to see the cool toys I am sure. Well Tony and I wanted to order some business shirts with the lca2005 logo which we intend to have for sale during the conference for delegates to purchase.

[lca] Panic over dns, what work for lca this week (where are we going today</plagarise>)

Thu, 02 Sep 2004 21:29:00

Last night I was writing various lca information and on checking the links worked I found linux.conf.au did not appear to resolve. Fortunately it was not off air, simply munnari.oz.au was playing up and not properly responding to queries. I imagine this is just another in the line of many panics I will have, whether well founded or not, leading up to April 23rd (the end of the conference) next year.

As for where we are going today (rather poor deliberate plagarism), we had another meeting and again it appears we had more people than actual jobs to do at the moment. This could be a good thing, when there is a lot of work to do we should have the people available for the work. I still need to work on letting go a bit and allowing lca crew members to do their own thing more and just being around to ensure things get done.

As for media wise, Rusty has volunteered to be the media contact person for the conference. This is cool as he has the gift of the gab (kissed the blarney stone or similar) in the context of media and people in suits and the like. Also he knows the guff about linux.conf.au pretty well.