dalts.net Kind Acts of Randomness

Ok.... I failed miserably in my attempt to blog every day through LCA. Friday morning was a late start (due to 3am bedtime) and that just messed me up for the week. In reference to my last post - I now have photographic evidence of me sticking the stickers on the laptop, I vaguely remember this now. I am now in the predicament that my macbook has a "Gnu/Linux" inside sticker on it - and it doesn't, unless you count all my various vmware images that run on there. I don't think the sticker will come off nicely so I may have to go back to running native Ubuntu on there (I had a lot of trouble with Feisty, but maybe Gutsy is better) - just to justify the sticker :)

Ok. Back to LCA. Thursday was an awesome day, started with an interesting and thought provoking keynote by Stormy Peters about paying open source developers. I then went along to Malcolm Tredinnick's tutorial on fast & efficient website... I knew some of this already, but there was a lot of real useful stuff in there - so will be watching that one again.... having the AV for almost all the talks is going to be really handy.

I had a bit of a gap next, but ended up going to Tridge's clustered samba talk... I do use samba but not in a real hard core way like this... it blows my mind to see the work these guys have done often without much help from MS... hats off to you. Next was Parrot a talk I had flagged quite a while before the conference, I was a little late and discovered on the plane home as I recapped the talk, that when you arrive and duck across the front of the room to get a seat like I often did, you get 2 seconds of fame as you appear on the video :) Anyway - Parrot is awesome, I am really excited about the project, actually makes me want to go away and write a compiler which is something I have never done. I notice that someone has already ported LOLCode and it is only a matter of time before OSDCLang is on there!

I took a break after this and ended up sitting opposite Elizabeth Garbee while she and her dad stuggled to fix her demo for the presentation. Anyway - they worked it out with about 2 mins to spare and I had nowhere to go so I went along to her talk about open source animation. She did a good job considering she is only 15 and there were quite a lot of people in the room with lots of questions and interuptions. Well done Elizabeth (she told me later that she had presented 3 years before too... awesome). You inspired me to get off my lazy backside and at least try and put in a submission for the next one.

Thursday night was the professional networking evening... and we got to hear an excellent (but a bit long) talk about CSIRAC. It was awesome to actually see the machine - so well preserved along with all the manuals, tapes etc... well done Melbourne Museum and all the people that worked on this. I also really enjoyed seeing some of the old computers that I knew about about such as the Altair and PDP8 etc.

Made me very nostalgic and had a few good chats with people about the early days of home computing and how we all got started (didn't do much professional networking though!). They also served an rather excellent beer "Red Angus" that I had rather a lot of. Went onto the Black Cat with some HP & IBM people which was good fun (nice Bloody Mary!) and then my downfall was spending the rest of the evening with the slab-drinkers at St Mary's until the wee hours. Waking up at 9:30 brings me back to last post!

I'll just post this for now and continue the rest of the week in a new post... hope this isn't getting too boring, my posts after LCA will be much more concise.