Gadget.Geek.nz

First published on LinuxJournal.com

The second day of the conference dawned just as bright and sunny as the first. The opening keynote was delivered by Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She spoke on the history of the FOSS movement as birthed by Richard Stallman and it’s paradoxical growth during the same period that governments and corporate bodies were pushing their agenda for stronger IP and copyright control. Gabriella took the audience through the wrangling that forever forced the FOSS community into the political arena and created the biggest threat to the traditional concept of IP that exists today.

Tuesday is traditionally the second day of miniconfs at LCA, with the lineup including:

System Administration Miniconf
Bridging the gap
Open and the Public Sector
Education Miniconf
Data Storage and Retrieval Miniconf
Multicore and Parallel Computing Miniconf
Multimedia Miniconf

For me, the highlight of the day was the talk by Paul Gunn of Weta Digital, who explored the ‘Challenges in Data Centre Growth’ inherent in the demanding task of rendering movie frames. With some limited personal knowledge of the makeup of the infamous Weta render farm, it was fascinating to get a closer look.

This year, Linux.conf.au is hosting a photography competition for delegates and speakers, with four sections breaking the stunning Wellington city sights into quadrants. Entries are accepted for Lambton, Cuba, Courtenay and the Waterfront, roughly delimiting four areas of interest in Wellington’s compact CBD.

The first round of competition entries have been judged with the finalists announced – disclaimer, I was one of them – you’ll all just have to believe me that I intended to mention the competition before I knew!

The first round of finalists were:

Dustin Kirkland
Tim Potter
William Gordon
Jes Fraser

With Dustin Kirkland having entered two winning entries.

Day 3 will usher in the conference proper, starting with a keynote by Benjamin Mako Hill.

First posted on
LinuxJournal.com

January brings with it the southern-hemisphere’s summer and Linux.conf.au. This year, the conference is being held in Wellington, New Zealand thanks to the hard work and dedication of the Capital Cabal, a team of volunteer organisers lead by Susanne and Andrew Ruthven.

After a grey and wintery weekend, Wellington was all smiles for the first day of the conference. Situated at the Town Hall and Wellington Convention Centre close to the waterfront, sunshine, blue skies and balmy temperatures saw quite a few conference goers spending time outside exploring today.

This year’s volunteers are numerous and helpful, and have done an amazing job of making the first day of LCA smoother than any other in memory. For the first time, the conference is being streamed live and streams can be accessed from the schedule on http://lca2010.org.nz. For me, just having the wireless working on day one was impressive enough.

The conference format is the same as previous years, with two days of mini-confs and then three days of conference proper. Monday’s line up included:

Business of Open Source Miniconf
Open Programming Languages Miniconf
Wave Developers Miniconf
Haecksen and Linuxchix Miniconf
Libre Graphics Day
Arduino Miniconf
Distro Summit

I have always enjoyed the first day at LCA, catching up with people I’ve met at previous years and making new connections. Registration is always exciting with the traditional goodie bag to rifle through. Tuesday is when the sessions that pique my interest most start, with talks on systems administration and high-performance computing. I’m really looking forward to it, and from looking at how it’s started, I really think this year’s conference is going to be one of the best.

It’s Linux.conf time of year again, and I’m starting to get that night-before-christmas feeling. This year the conference is being held in my home city of Wellington, New Zealand. Thanks to the generosity of my employer, Modica, I will be spending the entire week at the conference.

I’m going to be blogging the conference here and on LinuxJournal.com which will be a nice motivation to start writing regularly again. I’m looking at the schedule with a particular eye toward kernel and systems administration talks, and anticipating catching up with people I’ve met in previous years.

More than that, every year I return from LCA fired up by feeling a real connection with the community and armed with new knowledge that gives me a direct benefit in my day-job as a Linux systems administrator. I’m looking forward to experiencing this for my third year in a row.

My flight from Wellington to Sydney can be easily chalked up as one of the most painful experiences of my life – alongside military service, breaking a bone, and supporting Windows 98. Things improved markedly when, after approximately three hours standing in line, my colleague and I boarded our flight from Sydney to Hobart.

We were playing spot-the-conference-attendee – a Linux cap here, a summer of code shirt there – when Linus Torvalds boarded our plane, looking a little sheepish at all the adoring stares. I ran into him again after we disembarked – standing in my way at the baggage carousel. I forgave him. After all, I’ve heard he’s a KDE fan.

The University turned out to be a very expensive but scenic twenty minute taxi ride from the airport. Hobart is nestled in thickly forested hills with stunning ocean views. The University itself is set to a backdrop of stately Australian bush, with a view of the city and the water from my room. The accommodation is better than any year I can remember – I and four others are sharing a spacious modern apartment with a very pleasant living and kitchen area.

After a pleasant Italian meal and a good night’s sleep, I started my conference experience by alternating between the Sysadmin and Kernel miniconfs. Matthew Garrett’s talk ‘How I learned to stop worrying and love ACPI’ was entertaining and informative, as expected. I counted no less than 10 instances of the word ‘magic’ during his explanation of how ACPI suspend happens. After my misspent youth digging into making Linux go on laptops I fully believe him that magic is involved. Dark magic. Involving animal sacrifice. Possibly the animal operating the computer.

On the systems administration side of things, I listened to Richard Keech talk on “Rapid, repeatable provisioning of Linux systems” using the Red Hat kickstart framework. There were some very good points to this talk, but my colleagues and I agreed we thought our current methods were better. Perhaps we should get around to putting in a talk for next year’s conference. Devdas Bhagat’s presentation on “Automating system administration” was great, looking at the people as well as the technical aspects and discussing how to make the business case for spending time on building these frameworks. I’ve felt the truth of his comment in the past, that “… any sysadmin can blow up a box, but to blow up an entire bunch of machines takes a sysadmin with a configuration management system.”

So far the highlight of the conference for me came in my schwag bag. This is my Tasmanian devil-tux. Yes, that’s a penguin beak strapped on with string. He’s adorable, but I confess to an uneasy feeling that he’s trying to get in amongst the penguins for nefarious reasons. There’s something a little too smug about that expression.

Tomorrow I plan to again alternate, this time between the Security, Systems Administration, and Virtualisation and Management miniconfs. For now, tassy-tux and I are going to go and see what happened to our pizza delivery we ordered an hour ago. He looks hungry.

First posted on LinuxJournal.com