Things that happened at the conference since I last wrote. I flew back from Melbourne last night, missing out on the Open Day today, so this is only notes from the final day and some overall impressions.

Also, the talks are gradually being encoded and put up on the conference website in both video and audio format. I gather there are plugins around to let Windows users play ogg-style video, although I don't have any experience with it. Not sure if it's a case of "not yet" or a blunder that only half of my "stand up and blather" session is available, but it's hardly the most interesting thing there and it's impressive how fast the videos can be made available.

(For those wondering, "most interesting" might be Bdale Garbee's rocket talk, or Jon Corbet's State of Linux talk, or Stormy Peters' keynote or possible one I haven't managed to watch yet.)

(Read more...)

Topics: software/linux, conferences/linux.conf.au

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Melbourne airport's Qantas Club has free wifi, which is nice. However, all is not entirely sane in the network land:

...
Feb  1 18:24:36 lancre dhclient: bound to W.X.Y.Z -- renewal in 59 seconds.
...
Feb  1 18:25:35 lancre dhclient: bound to W.X.Y.Z -- renewal in 55 seconds.
...

and so on (public IP address changed to protect the innocent). Rinse, wash, repeat. I'm all for not tying up the network with unexpired leases that aren't being used, but 60 seconds seems a little eager. I'm just saying.

Topics: software/linux, conferences/linux.conf.au, technology/sysadmin

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[I'm quite behind on a lot this month, due to a bit of unforseen downtime, but I want to get this down whilst it's fresh.]

Currently at linux.conf.au, feeling a bit rushed, but enjoying it now I'm here.

Have my tutorial this morning and it seemed to go reasonably well. I realise as I was writing the slides last week that, as usual, I'd vastly overestimated the amount of stuff I'd be able to cover in 90 minutes. I miss the three hour tutorial slots we used to have at this conference. Still, enough people showed up that they were sitting in the aisles: always a good stroke for the ego.

My talk was nominally about website server performance and I tried to structure things to give people a sense of the problems they have to identify and face. The entire field is pretty large, so I stayed away from too many specifics and concentrate on the attitude and approach that is required to understand and solve problems. Although the slides won't make a lot of sense if you weren't at the talk, they're available online for those who did attend and want to remember which tools I mentioned.

The talk was video taped and they gave me a microphone this year (vast improvement on last year), so it should be available online eventually.

Somebody asked, quite reasonably, if I blogged about the stuff I was talking about and, indeed, I should do more of that stuff. There are a lot of examples of good problem solving, both pre-emptive and after the post facto changes that sites have made, both large and small. I'll try to write some articles about that sort of thing over the coming months. Sharing experiences in the sysadmin/operations arena seems to be a good way to get the knowledge spread around.

The conference generally has been fun, although I only flew down yesterday (missing the mini-conferences on Monday and Tuesday). It was nice to hear Stormy Peters speak at the keynote this morning. Not sure I entirely agree with her conclusions, but her groundwork was sound and it provided food for thought. Val Henderson's talk on her clusterfs project was worthwhile, too. She's a good presenter and filesystem theory and practice is full of interesting algorithms and data structures.

Oh, I was lucky enough to get an OLPC in the giveaway yesterday, so I now have a nice little XO to play with.

More later.

Topics: software/linux, conferences/linux.conf.au

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I forgot to mention this when I received the notification a few weeks ago: I'll be speaking at linux.conf.au next January, in Melbourne. Apparently (he says, quickly checking submission email) the tutorial is called "Memory-efficient and fast websites — pick two!" The full schedule of talks won't be up on the website until late-September, apparently, but I'll forget to mention it by then.

This keeps alive my 100% record of having submissions accepted for this particular conference(or maybe it's more than that, since I accidentally had a paper accepted for Brisbane in 2002, when I couldn't attend). :)

It's always a fun gathering, regardless of if I feel like attending lots of talks or just sitting around talking to people I've never met, or only get to see once a year. This year (in Sydney) i went to fewer talks than other years, but still had a great time because I got to talk to more people and learn stuff that way. If you're in the area, it's not a bad way to spend a week.

For people considering attending, there is also a nice collection of mini-conferences shaping up. These are one- or two-day ad hoc events held just prior to the main conference. Worth making time for if you're also coming to the main conference.

Topics: conferences/linux.conf.au

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Been enjoying attending linux.conf.au this week, in between a few other commitments.

As I wrote about previously, the conference organisers made a few changes to the traditional schedule this year, moving some of the keynotes to odd days and putting the tutorials in the midst of the talks. By and large, the changes have worked, although for any organiser reading this, I have some feedback to send in tomorrow.

Gave my Django tutorial today. It was not the greatest tutorial I have ever given, but it wasn't too bad in the end. I would have preferred more than just 90 minutes, since giving a real tutorial (rather than just a quick overview) can take some time. Feedback from the audience afterwards (just chatting to people in the afternoon) was positive and it seems like I've encouraged a few more people to take the plunge and see what we're doing in Django land.

For those who attended the talk, I have, as promised, put up the slides and example code. Those slides probably won't make a lot of sense to people not at the talk; I have grown tired of putting everything on the slide and prefer to be able to talk and wave my hands around a bit to get the message across. The tutorial was recorded to DVD, although there was no microphone at my podium, so I'm not sure if the sound carried to the camera microphone. If the video does turn out to be reasonable, I'll post a link here. Nothing really special was presented, since this was a beginner/introductory tutorial, but we had some fun and nobody threw fruit.

Been going mad taking photographs. Some of the more acceptable efforts are now in a Flickr set.

For other photos from the conference, look for the lca2007 tag on Flickr. More blog postings from attendees at Planet linux.conf.au.

Topics: software/django, conferences/linux.conf.au

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The linux.conf.au conference programme has now been made available. So everybody can drop what they're doing and finally book that trip to Australia they've been wanting to make.

Will be interesting to see how some of the changes made for this year's conference work out. They have moved the tutorials to the middle of the conference and put keynotes on both mini-conference days. I like the former idea, not necessarily thrilled about the latter, but I guess it's an attempt to include the mini-conferences a bit more. The Saturday has become a bit of an intentionally unplanned day. Kudos to the organisers for taking some risks here; if they don't try new things out, we'll never know if they work.

One item of interest (possibly only to me) in the timetable: Andrew Cowie is giving a tutorial on building GNOME/GTK applications in a few different languages. Back in 2004, I gave a tutorial on the various pieces of the GNOME platform, intentionally keeping it language-neutral. It seemed to go well. A couple of days later, at the conference dinner, Andrew came up and introduced himself to me and said he ahd gone back to his hotel after the tutorial, grabbed the GNOME-Java bindings and played around with them until the early hours of the morning. Sounds like he has continued to remain interested and involved. I have no idea what Andrew's level of interest in GNOME application development was prior to my tutorial, but he was somebody who stood out in my memory for making the effort to come up and say "thanks" and talk about he'd followed up what he had just heard; I remember him sounding really enthused at the time and he was exactly the sort of person — a third-party software developer — I was trying to reach.

Topics: conferences/linux.conf.au

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I received some pleasant email from the organisers of linux.conf.au yesterday: they have accepted my tutorial about Django for the 2007 conference (January next year). I love speaking at that conference because the audience is generally very appreciative, it's very well organised and the talks are always interesting. No conference is perfect, but linux.conf.au is very, very good.

Coincidentally, this keeps up my 100% success rate with having talks accepted in that conference since 2001, although I had to miss the Brisbane (2002, although I accidentally had a talk accepted before I knew I wouldn't be able to attend) and New Zealand (2005) conferences due to other commitments.

Not sure who else is talking yet, since the acceptance emails are no doubt still being replied to, but Rusty has admitted to having a couple of talks. His technical presentations are always compulsory viewing for me.

Topics: software/django, conferences/linux.conf.au

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