linux.conf.au sessions so far

this year's conf runs from monday 'til friday, ending promptly with the penguin dinner.
meaning, there'll be no circus of shaving, ^^ for poor Rusty who's just allowed to grow his facial hair again.

weather on sunday was up to it's reputation, giving me sun burn with all that sunblock lotion. heh, a sun burn in january. had breakfast in coogee beach, took ferry to the zoo for a few hours, and hung out in downtown/chinatown for the rest of the afternoon until we met up with Kay's sunday party at the Opera House Bar. Took off early around 9:30pm to make it to the monday/tuesday adventure at 6am, but obviously didn't wake up for it.

monday and tuesday were mostly miniconfs, each of conference room setup as a track for one topic. there were debian, GNOME, education, embedded, mySQL, research for monday and debian, GNOME, Education, gaming, kernel, postgreSQL, openoffice and linuxchix for tuesday. Hmm... one too many tracks for a single person to go to. And, wednesday is when the full session began.

i like the bag for linux.conf.au 2007, it fits my laptop perfectly fine and is a size of a purse.

i began monday with Jonathan Oxer's "Escaping Image Storage Hell", and learned immediately one of more popular topics of the conference this year, virtualization!

his slides should be available at http://jon.oxer.com.au.talks and started with a brief description of storage options and how the virtualization oes work in current models. he used some humour describing the name xim(xen image manager) that it rhymes with vim, to state 'xim with vim', haha. His xim works for build and clean removal and other basic fuctions and he's still working on synchronization of virtual machine images and is still researching with rsync and unison, and on things like configuration.
unlike me many of the attendees were active player in the fields, or have been paying enough attention to come up with all sort of comments and suggestions. what a lively panel for the first session of the conference, and a mini-conf session it was too.

then, i thought i might checkout this "A solar powered blue-tooth enabled, embedded video capture device" by Jamie Honan, mainly because I'm a sucker for this 'solar power' bits and 'embedded' another keyword that buzzed my attention. it was more of a demo and sharing session and i enjoyed immensely. Jamie is an active bee watcher it seems, so he was trying to come up with a way he could monitor and study his bees and bee hives. He began a session with a thing or two about bees and went on to describe each of the parts and generations of progress as he surveyed and added different devices. I've seen a few solar-powered devices for home appliance at Fry's but was still a little too timid to do anything with any yet; solar-powered lights for lawn or solar panels to charge up the car and things like that. Jamie had brought a few of his devices and let people discover his bluetooth device, and also showed the small solar panel mounted to the steel pipe and described what gave him difficulties and such. it was a quite motivating session.

university cafe were pretty nice and inexpensive, and were open to feed us, some 600+ attendees at the conference.

there was no question and no arguments about skipping Keith's 2pm session, even as it was titled 'TBA'. Unlike last year, I'm not surprised that he gets to work on the slides 3 days before coming to the conference, and yet come up with topics that everybody cramms the room to come hear about.

Jetlag finally hit me, and I don't really remember anything from 3pm until I was hungry waiting for the speakers dinner bus to transport us all to Captain Cook's cruise. It wasn't until 8pm that we got on, but there were ice cream shops and pie shops at the pier, so ...

Tuesday morning was a bit tough, I wanted to crash Kernel track and also wanted to checkout linuxchix track, not to mention gaming. I started the morning with Peter Chubb's "Speeding up Kernel Development" where I got reminded to go back to the basic, read /usr/src/linux-2.6/Documentation for things, and other neat tips like -> google for LXR on other online documents, -> use distcc and ccache to help speed up the compilation, and tune the machine for faster compilation (use SMP, better than multi-core) and things like that. He also mentioned to use ccache -C to compile if there's any assembly code changes to be picked up during the compilation.