Once again, I showed up to assist with the registration process this morning. It was just as well that I did, because one of the more important organisers was still asleep in the storage room. Perhaps he overdid it a bit at the Google party?
Today's keynote was introduced by Linus Torvalds himself, and given by Dr Andrew S. Tanenbaum (inventor of Minix). He talked about the design of reliable operating systems, and in particular Minix 3. Extremely interesting!
Next was a talk by the editor of Linux Weekly News called The Kernel Report. It was an overview of the development process of the Linux kernel, progress made in the last 12 months and predictions for the future. Although a few people who follow the Linux kernel more closely than I do found it a bit tame, I thought it was very useful and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Andrew Tridgell, Samba developer and renowned speaker, gave a speech on some software that had only been readied for testing the night before his talk - adapting the Samba trivial database, tdb, for clustering environments.
I went to another of Jon Oxer's talks, which turned out to be on the automation of homes and gardens using scripting languages, off-the-shelf components, and basic electronics. Entertaining and thought-provoking; the UCC SMS Screen would have been a great addition to the talk.
The last thing I managed to see today was a talk on nouveau, the reverse-engineered nVIDIA driver project. The guys working on this project are true hackers - reverse engineering a complex, imperfect set of hardware and proprietary software. It's taken them several years, but serious progress is being made.
Unfortunately, a series of events occurred this afternoon which I'm not quite ready to publicise. The upshot is that I won't be attending the rest of the conference.
Thanks, LCA 2007 - what I saw was educational and entertaining.
5 comments
helen :: Wednesday, January 17th
Unfortunately, a series of events occurred this afternoon which I'm not quite ready to publicise. The upshot is that I won't be attending the rest of the conference.
oh dadams, did you bring up windows :(
nephron :: Wednesday, January 17th
Ah well, I'm glad you enjoyed the bit of LCA you managed to see.
banana :: Wednesday, January 17th
I can't think of how you could possibly have ended the post on a more ominous note. Interesting, though, I hadn't realised linux.conf.au was such a big thing.
Nat :: Thursday, January 18th
Is an upshot a good or bad thing?
And does it involve nekkidness in any way, Because you reliase we will tickle the truth out of you.
I wanna be able to say I've attended a google party.. How awesome!
nephron :: Thursday, January 18th
Also, elephants! Elephants fix everything!
