21 Jan 2004 daniels   » (Master)

lca2004

lca wrapup (day 3 onwards) - 'dude!' 'rock!': Saw excellent tutes about Cairo and the GNOME Platform Libraries, and did a whole crapload of hacking - easily the most productive week I've ever had. Found out cool stuff about where I stand in fd.o, and watched more cool talks about stuff like D-BUS, GStreamer, and the stuff I've always wanted to find out more about but never had time to. I rounded off my talk schedule with willy's talk on PCI (the scheduling conflict between PCI and RCU kinda sucked, but willy's talk rocked), and Tridge's junkcode directory; then I watched the GCC regression talk, which wasn't quite as technical as I would've liked.

In between all this, I also saw easily the best talk of the conference: Jeff Waugh on 'To The Teeth: Arming GNOME for Desktop Success'. He ran through all their strategies for release management (particularly pertinent for me now), how they dug themselves out of their pre-2.0 hole, the GNOME infrastructure, where GNOME's going, and more. The dude can talk, and had excellent subject matter, too; two great tastes that taste great together.

In between all this, socialising, and spending entirely too much time at the pub, I also found time to somehow win an iPaq for "leading" (it fell to me by default, because I suggested it) the Debian Apache FIXIT, which rocked way hard. The others (Willy, Thom, Trent, Gus) won WiFi cards; Gus for turning up halfway through our allotted time and complaining that something was broken.

It was fantastic to not only get to learn so much, hack so well (it's that much easier when you can just wander over and ask people questions, or hack together), but meet all the people I've been working with for the last 4+ years now, as well as other random luminaries. On the whole, everyone was way cool. Getting dunked for $110 also rocked hard.

I'd just like to say a huge word up to the organisers for a fantastic conference, HP for food, drinks and iPaqs, everyone I met for being a dude, Pia for getting better, Jeff and Pia for the dinner ticket, Apple/AARnet/Internode for WiFi and bandwidth, Romana for providing a house and a car, Trish for providing a car, and ... yeah. People. It was fantastic, and I'm still happy. :)

Oh, and Havoc's Ray Bans were too funny, especially at about 10pm when he took them off because he had a sudden flash of realisation that he 'couldn't see shit'. On the same page, rock on to the face of Sun Microsystems.

so tell me what makes you so afraid, of all these people you say you hate (20:57 | #)

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