Obligatory post linux.conf.au diary - doesn't
everyone have one?
arrival - Arrived in Sydney safely, and caught a
taxi with other compatriots to UNSW. I disagree with
rmt's view of Sydney taxi drivers, the
majority bar one were very pleasant and helpful, much moreso
than the taxi drivers here in Perth, Australia.
tutorial day - Went to the "Threaded Programming"
tutorial, it really opened my eyes and explained things
quite cleanly to me about how threads work. Registered, got
recognised by jdub. Encountered
mbp and raph. This was quickly
followed by the GNOME talk by mjs and
vicious. Held a calendaring BOF,
Skud arrived just in the nick of time as I
was flailing madly at attempting to explain things to the
rest of the people participating. On reflection, it went
well and it was nice to meet people face to face. Went to
Oxford Street for dinner with all the other West Australian
expats, a lovely that restuarant called Thai Panic. I kinda
agree with Skud, if Oxford street is the
queer central of Sydney then it's really quite dull -
thoroughly prententious and no sign of real personality.
Cripes The Court in Perth can do better.
wednesday -
Attended the Alan Cox keynote. I'd attend the talk that
Linus had given in Australia (the penguin incident trip)
several years before, it was quite a thrill to see how far
the kernel had moved since then. Met telsa
at some point that day. Attended the OpenH323 talk, must
investigate if it can talk to work's 5300. Attended
ajv's talk on large scale OSS, it was a
pity there were few cluey software engineers in the audience
it could have triggered some interesting discussion.
Went to the Qt/Embedded talk, sexy to say the least. Watched
the eye canday at Rasterman's talk. I feel kinda sorry for
taj talk that happened at the same time, i
would have liked to go to both of them. Went to Newtown for
dinner, lovely BSE-free steak :)
thursday - Saw Dave Miller's keynote, went to the
GNOME talk, followed closely by Wichert Ackerman's Debian
Talk. Met Zebee, Clare @ work's daughter. Went to the init
script talk and finished the
afternoon with Rusty's kernel come generic linux hacking
talk. Skud's comments about the gender
cliqueiness of the free software community ring especially
true, at UCC we
suffer the same problem, the CS/hacking community doesn't
seem to attract many females - where's the glass ceiling?
Went to the dinner, lovely food, too much wine, and was
certainly guilty of revisiting my earlier student drinking
days. I'd agree that it was not what I had hoped for, not
enough mingling, most of the crowd disappeared early, too
much Australian ockerism and not enough of a direction to
the whole evening. Watched gbowland laugh
at taj - something about GNOME/KDE? Went
to the pub afterwards, drank more, met
hypatia, went back to International House
and went to sleep.
saturday - missed most of Saturday morning (see
above), heard that the Perl 6 talk was fixing some of my pet
peeves about OO perl. Went to the conference review, truly
astounded about the percentage of developers at the
conference versus plebs. Then wandered around Sydney with
about 50 other linux hackers, lots of fun!
hypatia reminding me that I really need to
buy some platform shoes :) Caught up with another old
friend of k's, the M lady.
sunday - went down to Nowra to visit relations,
Sydney trains are great, pity there are so unclean. Lost an
hour of my life that I'll never get back in Dapto, oh well.
monday/tuesday - back to Perth, catching up on
sleep and catching up with work. Must deal with some of the
calendaring stuff. Oh well, I think I've mentioned enough
other hackers in this diary tonight to make up for
yakk's blatent name dropping all last year :)