linux.conf.au
Michelle and I are in Sydney for Linux.conf.au 2007 at the moment. It's been pretty awesome so far. We're almost at the end of the 3rd day, but it feels like we've been here ages because there's so much going on.
On the way from the airport we met a really cool couple coming from Germany who we've made friends with called Matthias and Andrea. He does data center distributed virtual machine magic stuff, and she is into biology. They go to conferences instead of having holidays.
Monday was all miniconf talks. I saw the Debian Project Leader Anthony Towns' talk in the morning. It was cool putting a face to some of the names, and it's great to see how informal the Debian people are. Caught the end of Bdale's talk on HP's relationship with Debian after that, which was interesting. Later I saw Keith Packard talking about what's happening lately with xorg. That was really interesting. If I remember correctly at one point he said that around 50,000 lines of unused X code was thrown out recently in a marathon culling session. Yay, reducing the bloat. It's so great that there's someone like Keith working on that piece of software. His talks are always really interesting - it's a pity I missed the one he gave today, but hopefully he just expanded on some of the miniconf stuff. In 2005 I remember he showed off the famous 'wobbly windows' which really blew me away. Another really great thing is that xorg is becoming less reliant on the conf file. So you can actually dynamically change all your settings *after* starting X. Yay! Can't remember what I saw in the afternoon as I was starting to feel a bit frazzled.
The speaker's dinner that night was really awesome. The Linux.conf.au people are known for treating their speakers really really really well, and this was no exception. We went out on a boat into Sydney Harbour and had drinks and dinner. It was so beautiful looking around at the lights from the city over the water as the sun set, and the weather was perfect. Absolutely wonderful. The food was great too. Talked to various hackers and ended up chatting with Arnd Bergmann and Rasterman (!!!) about the PS3 and some other stuff. Arnd has done a lot of work with Linux on the cell hardware and knows it inside out. I met him at lca2005 and I remember he was working with the cell already then.
After the boat landed Michelle and I went drinking with Rasterman and A swedish kernel hacker who's name I have rudely forgotten, and also Matthias and Andrea. Later kfish and horms turned up and we all drank for quite a while. That was really fun.
Will soon write more about yesterday and today.