lca.2007.tuesday
Tuesday morning started with Chris Blizzard of the One Laptop Per Child project's keynote address. It was fascinating to hear about the project straight from the horse's mouth and be able to ask questions directly. This is definately the best thing about the Linux Conf, and conferences in general - there is simply no better data mining algorithm than asking a person who wrote a piece of software directly a question about their software or project. They can tell you the answer straight away without any overhead. I asked Chris Blizzard something I've been quite worried about since I heard about the project - what are the security implications of giving to children a device that is worth more money ($100) than most people on the planet make in one month? He basically said that whilst there will probably be things that go wrong in that respect, with children getting the devices stolen etc., they don't think that it will be a huge problem.
Tuesday was the second miniconf day and I spent most of it in the gaming miniconf rooms. This started with Paul Murphy talking about BigWorld, a proprietary MMOG technology with a backend written totally in Python. The stuff he demoed looked pretty neat. Nice graphics, and some cool tools coded in-house. After that I had to go and re-do all my slides from scratch so I went and sat down and started evaluating different slide making software. There was no tool that suited exactly, and time was starting to run out so I just hacked my existing slides. I seem to have lost the awk script I wrote for generating the slides from a text file, which is kind of annoying, so I just had to modify the HTML directly. The reason I had to re-do all of my slides is because at the speaker's dinner on the boat the night before, Anthony Baxter, the release manager of Python had given this really awesome talk on how to write exciting talks ("presentation > content" he said). I met Anthony later and he's a really awesome guy. I asked him a bit about releasing Python and how he got into that and that was really fascinating.
Next up after lunch was finished I gave my miniconf talk, which was entitled "Dr. StrangeArt, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Algorithmically Generated Content." This was a bit long obviously so the name got cut down to the slightly poncier name "Love and Algorithmically Generated Content." I told the attendees that if they had come to find love this was probably the wrong place for it. Anyway, the talk went really well and I got really excited. I showed off Karl Sim's 1994 video about genetically evolved polygonal creatures which still blows my mind every time I see it. It's available on archive.org so have a look for it if you're into that stuff. Since my talk about four or five people have said that it was the best one they've seen so far! Yay! I'm really thankful to Anthony Baxter for that. The talk was filmed by Tim Ansell and the Gaming miniconf team and I'll put a link to it online when the video is available that way. Tim has done an awesome job of putting lots of open source gaming stuff into the conference programme. I think that the time when you can say "I won't switch from Windows because there are no games for Linux" is rapidly coming to an end.
After me Rusty gave a talk on Wesnoth called "Wesnoth for Kernel Hackers (and everyone else)" which he wrote on his way home from the speaker's dinner the night before in true miniconf style. He is a fantastic speaker and always gives really funny, nerdy, interesting talks. This one was no exception and was brilliant and informative. He has helped get a lot of science into the art of balancing the game Wesnoth by setting up a stats collection, analysis, and visualisation system, and I have no doubt that it's helped Wesnoth a great deal. A lot of what he said resonated very strongly with my own thoughts about games and open source. I think Free software is going to have a bit influence on the games industry in the near future.
After that I don't really remember what I did as I was starting to feel sleep deprived like the day before. I think maybe I went home and had a nap.
Tuesday night was the Google sponsored party at the roundhouse. We had to walk the length of the University of New South Wales and it was really incredible to experience the size of the place in that way. It's quite literally the size of a small suburb, several city blocks long and deep. I wonder if they have a bus service that takes you from place to place within the campus? There is a wonderful variety of architecture there too. Some really crazy experimental looking buildings.
The Google Roundhouse party was in this huge round dance hall kind of building with a nice outside area, fenced off to keep all of us nerds away from the rest of the world, or the rest of the world away from us. The drinks were on Google and we collectively drank about $8,000 AU worth of beer and wine. Unfortunately Guinness was non-free, but it was still a great night. I talked to many many interesting people and had a really awesome time. Speaking of Google, I have not met a single employee from the secretive company, even though there are heaps of them here this year. Apparently last year they were really aggressively trying to hire people, but they've toned it down completely this year. I did see one guy from the company last night at the professional delegates networking session but I didn't talk to him.
After the party at the roundhouse we went home. I was getting increasingly tired from staying out late having drinks each night and waking up early the next day. Wednesday was my main talk so I was worried about not getting enough sleep.
Also on Tuesday I saw Linus moving quite fast on a home-made segway (someone else built it, he was just having a go).