It's been one week since I returned from LCA2008, the annual linux.conf.au. I had an excellent time, met some great people and attended some awesome talks. I've been meaning to do a brief write up of what I got up to on the conference but I have procrastinated in doing so. But, without further adieu, here are some of the highlights of the conference week.

Sunday 27th:

• Paul "Rusty" Russell held a newcomers session with the secrets, tips, hints and tricks for the week.
• We then moved onto a pub for some good ol' socialising where I met Peter Hutterer and had a good chat about multiple X inputs. Unfortunately I missed his talk on the topic, but I intend on watching it soon (all of the talks are available for download from the program page and the Linux Australia mirror). It was really interesting learning about the pros and cons of multi-touch technology and how hard it is to achieve some of the "revolutionary" user interfaces we see in Sci-Fi movies, especially since one of my good friends is doing a PHD on human computer interaction (or something along those lines).

Monday 28th:

• I spent most of this day in the Debian miniconf. I really enjoyed the "State of the Project Address" as an overview of where Debian is and where it is heading. It was a very informative talk.
• I also thoroughly enjoyed the "Version Control Systems for Debian packaging". The talk gave a great overview of managing Git for use in Debian packaging and was a really useful summery of branching and merging in distributions^[1].
• After lunch I dropped in on the Multimedia miniconf's lightning talks^[2] where I got to see some of the cool stuff happening in the multimedia world. One of the most impressive demonstrations was about sound in 3D space. As the character in the game moved around, the sound objects playing nearby would fade in and out of the right speakers as expected. It was very impressive^[3].
• Also in the Multimedia miniconf was a talk by Stuart Cunningham from BBC on how they are moving towards Linux to increase their work flow efficiency in production television. The technologies they were utilising on Linux were very impressive and will eventually save hours of man power for the BBC. The talk is well worth downloading from the previously mentioned mirror.

Tuesday 29th:

• On Tuesday I spent the entire day in the Gnome.conf.au miniconf. There were some talks from particular people along with a very laid back style lead by Jeff Waugh.
• Jeff Waugh started the miniconf by asking everybody in the audience how they were involved in Gnome or open source as "nobody is just a user". There were some pretty interesting responses and it was great to see how involved everybody was in the community.
• I was really looking forward to the talk on Conduit by John Stowers, as I have been following the synchronisation program's progress since its early days, and it did not let down. It was fascinating seeing how far it has come and listening to the author speak about it.
• I was also very impressed by Rob Bradford's talk on Gnome Mobile and the OpenMoko device. He is from OpenedHand who have made great progress in the Gnome Mobile project.
• In the afternoon I gave a short (5min) lightning talk on Diving into GNOME Development with the Gnome Developer Kit. The talk went ok, but I ran out of time and due to the limitations of my laptop and I was unable to fully demonstrate the process. In hindsight I would have been better to take screenshots of the process and talk through them quickly. On the bright side I had an opportunity to talk to some people about the process after the miniconf who were interested in it.
• The highlight of the day though was going out for dinner with John and Rob for pasta and wine. It was excellent to talk to them about numerous things from Conduit to the OpenMoko and even the Gnome Developer Kit!

Wednesday 30th:

• After the keynote by Bruce Schneier there was a give away of 10 or so XO laptops from the One Laptop Per Child foundation to random attendees. This was very exciting but was just a teaser of things to come...
• The first talk I went to was Jonathan Oxer's talk on hardware programming. This was an excellent talk and was really interesting as Jon scanned an implanted RFID tag in his arm in real life to open a door in a video game - second life. This was a pretty cool idea and really showed off how the future will be very automated. For example, he then controlled a fan in the lecture theater by clicking on objects in the game (download his talk for the cool demonstration). While these shenanigans were going on there was a talk titled "Writing really rad GTK and GNOME applications ... in C, Python, or Java!" which I therefore unfortunatly missed. However I intend on watching this very soon on my computer.
• As I said, the 10 laptops that were given away in the morning were just a teaser. Throughout the day a further 60 XO laptops were given out to random attendees with the reasoning "hopefully they'll do something really cool with the laptops... If not, they'll give them to somebody who will". This is very true as I saw a couple of people giving them away saying they didn't have time, and others who I spoke to had already started playing around and coming up with really cool ideas.
• The Kernel Report proceeded after lunch, which was an excellent overview of what is happening in low level Linux development - even if they did stay on file systems a little too long.
• I really enjoyed the Incident Response Unravelled talk by the Tux's Angels. Three incident response experts from the Department of Defence talked about how to trace back and resolve a compromised system. I found the talk very informative and useful.
• Wednesday evening was the Penguin Dinner. This year it was at the Melbourne Market where we were given vouchers to buy food and drinks from our preference of stalls. This gave attendees a very nice selection but I feel the informality of the dinner was lost and no fun speeches or other events were able to happen, but being my first LCA I can't really say otherwise. Overall the dinner was a great success and lots of fun with very positive feedback from the attendees.

Thursday 31st:

• I really enjoyed Stormy Peters' keynote about paid open source development. I found it very educational and was fascinated at some of the statistics. I intend on writing about how open source programmers make money very soon, so hopefully this information will be useful to me.
• In total, 100 XO laptops were given away. The first 70 were randomly selected attendees, and the last 30 were given to people who were believed worthy of one. For example one was given to Linus Torvalds and a few to other members. The rest were given to attendees who said they wished to do such and such with them. I was one of those "such and such" people. So as of Thursday morning I received and XO laptop! I have some exciting, and very ambitious, ideas that I hope to achieve with my laptop, and I'm looking forward to making process on it. When I run out of time and find myself to busy to play with it I hope to pass it onto somebody else who will make good use of the machine.
• Andrew Tridgell's talk on Clustered Samba was awesome. Tridge showed off how stable and efficient samba is in a clustered environment. For example, when he killed off one computer in the cluster, the Windows box that was copying files connected to the next computer in the series and kept going without pausing. He also showed how easy it was to revert files and keep backups which I thought was a really valuable feature. If you have time, his talk is well worth the watch.
• In the afternoon I went to a talk on Rockhopper Robot - an open source robot for saving children and putting out fires! It was one of the funner talks to attend, watching the robot do it's thing live... It wasn't really live though. Getting the robot to Australia from America would have been a huge feat for Doug Chapman with customs, things inevitably breaking and having to dismantle and rebuild the robot during it's travel. As a result we watched the robot on a live webcam. The effect was not lost though, as we saw Doug SSH into the robot and control it remotely - we even saw how easy it was to edit the source to change the functionality and rerun the robot from around the other side of the world! Doug had his friend, Paul, at the other end of the webcam to light a fire (a candle) for the robot to find and put out. Everybody cheered as the robot did its thing. The video is well worth watching if you are interested in microcontrollers, robotics and general funness.
• The Replicators Are Coming! This was a very interesting talk about the state of physical replication and how in the future we will be able to download the schema for any object, print it out, assemble and have a functioning toy, game or utility. Viktor Olliver showed off his robot/replicator that prints 3D objects well enough to even make another replicator. The RepRap was also on display at the open day.
• Thursday night was Google's student party which consisted of food and plenty of free drinks followed by gelatto. It was a great night to socialise with others as normal attendees were allowed as well. I talked to a few of the Google employees on a number of subjects including Kernel programming and Google's Summer of Code.

Friday 1st:

• Anthony Baxter's keynote on python was very informative. He did a great overview of python 3 and the structure of python releases while tying in many Monty Python jokes and video clips. It was very useful to hear an overview of what will change in python 3.0 and why things were changing. It seems like it is lined up to be a very promising release^[4].
• Friday marked the (offical) close of the conference. While it was sad it was during to an end, it had been lots of fun with exciting happenings all of the time. But the excitement for us wasn't quite over yet, because it was at the close the LCA2009 was announced. I knew beforehand the location of next years event because I am involved in the organisation of it. Yep! it is in Hobart, Tasmania! There are some excellent activities lined up and it is still early days in the planning. We are hoping that the conference will be bigger and better (even thought that is a hard target to reach). I strongly recommend you download the bid document for an overview of what we have planned. Of course more information will be available on the http://marchsouth.org website as it comes out.
• Because I was busy running around gathering postcards and magnets for LCA2009 to give out at the conference close I missed Pia and Jeff Waugh's Open Source Industry & Community Census 2007 talk. I was a little disappointed but not too phased as I downloaded the talk shortly after. While the full report from the census taken last year has not been released, Jeff and Pia gave a sneak peek into the results^[5] and I am eagerly awaiting the statistics. I intend on posting more about the census after the results are released (next month perhaps?).
• After the conference close was the Google Party. The party was for all of the conference attendees with a BBQ and free drinks (thanks Google!). The food was nice, the people were great and I got to meet Linus Torvalds personally as I handed him a magnet for the 2009 conference. Even though the drinks ran out (very) early it was a nice wrap up to what had been an awesome conference.

Saturday 2nd:

• Saturday was open day! A chance to show off the latest and greatest technologies and progressions in the open source world. There were lots of industry representatives from big companies and really cool demonstrations. I went over early to help set up for our promotion table for LCA2009. It went very well giving out nearly a thousand or more post cards and magnets. Our table was particularly popular because thanks to the Tasmanian Conference Beuro we had lots of Tasmanian chocolates and show bags with information on Hobart and the conference.
• Before the open day was open to the public we held the annual general meeting for Linux Australia. The meeting was very good and informative but only a few motions were passed. The minutes are available here.
• Rusty Russell had a table demonstrating his new game (now titled "Pong Hero"). The game was lots of fun and very popular. It is basically the classic pong game, but instead of using a bat to bounce the ball, you draw on the wall to make lines and angles in challenging positions for your opponent. Check out the website here for some video demos and more information.
• After having a really nice dinner with some new friends from Brisbane we headed back to our accommodation common room where we talked and relaxed with Rusty Russell. Somehow our conversation turned onto http://antonblanchardfacts.com - A takeoff site from http://chucknorrisfacts.com. With all the funny quotes and laughs coming from Rusty, it was decided that he needed his own site. Such was the birth of http://rustyrussellfacts.com, http://rustyrusselfacts.com and http://rustyfacts.com^[6].

Besides the plane trip back home (after going to bed at 4am because I wanted to make an AJAX voting system for Rusty Facts) that pretty much concludes my highlight list for LCA2008. Of course I have missed out lots, but if you want to be in the fun, just come next year to Tasmania! Thanks to all of the wonderful people I met over the week and all of the people who I shared meals with. I'm sorry I couldn't mention all of you (the list would be too great!).

Looking forward to LCA2009 (now onto organising that...)

(PS: It is very late and this is a big post so I haven't had time to double check it. I apologise if anything is mis-spelled, mis-linked or mis-referenced.)

1.

Read more on Version Control Systems for a full description.

2.

Lightning Talk: A quick 3-5min talk from any attendee.

3.

Unfortunately I didn't pick up on the name of the game demonstrated and I haven't been able to find it online.

4.

Quote of the day: "because teaching C to 1st years is child abuse"

5.

Full time open source developers earn more than the industry average!

6.

Warning: Website most likely contains technical jokes not meant for general public humour.

Whenever I talk to people about changing to Linux there is always one major question that they ask. Why?
Now of course this is quite a reasonable question considering the effort that comes with changing an OS on one's computing device. A long time ago when someone asked me that question I always answered that it was because Ubuntu (Linux distribution I have always used) is a free OS that optimises my system hardware and is not any harder to navigate then windows.  Read More »

I have just finished writing: A brief overview of how to get started developing and contributing to GNOME with the GNOME Developer Kit.

Wanting to change and/or contribute to open source software is one thing, but diving into development can be a very daunting and challenging process. Every software project has their own repository of code, their own programming methodologies and their own development environment and tools and as such it can be hard to know where to start.

My favourite open source project would have to be the GNOME Project. Within the desktop environment there are numerous applications designed to achieve certain tasks and functionality. Until recently it has been somewhat a chore for somebody to easily set up a development environment in which they can play around with the latest and greatest development (unstable) version of GNOME. Thankfully the GNOME Developer Kit came along. This is simply a Linux distribution with the latest GNOME applications, libraries and builds from the GNOME SVN. This purpose-packaged Linux distribution is a great way to not only trial the new developments and progress made within GNOME, and even Linux, but to also contribute back to the GNOME project.

Since the developer kit has the latest libraries and tools required for GNOME development it is very easy to download and compile the source of any GNOME module. Thanks to the help and brillient guidance of Ken Vandine I have written a document/tutorial on how to utilise Foresight Linux's^[1] brillient package manager, Conary (developed by rPath). You can find the tutorial here which will walk you through the process of downloading, building, modifying, patching, creating patches and contributing to the GNOME module of your choice from start to end.^[2]

I'm hoping that this guide will be a great way for software developers to quickly and easily jump into GNOME development, and not only them, but also testers and translators. The developer kit really is a great way to generate clean patches and test the mainstream GNOME project without going through the dependency nightmare to build the application.

Recommended Links:

• http://www.gnome.org
• http://live.gnome.org/GnomeLove
• http://live.gnome.org/GnomeDeveloperKit
• http://live.gnome.org/GnomeDeveloperKit/BuildingPackages

1.

Foresight Linux is the parent distribution of the GNOME Developer Kit. That is, the GNOME Developer Kit is based off Foresight Linux.

2.

If you are unsure of the terminology used in this sentance, then the chances are that the tutorial isn't for you. However if you are interested, take a look at it for more information

For those of you who haven't heard about the one laptop per a child program, you're really missing out. The initiative is an excellent step forward towards education in third world counties and they are also rocking laptops. If you haven't heard of them (or even if you have), I highly recommend you read more about it on their website, here.

Now onto my main point. I was very surprised (and incredibly pleased) to find that Masi Oka (who acts Hiro Nakamura in the hit TV series Heroes) did a promotional video for the "Give One Get One" program.

I am really looking forward to going to LCA2008. I have heard many great things about it and it is well known as one of the best open source conferences in the world, even Linus Torvalds goes.

I hope to attend most of the Gnome mini-conf and even get more involved in the open source desktop community.

These new comer guides are awesome and aren't helping me have patience waiting for the event!

• http://laptop006.livejournal.com/39352.html
• http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/2007/0129.html