tcpip: (Default)
Diary of a B+ Grade Polymath ([personal profile] tcpip) wrote2010-01-20 07:58 am

Linux Conf, Wikileaks

Day Zero. Yes, there was some day zero speeches. Graham Lauder spoke on how to speak to an audience. Although not a speaker, I went along for fun. It should be compulsory for presenters to go to talks like this, as there was a few people talking to the screen, not engaging with the audience etc. This said, the presentations on the first three days have been quite good.


Day One. After the introduction Josh Berkus 'Ten Ways to Destroy Your Community' was entertaining. Saw former co-worker's Peter Serwylo presentation of 'Attribute-Orientated PHP'. Lana Brindley's 'Creating Beautiful Documentation' combined both basic principles and practical elements. Nic Steenhout's 'Accessibility and FOSS' was more about the former on a high-level. Joh Clarke's 'Hackers, Crackers and Security Basics' was very blunt and Karen Liesenfield's was very practical. The discussion following Lucas Nussbaum's 'The Relationship between Debian and Ubuntu' was interesting and hopefully there will be more discussion between those communities.

Day Two. Keynote Gabriella Coleman, an NYU anthropologist, spoke about the experience of ethnographic immersion in the free software community and its cultural history. After this went to Lenz Gschwentner's talk on Erlang for parallel computing, followed by the superb evangelism of Threaded Building Blocks by Intel's James Reinders. Douglas Bagnell spoke on FLOSS Manuals, an online resource and then went back to the parallel computing stream for Stephen Blackheath' discussion of Haskell on multi-core systems. For the final session ended up in the database stream, specifically Arjen Lentz's interesting 'Multi-Master Replication' followed by Ben Balbo's useful 'Build Your Own Dropbox'.

Day Three. Keynote Mako Hill spoke very quickly on free software and specifically anti-features, deliberate attempts to cripple software, and often hardware (e.g., mobile 'phone locking, 'digital rights' management) , which results in consumer pain and would not exist in a free world. Currently sitting in the discussion by [staff profile] denise and [staff profile] mark from Dreamwidth.org (the livejournal that works).


Yes, I'm forty-two today. [livejournal.com profile] beagl has already made the joke "You are the answer" (of life, the universe, and everything). My birthday wish is that you donate to Wikileaks who, despite all the incredible good work they have done, are in financial trouble. Note that donations are tax-deductible.

Wikileaks has probably produced more scoops in its short life than the Washington Post has in the past 30 years
The National, November 19. 2009

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2010-01-20 08:04 pm (UTC)(link)
Well, you posted on the 20th at least according to the timestamp, so that's the right day. :)

[identity profile] domesticmouse.livejournal.com 2010-01-20 08:15 pm (UTC)(link)
Really? That timestamp is lying. I posted about twenty minutes past midnight. =)

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2010-01-20 08:47 pm (UTC)(link)
Ahh! The timestamp uses UTC. The one true time!

[identity profile] domesticmouse.livejournal.com 2010-01-20 09:36 pm (UTC)(link)
heh. the time to rule them all.

I never quite understand where lj is at, timewise. It's timestamps seem to float between gmt and local time depending on a bunch of factors I don't get...