A Geeky Week for the Mind

Last Sunday gave my presentation at the Melbourne Unitarian Church on A Unitarian-Universalist Perspective on the Economic Crisis; I got a bit ranty at the end, but it was suitable. Sent a revised copy of my ASCP paper on Lying in Politics Revisited to Parrhesia. Have also just sent off a review to Ticonderoga a review of Firmin, a sorrowful tale about a literate existentialist rat by a doctor of philosophy from Yale.

I have been spending the past few days at linux.conf.au in Hobart and have followed a fairly hectic timetable starting from Tuesday where I attended the "Free as In Freedom" and "Open Source Databases" miniconferences. From the latter I attended Monty Taylor's presentation on DRDB followed by arjen_lentz's presentation on MySQL server coding and patching. From the former, Liam Wyatt's summary of a history honours thesis on "Gratis & Libre" was excellent, and I also listened in on Jessica Coates on lobbying politicians and the powers that be to accept open access content and, at the end of the day, Rusty Russell's "Free As In Market Property and Liberty", where he compared intellectual property with the characteristics of physical property.

The twentieth (apart from Barak Obama's inauguration - nice speech, and a day after Martin Luther King Day), as I was duly reminded, my birthday and caseopaya (who is here on the conference partner's program, lucky gal) and my former Vice-Chancellor from Murdoch University, the Emeritus Professor Peter Boyce took me out to a very fine local restaurant. Was also surprised and pleased to receive a number of comments on Facebook, via email etc wishing me the best for the day. Thank you all!

With the start of the conference proper, have attended the two keynotes by Tom Limoncelli and Angela Beasley, on IT views of scarcity vs abundance and developments in Wikipedia respectively. Keith Packard spoke on developments for the Linux desktop which included some impressive eye-candy (but of little interest to me). James Turnball spoke on Puppet configuration, which is truly useful in our environment, and after that I attended a tutorial by Jacob Kaplan-Moss on an introduction to Django, which I have had some limited experience with. Stewart Smith entertained with a presentation on how to get efficient, fast, safe and portable file I/O (haha), and Chris Willing spoke on the Optiportal and Access Grid. Today I've attended Bob Edwards's presentation on using authentication and access control on websites to a database managed system and Timothy Terriberry on the development of a low-latency high-quality audio codec which looks very useful.