Lev Lafayette's journal

Second half of Canberra visit including catching up with the_shadow298, whom I hadn't seen for some time, and meeting John Hughes for the first time. Interestingly both included a fair bit of discussion about H.P. Lovecraft, the former from a literary perspective and the latter from a gaming perspective. RPG Review #18 is almost finished, albeit over a month late now - just as well it's a quarterly. It has been sadly "interrupted" by the death of Lynn Willis, one of main figures behind Call of Cthulhu.

The conference proper of LCA included a visit to the Mount Stromlo Observatory, as the location of the annual Penguin Dinner, which was extremely pleasnt. Also had the opportunity to confirm with Linus Tolvards that he didn't ever say The future is open-source everything. Apart from that felt that the second half of the conference didn't really deliver as well as it should have; more on that later. Probably should mention that the behaviour of at least one of the organisers was somewhat less than optimal.

On return to Melbourne, attended St. Michael's on Sunday, followed by facilitating The Philosophy Forum; Marietta Elliott-Kleerekoper gave an excellent and very well-attended talk on The Art Instinct, suggesting a genetic and evolutionary prediliction for the aesthetic in all animals and raising good questions on the social construction of aesthetics. Afterwards played Sunda to Sahul an interesting puzzle and strategy game representing the arrival of the first Australians across the Sunda archipelago.

Tomorrow I'm starting two days of training for post-graduate researchers on how to use Linux and submit High Performance Computing jobs. Tomorrow evening will see Tim Berners-Lee speak for a second time in under a week. Tuesday night is facilitating the LUV-main meeting. In just over two weeks will be off to New Zealand again.

Part two of my attendance of Linux.conf.au in Hobart consisted of Louis Suarez-Potts talking about OpenOffice.org and ODF, followed by Olivier Crete on videoconference integration. The final day began with Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer of Sun Microsystems giving an excellent speech about open-source business models and in particular why a support model must include all products (yes Redhat, that does include Fedora, get it?). Andrew Tridgell and Martin Schwenke followed up with the autocluster test suite, Paul Fenwick entertained one again with "Awesome Things You've Missed in Perl", Pia Waugh spoke on the OPLC project in the Pacific, Jon Oxer and Jared Herbohn spoke on adding Linux to your car. For the final session I went to Terri Haber of Dreamhost taling about large-scale Linux webhosting. One particular highlight of the conference was various open-source advocates taking a Microsoft speaker to task when they claimed to be supporting open-source - especially over their ruinous, indeed evil, manipulation of the ISO over OOXML. Finally, on Saturday, was the Open Day at Wrest Point where it was announced that next year's conference will be in Wellington. Perhaps linux.conf.au should become linux.conf.anz?

The Conference targetted charity was, appropriately, the Tasmanian Devil who is having a fairly rough time with about half the population in two-thirds of the state suffering from invariably fatal Devil Facial Tumour Disease. As extraordinary proof of the dedication of nerds over $40 000 AUD was raised, as Linus Tolvards helped Bdale Garbee shaved off his beard, which he has had for twenty-seven years - arjen_lentz also contributed to this hair-removing and wallet-loosening spectacle. Further donations (tax deductible, natch) can be made through the Tassie Devil Appeal (search and "feed" Vagabond).

Went to see The Triffids (minus David McComb of course) at the Arts Centre with caseopaya and imajica_lj last night. With various others stepping into the lead vocalist's role (including Steve Kilbey from The Church, Rob Snarski and Mark C. Halstead from The Black-Eyed Susans, Mick Harvey from the Bad Seeds etc, Ricky Maymi from The BJM, Melanie Oxley of the The Sparklers and supported by Youth Group) it was a bit of an all-star evening of 80s Australian indie/alternative rock. They played all the old-favourites over what was roughly a three-hour concert to an aging crowd. Kilbey proved himself yet again to be a most enthusiastic performer which led me to remark that this was "The Church of the Triffids". The only real negative was the less than average performance of the mixer.