Martin Pool's blog

Mail me RSS Bazaar distcc Canonical is hiring! flickr

lca2005 papers available

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere yet, but the linux.conf.au 2005 papers and slides are now available on the web. If you heard about a good talk but couldn't make it, or want to refresh your memory, there they are.

Don't forget to remind your favourite free software hackers, users, and evangelists to submit a proposal for lca2006 in beautiful Dunedin.

posted Thu 18 Aug 2005 in /conf/lca2005 | link

LCA2005 early-bird registration open

Preparations for linux.conf.au are proceeding apace. (For one thing, we got the delegation of the linux.conf.au domain name sorted out again.) We have also selected a program from many excellent submissions, secured a venue and accomodation for delegates and speakers, and are close to settling dinner and social venues.

Steeply-discounted early-bird registrations are open and are selling well. Jeremy wrote (we hope :-) a friendly and secure registration system.

We are just starting to accept media registrations. Some of the bigger names in Linux news and analysis will be there — and why not, with a chance to talk to so many prominent Linux and open source developers in one place?

posted Fri 7 Jan 2005 in /conf/lca2005 | link

Scoring LCA2005 conference papers

We're scoring and evaluating the LCA2005 abstract submissions now. This is a lot of work.

The proposals look generally very good.

It is very disappointing and frustrating when people put in inadequate abstracts, sometimes just a couple of sentences. Sometimes they sound interesting but without enough information they're always going to lose out to somebody who can explain what they're going to say. Doubly so because the whole point of a seminar is cogent presentation of interesting material, and if you can't do that in a web form why should I trust you with an hour of my time?

One common failing is to give a definition of the topic but not say what you're going to talk about. There should be some kind of indication that you'll do more than just tell me the definition.

It doesn't have to be cute. You can be entertaining in your presentation; you can even redraft the abstract later so that it's funny or intruiging in the program but judges looking at 140+ abstracts in a row would rather just have the facts.

Similarly for the presenter biography: I really don't care where you were born or went to school or what you do on the weekend. I might find your hobbies fascinating if we meet at LCA but it's totally irrelevant to choosing the best possible material for our conference. What I want to see is evidence that you know the material, and are experienced at public speaking in English.

The whole point is an assessment of the likely quality and appropriateness of the paper/seminar. Everything should be directed towards helping the judges decide that.

I'm tired and aware this is a bit ranty but it's also dead true.

posted Thu 18 Nov 2004 in /conf/lca2005 | link

LCA2005 progress

I've been busy getting the linux.conf.au 2005 papers database ready so that we can work out our program. Our target it to make a first release of the program this week.

We have about 146 submissions in total, and about 50 slots.

posted Mon 15 Nov 2004 in /conf/lca2005 | link

Kernel hackers debate: Is Canberra boring?

LKML thread:

From: Alan Cox
Subject: Re: Loops in the Signed-off-by process

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, alan wrote:
> > (Kind of like Mountain View without all the excitement
> Oohh-keey.. "Mountain View without all the excitement".

> ALL THE EXCITEMENT? MOUNTAIN VIEW?

> Brain overload.

Visit Canberra then you will understand.

From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt

> Visit Canberra then you will understand

I respectfully disagree :) Canberra at least has some good pubs :)

Ben.

posted Thu 7 Oct 2004 in /conf/lca2005 | link

Conference website tips

I need to check this list from hypatia of questions your conference website should answer against the linux.conf.au web site.

People planning to submit might want to read my advice on how to get a conference abstract accepted.

Most of the few dozen abstracts we've had so far have had all the right information, and they sound like good talks.

<blink>One and a bit weeks to go for abstracts/proposals!</blink>

(ps: Oh, hypatia is Mary. This is one demonstration of why we're going to (optionally) print usernames on conference badges.)

posted Fri 24 Sep 2004 in /conf/lca2005 | link

linux.conf.au DNS broken

The .conf.au domain nameservers have been broken for a while and are still not fixed. Apparently the venerable munnari.oz.au is still authoritative but is failing.

In the mean time, the linux.conf.au web site can be reached at lca2005.linux.org.au. Sorry for the inconvenience.

posted Mon 13 Sep 2004 in /conf/lca2005 | link

LCA Ghosts

LCA2005 hosted the ghosts of conferences past this weekend; many friends from Linux Australia were in Canberra to give feedback on our arrangements. LCA Convenor Steve Hanley has more details on his diary. We should have a Planet aggregator of LCA news some time soon.

LCA is coming along well. The call for papers/tutorials/minconfs is now open — go ahead and submit something cool.

Steven's friend Niki Gudex was on the recent UA flight that was turned back to Sydney after attendents found a sickbag with the word BOB written on it. I wonder if MAXIM model Niki was the Babe On Board that may have been described by the letters?

posted Mon 30 Aug 2004 in /conf/lca2005 | link

LCA 2005 Call for Papers open!

The linux.conf.au 2005 Call for Papers is now open! Please propose something cool so that we can enjoy listening to you in April next year in beautiful Canberra.

Bribes are gratefully accepted... but must come in the form of cool open source software. (Or Islay whisky is also persuasive.)

posted Mon 9 Aug 2004 in /conf/lca2005 | link

OSCon, OLS and LCA

I just got home from Ottawa Linux Symposium and O'Reilly OSCon.

OLS was very good. It's more kernel-oriented than LCA, kind of sticking to the strict definition favored by rms that Linux is the kernel, not all the associated software. About two out of the three streams were kernel-oriented. There's also quite a focus on big machines, because I suppose that's where a lot of the money is. Ottawa was really beautiful.

OSCon was pretty good. It's about four times more expensive than OSCon, and probably not four times as good, at least for me. It's very inclusive of all open source work, not just Linux. Many people had Macintoshes, and most of them were even running Linux. They have a slightly ridiculous number of parallel sessions - about 12? Still, I guess it works: there was always something I wanted to see. Lots of stuff on scripting languages.

I have a vague sense that it's about the buzz of open source, not actually about open source.

Paul Graham's talk was good. The SCO moot court was good.

There was a panel debate about open sourcing Java, but I think I'm not the only person there who felt so what? If Sun feel a not-quite-free licence suits them best, let it be. My impression from OSCon is that the most interesting work may be in Perl/Python/Ruby on top of Parrot/Mono/Rotor/CLR.

There are people outside each room at OSCon checking ID, which gives it a slightly regimented feel. I guess since they're charging so much, and they need to make a profit, it's necessary.

Meg Hourihan shares some thoughts on conference design. It's hard.

posted Mon 9 Aug 2004 in /conf/lca2005 | link

LCA 2005 website underway

linux.conf.au 2005 is in my home town of Canberra, so I have got pulled into helping organize it.

I was feeling really tired on Monday after helping Stephane print and bind her thesis (go Steph!) so I spent some easy time adding some content to the linux.conf.au web site. PHP tells me only 41 weeks to go!

posted Wed 30 Jun 2004 in /conf/lca2005 | link

Copyright (C) 1999-2007 Martin Pool.