Mon, 15 Jan 2007
Public Transport and Getting Lost at the Beach
I was about ten minutes late for the start of the Tuesday opening talk,
although I'm finding it hard to feel guilty about it. I got on the wrong
bus and ended up on a sunny beach where I had a nice bacon roll and a
cold diet coke while I waited for the right bus. I've been commuting
pretty much every work day for my entire adult life and I've got to say
this is the first time I've ended up on a beach. Doesn't suck.
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Posted: 2007/01/15 22:57 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
LCA Sessions: Day 1 - Afternoon
Getting back from lunch with more time to spare than I expected I continued hunting Jon Oxer. His Self Healing MySQL Schema talk was interesting but I'm not sure we'd ever use it. In essence he keeps a copy of his schema with the relevant application module (as a reference) and, using error trapping, any time a query hits certain error conditions, such as a table not existing, it looks up the reference schema and if it knows about it then it creates it on the fly. This tact gets rid of upgrade scripts and a lot of schema / code versioning hassle but it has some down sides such as temp tables when doing ALTER TABLES and requiring schema manipulation privileges in your scripts.
I then went to see Russel Coker present on "Security Improvements needed in Debian". I've never seen him present before but I've read a fair amount with his name on it so I knew the material would be good - and I wasn't disappointed. He covered some of the Linux kernel capabilities and how they're too coarsely grained, the benefits gained by using polyinstantiated directories (which I'd never heard of before) and some of the attack use cases they prevent and how they live with PAM and how to exec a program as another user; both interactively and when running as a daemon. He mentioned an exploit I'd never heard of before and I'm going to be re-writing a couple of init scripts when I get home. Oh, and SELinux came up ;) Although Russel wasn't an exciting speaker, he was well paced, had some great material and really knows his field. Great talk.
I then went to my second talk of the day on MySQL schema changes, this one focused on using VIEWS and TRIGGERS. The speaker did a good job of getting his ideas across but they left me cold, the examples had a lot of caveats (and what looked like a data corruption race condition) and so while it was nice to see some real world examples of MySQL VIEWS and TRIGGERS I didn't get much from the talk.
The first days sessions ended with Laura Thomsons session on MySQL Trouble shooting. Which was a good mix of case studies and war stories. I really enjoyed the session, it had a good pace, the speaker was enthusiastic and I took almost no notes - which is always a good sign. It's worth noting that her slides stand alone and are worth a look when they hit the LCA site.
After everything had finished I started the long walk back to a bus stop that'd get me back to my room, I'm feeling a bit sore and very sunburnt at the moment; ironicly I got sunburn looking for a chemist that sold decent sun block. So I was a little antisocial and cut out for an early night in my nicely air-conned hotel room.
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Posted: 2007/01/15 22:55 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
LCA Sessions: Day 1 - Morning
The first session on my list was Pia Waugh on Open Source in Australian
Education, I wasn't that interested in the topic (Aus is a long way from
home) but I was looking forward to seeing her present, I've been told
she's a great speaker (nothing like raising the audiences expectations
;)) but I've never been able to pin people down on any details on her
style; so I thought I'd have a look-see. Only the session didn't happen.
I arrived a little late (this was pre the signs going up) and she wasn't
presenting so I slid off to the other session I wanted to see, Jonathan
Oxer on XEN image management.
I seem to be stalking Jon, I went through and marked the sessions I want to see and I seem to be going to three or so of his. If nothing else the man knows how to name his talks. I enjoyed the talk (the virtulisation room was packed and I ended up sitting on the stairs) and it gave me some things to think about even if I don't think we'll be using his approach. The audience also gave a lot to this session, their questions pulled a lot of the speakers knowledge out and some of the suggestions have gone in to my "have a look at" list. His cunning plan, which is very google file system in its approach, seems to work best for machines without a lot of local state, which isn't that close to the use case we have at work.
On my way to the second session I bumped into a couple of Kiwis that used to be based in London so I did some catching up with them, and then sat out half a session in the open air, which made a pleasant break.
I then went to Coogee beach for lunch with Richard Cohen, a guy I know from GLLUG in London who's been living in Hong-Kong for a while, and I've not seen for too long (he'll be looking for a contract soon - hire him while you can!) Eating near the water was great, the views certainly helped and I had a lamb kebab (called a yeeros by the heathens over here) that you could actually tell was lamb. Weird.
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Posted: 2007/01/15 22:52 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Australia: Not so Big on Bandwidth
My hotel has two connectivity options, I can either sit in the lounge
and pay by the minute to use a machine any one could have installed
anything on or I can pay silly money to get wireless for a couple of
hours - and to add insult to injury if you buy a days worth you get a
cap on how much you can download. Starbucks has never looked so
appealing! (and no, it's not just the waitresses accent). I also heard
today that they're rolling out 24Mb ADSL2 to certain parts of Sydney and
yet they've got a 10Gb a month download cap. Gah!
On the plus side the Uni is supposed to have a connection of firehose power, so I know what I'll be doing when I get there tomorrow morning.
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Posted: 2007/01/15 22:48 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
And so it Begins: LCA 2007
After trying to get out here for an LCA over the last three years I finally made it for Sydney
2007, and so far so good.
The venue is huge, the University of New South Wales is full of big, open airy spaces between buildings and it's lovely to walk around. The rooms themselves were a little hard to find at first (the LCA team put a lot of signs up in the first break which really helped) but they're functional and have people presenting in them so what more can I ask for? The attendees are really friendly and easy to talk to, I get the impression that some people have been looking forward to this since the last one, I've also bumped in to half-a-dozen people I know from London, which is cool and occasionally surprising. I'm feeling very sunburnt (ironically I got sunburn looking for a chemist that sold decent sun screen) so I slipped off early and I've been a little quiet and anti-social, which I'm hoping will fade with the bright redness.
The opening session was great, Jeff Waugh's a great presenter and he had a well chosen selection of jokes, including the great Debian couch, "It has no support but if you all lean back a bit you can support each other."
Fortunately I had a local nearby to explain some of the less obvious terms used and some of the previous LCA referencing jokes. It's also the first opening speech I've heard that included mentions of "slip, slop slap" (not as bad as it sounds), a slide on sexual health, the LCA gods of fertility, advice to not be creepy and a mention of the confs "Aura of sexual potency."; and to check your badge has the right number of fishes. Which lead to some seriously confused expressions.
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Posted: 2007/01/15 22:46 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
