Wed, 17 Jan 2007
LCA Day 2 Sessions - Afternoon
I was back in the LinuxChix room for the next (two separate half)
session. Jacinta Richardson gave a short, pragmatic and quite practical,
primer on social networking. The material was solid if basic - although
from looking around while she spoke it seemed to be perfectly targeted
to the majority of the people in the room - much note taking was going
on. Val Henson then presented on salary negotiation and how to close the
pay gap. The sessions title was a little misleading (and unfairly
limiting) as the talk itself was applicable to any one who gets paid and
would like more. Although the material was well presented (I'm looking
forward to her file system talk on Friday) almost none of it was new to
me, but I did agree with most of it, so if you've not encountered it
before then you should send her a present when you get that first bumped
up cheque!
My last talk of the day was Pete Ryland, an Aussie that we're lucky enough to have based in London most of the time. He covered a new PyGTK wrapper he's working on (temporarily called EGG) that aims to make the more common tasks a lot easier (and concise in code). From inferring tooltips, about boxes and the contents of other related widgets from docstrings to making assumptions about the most sensible defaults (and letting you slip under to the raw PyGTK when you need it) it looks like it'll make a lot of the common drudge for less complex applications vanish. If I was a Python guy it'd be on my shortlist of things to look at, for his meta-programming tricks if nothing else.
After this most of the conference headed over to the Google sponsored party. Which I'm not blogging about.
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Posted: 2007/01/17 22:28 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
LCA Day 2 Sessions - Morning
My second day of talks began with the ever enjoyable Jono Bacon (a
fellow Brit and all round top guy) introducing Jokosher, a new sound
editing project for GNOME. He covered how it came to be (a mobilising of
some of the LUG Radio audience) and took the audience through some of
its features (with some very Slayeresque backing music). The session
went well and the audience soon feel in to a rapport with him.
I spent the second session, and lunch time, chatting with some of the Ubuntu crowd; very smart people. After some decent ramen I went to a chunk of "Getting More out of PostgresSQL", which was very SQL heavy (not my favourite type of talk).
I followed this with the LinuxChix lightening talks, it might be a perl monger thing but I can't resist a set of lightning talks. Val Henson covered a "Am I more famous than SPAM" metric script she'd written, Lucy (possibly Lee - her name isn't in the program) gave a brief but very easy to follow introduction on how to write Clam AV matchers (both the technical details and some useful heuristics), this may be the most immediately useful of the lightning talks for me. Donna did some post mortem on the number of women present at the conference (I'll blog about this separately) and then Alice mentioned some Google tools, what they're doing in this location and then some HR, my notes on her talk are seriously thin - I was a little distracted by her "emoter". I've no idea who she was but the emoting was funny (both verbally and when doing hand gestures that had no bearing on what the speaker was saying), articulate and seemingly able to speak without taking a breath; it'll be a shame if she's not speaking at the conference.
The last of the lightning talks was Pia Waugh on the school talks she'd previously done. Although the slides irked me - the background graphic made the text seriously hard to read - the subject matter was fascinating. Pia has spoken to all-girl and mixed-gender classes about the IT industry and what makes it an exciting career. I'm not really doing it justice but there were a handful of quotes that would have justified a full length talk, let alone a lightning one. Such as - the shortage of women in IT is a Western thing. Many of the more eastern Muslim countries are much more gender balanced. If you get a chance to watch the sessions video and you're interested in Women in IT watch it.
And the word of the conference seems to be "ROCKING"
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Posted: 2007/01/17 22:22 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Watch Them: They're Organised Out Here
Over and above the actual attending and enjoying of talks I've got
another reason to be here, to see how they organise events on this side
of the planet and to see how the wider communities seem to be doing.
I've been chatting to a number of locals who are involved in different groups and the level of cooperation is embarrassingly good compared to what we've got at home. I sat in on the Linux Australia AGM last night and I've now got a short list of people to hassle about how they've managed to get certain projects off the ground; so if you're an LA board member watch out for the sunburnt pom with a list of "How'd ya..." questions.
I'll throw in a congrats to Janet Hawtin, who's just been voted on to the LA board. She'll be a great asset to them.
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Posted: 2007/01/17 03:57 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Morning Wake Up Alarms: Yes, ALARMS
I've been running on an ever diminishing amount of battery since yesterday
morning, which was when my VAIO power adaptor decided to go boom. And it
did go boom. If you've heard stories about a strange foreign man setting
off the smoke alarms in one of Sydneys highest regarded hotels then they
may
be true. I'm not going to comment. EVER.
So this morning I made an unplanned trip to the Sydney Sony Centre and spent 200AUD on a new transformer. The staff were helpful (they even undid it and tested it with my laptop) but it's still a cost I'd rather not incur. Still, not having wireless at the conference is a PITA and it was hindering my ability to find my way around the town.
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Posted: 2007/01/17 03:10 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
