Thu, 17 Jan 2008
OpenSolaris User Group - Jan 08
I attended the Advances
in OpenSolaris Network Administration talk hosted by LOSUG over at London
Bridge last night. And no one mentioned MySQL.
I came out of the session with a couple of pages of notes but two things really stuck out - the talk covered the new developments as a sequential feature list rather than showing you something cool or interesting and then explaining how the new technologies made it possible. A couple of slides had command lines on them to illustrate a point but they were little tweaks and changes rather than something that made you sit back and say "I want that." This is in no way uncommon but it is often an opportunity wasted.
This leads to my the second point, a lot of the topics covered were about incremental improvements and addressing concerns from previous versions of Solaris. While these are probably great things if you are stuck with older Solaris installs and looking for a way out the ability to sniff loopback traffic and rename nics didn't really inspire me much, we've had those abilities in the Free and Open worlds for a fair while now.
I should also note that I -really- dislike the term "vanity naming" when it comes to changing the name of a network interface. It just makes the process sound so pointless and frivolous.
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Posted: 2008/01/17 20:33 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 06 May 2007
WOOT 2007
The Workshop On
Offensive Technologies (WOOT 07) might be the
most interesting new conference this year. If it plays its cards right
it'll be a good mix of the more underground groups, infosec professionals
and security think tanks. We need more events like this in the UK.
Don't know how nice I'll have to be to management to try and get a ticket but it'll probably be worth it.
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Posted: 2007/05/06 12:39 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 26 Mar 2007
Flu, The Puppet Muppets and NPW 2007
I've been in bed for most of the last week and a half (apart from two very
short staffed days in the office) with the cold / flu bug that seems to
stalk through our office on permanent rotation. Apart from the general
feeling ill and lots of sleeping I missed a GLLUG and the first London
Puppet Muppets meeting. But I did decide to go to the 2007 Nordic Perl
Workshop, an event I've managed to miss for the last three years.
I've never been to any of the Scandaweigan countries so I'm both looking forward to having a look around and the conference itself. I expect to see many trees and much snow. The perl in financial institutes talks and Flexible Business Rules with Brick (brian d foy) look very interesting. And I get to meet up with The Hukins as well, (who needs both an easy to link to web page and a blog dammit) just not in any vegetarian restaurants.
Now I just need to do the actual bookings and not get distracted before the event starts...
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Posted: 2007/03/26 22:23 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Google - Second London OpenSource Jam
I recently went to the second Google
London OpenSource Jam over at Belgrave House. I've been aware of some
of the London Google evenings but I've never made the effort to go, how
ever there were a couple of people I've not seen for ages on the attendee
list for this one so I decided to sign up.
I don't know exactly what I was expecting but what I got was more than a little weird, part pre-2000 dotcom and part group hug; it wasn't really my kind of event. The whole venue seemed to be baiting the bubble busters. A couple of people gave lightning talks about topics close to their hearts, free beer and pizza were made (copiously) available (my kool-aid detector was overwhelmed by the whole place so I stayed away from both) and lots of nattering in small groups followed.
I had a good time but I mostly spent the evening catching up with people I've not seen in a while; I don't speak at these kind of events - people still complain about the first time. I think I'd have been in and out damn quickly if I hadn't known any of the other attendees, it did feel like quite an established group (even though it was the first time for most of the people present, a lot of us cross paths at other tech nights). I met a couple of people I know from mailing lists but have never met in person, scared a Thoughtworker (I used to spend more time than I should researching potential speakers) and then left a bundle of Lonix and GLLUG people in the pub near closing time. A mostly fun night.
On a tangent, the fact that there were still five or so places available on the evening itself surprised me. I've always assumed a Google sponsored evening would fill out within minutes of being announced. Having seen Google booths at a number of conferences over the last couple of years they don't really seem to get the whole wider community thing; I'm not saying they don't do anything for us but they always seem like your great uncle trying to be cool with the kids. Giving out glowing badges and asking people if they want to enlist isn't playing well with others.
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Posted: 2007/03/26 22:00 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 10 Mar 2007
First Puppet London Users Meet - Thursday, March 22
I'm a lurker on the
Puppet mailing
list and after some discussions John Arundel has stepped up and done the
organising for the first
Puppet London Users Meet - Thursday, March 22. I'm not using Puppet
yet but I'm thinking of heading along to hear peoples adoption stories.
I've also been thinking about the lack of a sysadmin community in London since GLLUG became a lot more newbie friendly and SAGE-WISE faded out. If you're a sysadmin in London interested in meeting some of your peers come along and say "Hi", this might be the start of a beautiful friendship^Wuser group.
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Posted: 2007/03/10 00:30 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 22 Feb 2007
FOSDEM 2007 - 1 sleep to go!
Tomorrow sees the unofficial start of FOSDEM 2007. A ride on Eurostar,
meet up with some of the London techs, food and then to the usual pub in
the evening - it's the only way for a Linux geek to spend a Friday night
in February.
This year we don't have RMS (no song! Oh YES!) and I've now (twice) seen the talk I was most looking forward to (Puppet - good talk) so I think I'll be spending more time in the dev rooms and less in the main tracks. Still, there are enough interesting sessions to prevent me from having a late morning lay in; JBJ, Miguel on Mono (who I owe a free cab ride to from the first OSDEM), Dag on Enterprise packaging and there is even a whole Gentoo track to ignore. It's going to be a busy weekend.
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Posted: 2007/02/22 23:18 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 18 Jan 2007
The OzDMCA: what it means for FOSS - Kimberlee Weatherall
My first session of the day (I was lucky enough to spend a big chunk of the
real first one talking to Richard Weideman, the Education Programme Manager
at Canonical) was recommended to me by all the local people I know at the
conference - and it was as good as they said.
Unlike most people who speak on these topics at Linux / OpenSource / Free Software conferences, Kimberlee Weatherall IS a lawyer (IP) and was actively involved in the amendments to the Australian laws. The often awkward topic was presented damn clearly, with an audience pleasing touch of humour, and was both an excellent talk and depressing as hell. Short version: in order to gain a free trade agreement (FTA) with America, Australia was required to change some of its laws, especially those concerning copyright.
I'm not going to go in to details, I wouldn't do the speaker justice, but it's well worth reading the slides (the Rusty test alone is worth the time) and watching the video once it's up; especially if you're from one of the countries that'll be signing up for a FTA in the future. This was one of the best sessions I've seen here.
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Posted: 2007/01/18 00:16 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
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
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
Mon, 15 Jan 2007
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
Sat, 02 Dec 2006
Conference Start Times - Never before 10!
Technical conferences shouldn't start before 10am. Although I'm no
expert I've attended a lot and helped organise a few events and this has
become one of my rules. Now let's see if I can convince you with some of
my 'whys'.
Firstly (and this is close to my heart) the stereotype of geeks working late at night isn't without a touch of truth, a lot of us are night owls and cherish the opportunity to grab an extra hour or so in the morning. Most of us have jobs that start at nine or slightly before. An extra hour will put your audience in a good mood (and make them more receptive to your speakers) and subtly point out that this isn't work, conferences are supposed to be FUN.
Some of your attendees will be coming in from Not London, by having a friendly start time some of them will be able to come up that morning, saving them hotel fees and occasionally catching you some last minute audience (at least one GLLUG had a dozen members of a Northern LUG arrive when they saw a last minute announcement and decided the talks were worth the trip). There is also a flip side to this, if your event is based around an existing community some people will come up the night before and socialise with the local members. Which seems to involve a lot of beer. You want them to be able to sleep in a bit. Especially if they're speaking.
And from an organisers perspective it gives you a couple of hours to warm up, chill out and deal with any last minute emergencies. An hours difference might not seem like much but after the magic line of nine am is touched help's much easier to find.
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Posted: 2006/12/02 11:06 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 20 Nov 2006
London Perl Workshop - 2006
I've been very slack in mentioning that the 2006 London Perl Workshop is go!
It's being held at Westminster (because they pretty much rock) and we're
looking for potential speakers. If you've got something interesting to
say about perl please have a look at the Call for papers and seriously
consider submitting a talk.
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Posted: 2006/11/20 20:05 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 21 Sep 2006
UK Subversion User Group Meeting - September 2006
Today I was fortunate enough to head down to the JP Morgan building in John
Winter street for, my first and, the second UK Subversion User
Group Meeting.
First up the audience, it was in the high twenties, which surprised me, and included a lot of people in suits; only a handful of us were casually dressed in jeans, untucked shirts or trainers. I didn't get to stay too long afterwards to chat, although my employer was gracious enough to allow a couple of hours in the middle of the day to attend and I didn't want to push my luck too far. The few people I did speak to seemed pretty friendly and knowledgeable though.
There were only two familiar faces, CL Kao, SVK author, brilliant perl developer and generally top guy (and ex-coworker) and Nik Clayton, who I've only briefly met in person a couple of times but I've seen him present and he knows his stuff. Both of them presented today and their style was very different to the first speaker.
The opening presentation was what I consider as more traditional, it had lots of information on each slide, a couple of minutes of presenting per click, and would be readable on it's own. It feels quite dry and stilted these days - it also covered a product that isn't useful to me, and to be honest felt very out of place. The relevance to subversion seemed a little stretched.
CL followed with his SVK talk (which I've seen three times now - it doesn't get boring) and he bought his trademark energy to the show. Lots of short, sharp slides, more of a story telling approach in his verbal presentation and some well placed humour helped his presentation go down well. And SVKs incremental commits look very cool. Nik was the last of the technical presentations and he wove a tail of setting up subversion so that it met his employers auditing teams directives. It was pithy, had the right amount of why as well as how and forced me to take a page of notes. He also gave me a quick peek at the SVN::Web timeline functionality, which is neat and may prompt me to install it for a little play.
The sessions were wrapped up with a few words from the sponsors, CollabNet and Clearvision, and the next meeting was announced for January; which I hope to get along to. It was very different to the usual user group meetings I attend and I did enjoy it.
Tangent: the meeting was held in the JP Morgan building I worked in about six years ago, nothing seems to have changed. My feet remembered the correct exit from Blackfriars station, the people hanging around outside smoking used the same spots as before and the area just felt the same. I realised I actually miss some of the big company feel. I'm just not sure it's enough to get me back there yet.
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Posted: 2006/09/21 22:05 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Javascript Developer Room at FOSDEM 2007?
If I was a bad man I'd suggest it might be time for a separate
Javascript developers room at FOSDEM
2007 (looks like the 24-25th February 2007). They had a couple of talks
on JS related subjects last year (Dojo and Selenium) and they seemed to go
well. dConstruct and the London Javascript nights have proved the interest
is there... And you'd have a bundle of the Mozilla people at the same
conference as potential speakers.
But that'd lead to chasing people, organising stuff and PAIN. Much pain.
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Posted: 2006/09/21 09:03 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 09 Sep 2006
Ask Later #1 (Not a Techa Kucha Night. Honest)
I've been very remiss about blogging the July Ask Later evening,
organised by Steve Coast
and Tom Carden. The format was
different to any presentations I've seen before, each speaker had 20
seconds to present each of their 20 slides, and no way of altering the
timing. BWHAHAHA.
The first speaker had me worried, without trying to sound harsh, his timing was off and my fears about sudden rushing as a slide changed before he was finished and awkward silences in between came flooding back to me. His material was good but he didn't hit his flow and in an enforced slide schedule it was a lot more visible than a "normal" presentation. I was mentally hunkering down for a painful evening. But then something clicked.
The gaps started to vanish and the over running started to reduce, I don't know how much time the speakers spent practising and timing but it paid off big time. Paul Hammond, who I've commented about before, hit every prompt in his Constraints talk, which felt very 37signals, (hopefully he'll give it again elsewhere). The only person with better timing was Jon Crowcroft who presented 9 levels of indirection (and got a lot of laughs) and only looked around at his slides a couple of times. And his timing was near bang on. Oh, and football jokes - which were actually well placed.
Other highlights were Simon Willison, who reached a new speed of vibration, as he dived in to Javascript closures (the most tech talk of the night and a nice intermission among the other, softer, talks), Muki Haklay on why mapping sites suck (it's all about screen size) and one of the best usability talks I've seen, presented by Natalie Downe. I know I've missed some of the dozen or so speakers but I stopped taking notes through most of the sessions, I was enjoying them too much. So take me missing your name as praise, not me being slack ;)
The only downside of the evening is that was criminally under-attended. A combination of the school holidays, night of the week and unbearable heat seemed to keep the crowds away, and that's a shame as it was a great evening, from the presenters to the pub chat afterwards. The best one evening event of the year so far, and yes I'm jealous as hell it wasn't one of mine!
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Posted: 2006/09/09 14:25 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 06 Sep 2006
September/October 2006 Event Shot
Here's a link shot to some of the events I want to try and get to over
the next two months, they've mostly not been very well advertised:
Steve Coast on Geospatial Open Source Activity - hosted by the BCS on September 9th. I've not kept up with Steves bundle of projects (OpenStreetmap and OpenPostcodes among a scary number of others) so I want to get along and see what he's been up to. He's a confident, passionate speaker and I've not yet been disappointed by any of his talks. And I've seen a fair few of them! I've also never been to a BCS meeting so this could be interesting - if I can duck along.
The Storage Expo in Olympia - 18-19th October. It's not exactly the most exciting of events but the vendors often have shiny new toys and they have the occasional gem of a talk. I'm going to try and cram an afternoon in around a couple of decent talks.
Linux World 2006 - Olympia on the 25th, 26th of October. The last couple of years have left me cold so I won't be spending as much time there this year (I'm heading down on the afternoon of which ever day has the big Lonix pub crawl). I'm not working on any stalls this year so I can wander around for a couple of hours, say hello to some people I don't see enough of and look at where the commercial market is pushing. I imagine I'll be spending most of the afternoon in the .Org village chatting. I also won't be paying for any of the (overly expensive) sessions.
And lastly d.Construct 2006, thanks to some help from a very cool friend (hi Tom) and the fact that my employers are one of the sponsors I'll be able to attend this on Friday. W00T!
I'll also note I missed another London 2.0 meetup. I've managed to be tied up for every one of them so far and I've still not managed to say hello to Sam.
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Posted: 2006/09/06 23:27 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
