[plug] Cameron's Conf Comments - Monday 12th

[Cameron Patrick]

Hello everyone,

Since no one else seems to be doing anything along these lines, I
thought I might write stuff about what's going on here in Adelaide.  I
don't claim to be exhaustive, and may or may not write anything for days
after yesterday, but it's a start. :-)  Also, I have blatantly ripped
off the subject heading of this email from a suggestion by Harry McNally.
I would submit this to the plug web site too but my web access here is a
bit dodgy.

So here we go...  Yesterday (Monday) was the first day of the miniconfs.
After eating breakfast - mostly surrounded by Perth people, PLUGgers and
UCCans - we set off to get to Adelaide Uni.  Despite Bernard having a
map on his PDA, we still got lost and ended up going around the long
way.  Unlike in Perth last year, there were few signs up around the uni,
although there seemed to be a few more by the end of the day.  After
registering and getting our back of conference goodies, we wandered off
to the Debian Miniconf, where Jon Oxer was wrestling with X on his
laptop and eventually resorted to showing his presentation using a
proprietary operating system.

The Debian Miniconf - which I spent most of the day at - was interesting
for interesting (for those who like that sort of thing).  Bdale, as
usual, had stuff to say about satellites and how he had machines of most
of Debian's architectures in his home, as well as other interesting
stuff that I've forgotten...  aj's talk ran for about twice as long as
it was supposed to but was an interesting look at how you end up
being one of the Debian bigwigs.  (Summary: harass people about your
ideas and then actually implement them even when the ftpmaster thinks
you're a nut.)  Anand's talk on the debian installer rubbed in how even
the new Sarge installer is nowhere near as swish as the offerings from
Mandrake, Red Hat and Suse.

There was lunch somewhere in there, too; and many failed attempts at
getting my borrowed laptop to work with a borrowed wireless card.  (It
alternated between not recognising the PCMCIA card, seeing it but
refusing to load the driver, and hanging when the card was inserted.)
I'm typing this over a wireless network using Putty and Windows XP :(
[Update 8:45pm - Bernard has compiled me a kernel which /should/ work,
with lots of bizarre patches in it to make it go.]

After the miniconfs, we walked (for half an hour!) over to a pub for
dinner and Conrad's Linux Audio demo/jam session, which fizzled after a
short time.  Returned home.  Slept.

I may or may not write one sometime later tonight or tomorrow morning
about today.

Cheers,

Cameron.