Plantagenet Penguinista

Thanks to pigeond AKA Howell Tam for the photo. The other pic I want is a little red Peugeot sports car, which I’m hoping was (1) still there and (2) photographed by the Second Bicycle Posse as they headed back past the shops toward ANU on Sunday afternoon. Reminder: if you took photos at LCA2005, please add a link to the wiki page by clicking the Edit button and copying what someone else did.

Michael Still will no doubt be pleased with this solution to limited sizes amongst the remaindered LCA2005 tee-shirts: AnnéRose models her new “penguin dress”:

Blue Beastie now has a new home in Tridge’s garage, his third spare guest bike. Tridge and Andrew Bartlett condescended to be interviewed, and as this drew to a close, Steven Hanley came pelting in and started dragging people out to the van for the Perth airport run. While I hastily packed, Steve and Tridge set about preparing Blue Beastie for being packed into a bike box for transport, only to discover that the handlebar boss is rusted solid and wouldn’t turn to fit into a box – so there Beastie remains. Thanks, James Andrewartha, for interview-recording services (plus an intelligent question during the interview); it turns out that one of the deficiencies of an AOpen OpenBook 1547 laptop is that there is no mic in, only a line-in. To the amusement of Bruce, the bloke next to me on the ’plane (which would have only been about half full), we passed a crossover cable between rows to shovel the audio data across in flight. For some reason, “all in a bunch, t...

I’m very glad that I was forewarned about my fitness levels. It was an easy ride – although it seemed for a while that Steven “Masochist” Hanley was going to take us via Dairy Farm (on top of a hill nowhere near Dairy Flats). We got to see the scene of the original Penguin Bite, a dam, some excellent shady forest paths, some swans, some nice shiny rent-a-cruiser road bikes, the Canberra foreshore and lots of other stuff. It was excellent and I am knackered. The after-ride yard party was great – oh, the calories! – and we’re currently sitting around watching Shrek2 (or typing up blogs, developing Exim etc) while we wait for airplane time to wander around. Tridge is, as always, an excellent host and Susan an impeccable hostess. They say you need to look at the people someone surrounds themselves with in order to truly know what the person is like, and at the moment we’re surrounded by some remarkable people, including roughly a dozen child...

If you watch only one video from LCA2005 , make it the mad South African’s presentation. Mark Shuttleworth is very , hah, down-to-earth, informative and funny. Classic lines include (on Soyuz landing simulations) “The sea was very calm that day <voice accent=russian>No problem, we’ll put in some divers to make it rough</voice>” – he learned Russian as part of becoming a fully qualified Cosmonaut, and reckons it’s very hard to do on a hangover – and (quoting a fellow cosmonaut on what happens to a Soyuz capsule when the parachutes are deployed out the side) “Sh!t, that wasn’t in the simulator!” Sundry quotes about molten metal running up the windows during descent (before the windows themselves blistered and fogged) and surreptitiously-installed VoIP software make this an unmissable in-depth edutainment session.

Falafel Burger and chips, a full meal in itself. I've not enjoyed a crunchy falafel before, and the avocadoish sauce atop it was also quality stuff. And now they also know how to make LLB in pint glasses, as the crew who joined me there also wanted one. My $15 bike works very well, if not quite up to Steven Hanley’s standards. Now that it has more than 20 and 18PSI in the tyres, the rims even stay clear of the ground. It'll need a new back tyre and eventually a new back wheel if I keep it longer than two days, but it goes, turns and stops, and even has a bell with a shamrock on it. It's been up Red Hill and back (via Dairy Flats on the way there ’coz my navigation sucks), and given me a fairly good reading on just how totally unfit I am. )-: Burgmann House is kinda convenient for budget accomodation. The dining hall has fruit, coffee, milk, hot chocolate and other stuff on tap from 07:00 to 22:30, and irregularly scheduled piano music (there are at least three maestros in h...

Got rid of the angle-brackets, anyway, by manually putting in <p>’s instead of Enter/Enter.

I got myself a bike for Sunday's LCA bike ride from Aussie Junk out in Mitchell. Funny thing was, a lock for it cost $2 more than the bike. The lock was necessary because I have no secure storage for the bike (Burgmann College was not enthusiastic about the idea of stashing it in my room) and an unlocked bike would be pretty much fair game for some (probably drunken) random in a hurry. You will also need a skid-lid. Quoting SJH on the ride itself: The ride is open to all delegates at the conference, meet at 10am in front of the Manning Clarke Centre with a bike, we plan to leave by 10:30am and ride for approximately 2 hours. There are some bike hire places in Canberra if you are unable to arrange a bike, further information is available at the registration desk during the conference.

It looks like David Weber is creating a male Honor-equivalent in Shadow of Saganami. Good read. Tridge expounded on a LDAPpish BerkeleyDBish pre-LDAP layer within Samba4 called tdb. Ah, the joys of editing your entire LDAP database with a text editor. Edale Garbee also showed us how to play TuxRacer really, really badly - and had an interesting experience with herring - and how to build a new TR course.

The Brasilians are all passionate about something larger than the coding community. Freedom as a concept is very important to them, we (in Oz) get all ideological but not enough to really move us. "This is the only place to transcend differences and work together." Opening up what you're contributing so everyone can take and everyone can give, a whole new bunch of ways to achieve freedom. "Refugee situation" - FOSS getting an increasingly commercial focus, discussed by guys in suits, becoming a little exclusive and restricted. Become associated with cutting costs and business case "reasons" to the exclusion of the cultural aspects. People starting to miss out on identifying with FOSS due to this. Many of the people becoming involved in it without picking up on the broader consequences. Open Source, Standards, Licences -> Business Cases and Code Open Knowledge, Community -> Broader Social Implications "Open Love" is the [ insert picture ...

Funny as ever, yet deeply informative. Valgrind is good. “You’re idiots!” (general laughter) to audience members who confessed with raised hand to not using valgrind. Samba4 looked at threads, multiple processes or a single nonblocking state machine. Threads are evil, processes are ugly and state machines will drive you mad... so Samba4 offers all three, determinable at runtime. You can be evil, ugly or mad. Using an IDL compiler called pidl, Samba4 can &ldquol;natively” communicate in any endian order (in CIFS, the receiver sorts out byte order on a per-structure-element basis, ie, very slowly) in its native endianness. Another side-effect is that each connection context drops from a couple of hundred kB to a few kB. Samba4 can (has) run a domain controller on a LinkSys router. Tridge waxed lyrical about talloc, including “the good parts” of C++ like destructors but without the C++ which he called (general laughter) “a big plus... C-big-plus...

The saga of Jeremy’s presentation reads like one of those stress-tester jokes. His (Mac) laptop wouldn’t sync with the projector. Then NeoOfficeJ crashed. And crashed again. And put the presentation on the background, leaving shells etc over the top of it. And scaled it, er, interestingly. Jeremy started everything from scratch a few times, all to no avail, then finally asked if anyone in the audience had a laptop. So, knowing that mine works with the ANU projectors, I volunteered it. Then I wrestled with Jeremy’s recalcitrant notebook, on stage, finally giving up and depowering it – and meanwhile, Jeremy was giving his talk, without notes. When I got the beastie up (very, very slowly) and managed to kill off the zillion and one automatically restarted PITA tasks – email, calendars, NeoOfficeJ, Lord knows what else, Jeremy took a ten-second break to find and copy the presentation onto a memory key, and went right back to his talk with no obvious signs of th...