Spent Sunday day hanging out with Scott who was down from Sydney, and squeezed in an hour or so bouldering at the National Library too.

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Headed out to the ANU for the Cat Empire with Jess, Scott, Catherine, James & Rob. Bumped into little Pange there, was good to hang out and share a few double wodkas with her and her girl pals.

But how good are the Cat Empire! Hoping they’ll be at Woodford again this year. If you liked them at the ANU you’ll love them at Woodford where you’ve got an entire field to dance in!

Monday, which felt like Sunday thanks to LCA, was spent at Tilley’s.

Yeah really most of Monday at Tilley’s. We had breakfast then lounged around reading and playing Scrabble. Oh my god how nerdy.

Squeezed in a bit more bouldering though in the afternoon, nice to be getting back into reasonable climbing form.

Popped back again this arvo. I’ve found a nice little spot on the south west corner of the Library, where there’s two ~5 metre stretches of wall with a step in the middle which make it intersting. Plus there’s a door in the wall which makes for an interesting move.

Last week was LCA, wow. That was one serious week of conference. I must remember in future to spend more of the conference taking part in pissing contests, rather than drinking contests. My head …

Overall it was really cool. Highlights were, in no particular order:

• Tridge’s keynote, if I ever write anything 1% as useful and 1% as slick as Samba I’ll retire.
• Andrew’s keynote. It was great to hear his view on things, as ultimately my work goes to him. I think everyone agrees that he’s one of the best things that’s happend to Linux since, well maybe Linus?
• Keith Packard’s wobbly windows were cool although useless. I’d love to have that MacOS X spinning cube effect for changing virtual desktops.
• Martin’s rendition of Yesterday’s Knickers at the dinner, catchy tune that one!
• Andrew Baumann’s talk on dynamic update in K42. I didn’t realise he was hoping to do similar things in Linux, which would be awesome for lots of reasons.
• The “round table” at the very end with most of the main speakers. I’d suggest next year’s organisers think about making that an official event.

Lowlights:

• Having a cold all week.
• Missing Eben Moglen’s keynote, dang!
• The incredible gender inbalance, no really I’m serious. Not that it was suprising, but what’s going wrong? (And how are we ever going to meet chicks! ;D )

.. computers. LCA is in town, and there’s bands of nerds prowling the streets looking for their next innocent victim.

Haven’t seen much so far, been sick with a mild cold courtesy of Finn. Caught Robert Love bashing his head on a table and giving a quick demo of Beagle and F-Spot. Beagle is kinda cool, except the backends are very GNOME specific, which is kinda annoying for non-GNOME users. It also explicitly calls “nautilus” to open files and so on, although I have a patch to call “konqueror” instead.

F-Spot looks ok, although doesn’t seem to be as functional yet as digikam.

Did a bit of work while watching horms’ talk on SSL. I’d never looked into SSL but it looks like it’s actually a fairly well thought out protocol, although he was talking about essentially the fourth revision, so they’ve had time to get it right.

Saw a really interesting talk by Simon Burton (I think), about using these weird gloves to control music programs. Would have liked to have caught his act at Toast, but wasn’t feeling up to a night out.

Interesting shenanigans re BitKeeper today.

Being a non-BK-using kernel coder I’ll be interested in any new tool that emerges.

Although there’s some great tools out there to make life easier, being able to use a real version control system for kernel work would be sweet.

I had the pleasure of downing a few ales last night at the Phoenix while listening to the Bootleg sessions, or whatever they call it. Bascially it’s poor starving musicians playing for almost free, all they get is the tips people give them.

I was a bit late and missed the start of some girl’s set, which was a pity, she was good.

Next up might have been “Changeable Dan” but I didn’t really catch the name. They were really good, somewhat reminiscent at times of Aforafro, a great Canberra band from days of old.

Was good to hear some local musos for a change, check it out sometime!