Phew. If you haven’t seen or heard from me in the past few weeks, it’s cause I was flat out preparing for linux.conf.au, aka LCA.

I foolishly chose a talk topic which is entirely open-ended, it can never be finished, leading to me spending endless days and nights working on it, always thinking of “just one more thing” to investigate.

In the end the talk went down fairly well, I had more material than I needed – preferable than the opposite situation. No one walked out, and everyone I’ve talked to said they enjoyed it, so that’ll do me.

If you weren’t one of the blessed few there, there’s a movie available here (or here), and my slides are here – though they’re not that useful on their own.

I’ve also uploaded the demo movie, if anyone wants to scrutinise it.

The rest of the conference was a bit of a blur personally. I had a fair bit of real work on leading up to it, and during, and also spent a lot of time working on my talk. Lesson for future LCAs, finish the talk before going!

I still managed to have a good time though, blur or not. The Penguin Dinner at the Queen Vic markets was good fun, followed by beers on top of some office block, and the PDNS was good fun as usual. The Google party was a pale imitation of its former self, owing to there being no beer after 8:30pm, I guess they ran out of cash?

The hackfest (programming competition) was a success, with quite a few entrants and some pretty solid efforts by both the winners and some of the non-winners – winning a Playstation 3 is obviously worth an all-nighter for a few people – good to see.

Next year should be awesome, Tasmania is amazing, who’s on for a “Riding up Mt Wellington” BOF? 😉