Monday, April 25, 2005
Linux.conf.au Day 6
The last day of the conference started at 10am, which gave me a chance to sleep in (and pack, seeing as I was flying to Melbourne that afternoon). Before the keynote, Steven announced that in fact they wouldn't be giving away the laptop until the conference close. I was being picked up at 4:30.
The keynote (or footnote as he called it) was by Eben Moglen, the legal council of the Free Software Foundation. He gave what he described as the State of the Free Union, an overview of how the Open Source community is placed, and the challenges it faces over the next few years. Basically, his speech was very cool, and ended with a standing ovation from the crowd.
After that, I went to listen to Luis Villa tell me why everyone needed a bugmaster. Villa talked about why he thinks bugmasters are really important (the help produce good quality products), and talked about the traits a good bugmaster needs (basically being fairly anal and humble at the same time). Good talk, but I found myself wondering "why would I want to find other people's bugs rather than write code myself?". So I guess I'm not going to ask to join QA just yet.
After stuffing myself with free pizza, I went along to Chris McCormick's talk on hacking the Gameboy Advanced. He made a point I'd been wondering about for a little while - if Linux is meant to be fun, why are there so few games? McCormick had started his own company to try and develop and sell an indie game for the Gameboy Advanced, but has found it really hard to break into the industry. Really interesting and really cool stuff. It probably helped that he thought he only had 10mins left, so rushed through his talk, and then realised he still had another 20mins, so could go off on tangents.
I'm pretty sure Gordon would have really enjoyed this talk.
After that it was time for the Lightning Talks - short talks about whatever cool think the speaker is currently up to. Some pretty cool stuff was talked about, and it will be interesting to see what's still around next year.
My last talk of the day was one of the Best Ofs. After seriously considering going to another talk by Bdale, I went to the Architecture of the X Window. Keith Packard didn't go into much details - I'm guessing it wasn't a work for word repeat - but he did have a lot of fun. It was a pretty cool way for the conference to finish for me.
The keynote (or footnote as he called it) was by Eben Moglen, the legal council of the Free Software Foundation. He gave what he described as the State of the Free Union, an overview of how the Open Source community is placed, and the challenges it faces over the next few years. Basically, his speech was very cool, and ended with a standing ovation from the crowd.
After that, I went to listen to Luis Villa tell me why everyone needed a bugmaster. Villa talked about why he thinks bugmasters are really important (the help produce good quality products), and talked about the traits a good bugmaster needs (basically being fairly anal and humble at the same time). Good talk, but I found myself wondering "why would I want to find other people's bugs rather than write code myself?". So I guess I'm not going to ask to join QA just yet.
After stuffing myself with free pizza, I went along to Chris McCormick's talk on hacking the Gameboy Advanced. He made a point I'd been wondering about for a little while - if Linux is meant to be fun, why are there so few games? McCormick had started his own company to try and develop and sell an indie game for the Gameboy Advanced, but has found it really hard to break into the industry. Really interesting and really cool stuff. It probably helped that he thought he only had 10mins left, so rushed through his talk, and then realised he still had another 20mins, so could go off on tangents.
I'm pretty sure Gordon would have really enjoyed this talk.
After that it was time for the Lightning Talks - short talks about whatever cool think the speaker is currently up to. Some pretty cool stuff was talked about, and it will be interesting to see what's still around next year.
My last talk of the day was one of the Best Ofs. After seriously considering going to another talk by Bdale, I went to the Architecture of the X Window. Keith Packard didn't go into much details - I'm guessing it wasn't a work for word repeat - but he did have a lot of fun. It was a pretty cool way for the conference to finish for me.
# posted by Simon Dugard @ 10:34 pm 
