linux.conf.au 2011

This relates more to the computer science part of my degree than mechatronics engineering, but it was such an interesting week that I thought I'd write it up anyway.


LCA is, well, an Australian Linux conference held annually at the start of each year, aimed at hobbyist computer users rather than corporate suit types.  This year it was held in Brisbane from the 24th to the 28th of January - in other words, barely a week after floodwaters receded from the original conference venue (QUT Gardens Point), forcing the organisers to set up the Kelvin Grove campus at the last minute instead.  They did brilliantly, by the way - you couldn't even tell that they hadn't been planning to have it there all along!

I 'worked' as an A/V volunteer - free conference registration and lunch every day in return for sitting behind a camera watching the same talks I was going to watch anyway.  Pretty sweet deal!  Even though I've been using Linux as my main desktop OS for years now, I still felt intimidated at the thought of being surrounded by a bunch of hardcore computer geeks talking really fast about stuff I'd only vaguely heard mentioned in CSSE1000, if that.  Which was pretty much my reason for volunteering, rather than going as a normal delegate - I figured if I had Important Volunteer Business to duck off to, I wouldn't be stuck nodding along in conversations, way out of my depth.

Best decision I ever made, if for completely the wrong reasons!

Volunteering meant I got to see first-hand how the conference was run, got to meet all the Important People running the show, got to eat volunteer-only pizza in the back rooms, got introduced to people whose blogs I'd been religiously following for months (in other words, people I idolised as minor celebrities), got to learn a bunch of technical A/V skills, got my own personal supply of Chupa-Chups, got laughed at as I stuffed up the gaffer tape for the millionth time...

And it turned out I wasn't out of my depth at all.  I might be a total newbie, but it turns out Linux geeks are able to talk about something other than kernel development, and carry on normal conversations (shocking!).  I had a fascinating conversation with one of the speakers on the first day, about discrete maths, set theory and mathematical analysis - I'm taking a discrete maths subject this semester so I've been looking into it a lot lately and it just seems like such an interesting field.  Other people asked about my uni degree, and were quick to recommend the Arduino tutorial as soon as I mentioned mechatronics.  I had random conversations about pop culture (Star Trek, anyone?) and walked in late on a bizarre IRC discussion on vampire ducks, but that's another story...

Oh, and I should probably mention the actual talks, shouldn't I?  There were a whole week's worth, so there's no way I'm going through them all, but in no particular order, here were some of my favourites:

• the various "home automation" talks - there was Andrew Tridgell's coffee roaster talk (he roasted his beans live, and the room smelt divine), Sarah Sharp's garduino talk slash awesome demo (I'm suddenly actually interested in gardening), and probably one of my favourite talks of the entire conference, Jonathan Oxer's "Use the Force, Linus" involving a Kinect-controlled quadricopter and curtains that open with a flick of a hand...
• Silvia Pfeiffer's HTML5 video talk, which was changed at the last minute to my room, and a jolly good thing too because there was a lot of cool stuff!  I never thought web development could be so interesting!
• basically the entire multicore and parallel processing miniconf, but especially one pretty random talk on functional programming languages by Lenz Gschwendtner - I'm a student, I'm supposed to be expanding my programming repertoire - and the other contender for favourite talk, Vint Cerf's second presentation (after the morning's keynote) where he basically went "hey, I'm just here because I'm famous, let's have a huge group panel discussion about all this stuff I think is cool" - in other words, aliens, the interplanetary internet, quantum entanglement, GPU processing, fibre optic networks, FPGAs...

So yeah.
I had fun.
And I will make a point of checking out all the Brisbane computing groups I was invited to, like HackerSpace and HUMBUG... but right now, I'm wonderfully satisfied with last week, and I had a pretty awesome time.