dalts.net Kind Acts of Randomness

First day back at work today. We had a lot of rain over the weekend, so decided to not cycle and get the (much slower, but dryer) bus. I've felt a lot sleepier all day without my morning exercise, although maybe staying up pretty late trying to get all my keys signed from LCA might have more to do with it.

I finally got everything in the right format for the caff tool, but it was then prompting me for the password each time (I have 3 keys to sign with) so I now have gpg-agent all setup and will finish them off tonight with a bit more efficiency hopefully.

Final Day of LCA... What a week. Missed the keynote today, but I'll probably catch the video next week. Lots of people all day talking about Python. I've had a play with it, but I really can't see much of a difference between the dynamic languages... it's all a matter of style. I personally use Ruby at the moment (which seems to have a really bad rep at LCA) purely because it gives me ActiveRecord and Rails.... which are very rapid and have excellent community support. It's a pragmatic decision more than anything - gets me stuff done fast and it's not .net :)

Planned on going to Farsight first, but ended up skipping to Kimberlee's Law talk as I couldn't be bothered to walk to Old Arts (I was kinda interested too). Great talk - she made some bold predictions, and a lot of people are obviously worried about all this stuff. Her core message was pretty sound though, as developers we should not stress about it too much and keep on writing cool stuff.

Ok.... I failed miserably in my attempt to blog every day through LCA. Friday morning was a late start (due to 3am bedtime) and that just messed me up for the week. In reference to my last post - I now have photographic evidence of me sticking the stickers on the laptop, I vaguely remember this now. I am now in the predicament that my macbook has a "Gnu/Linux" inside sticker on it - and it doesn't, unless you count all my various vmware images that run on there. I don't think the sticker will come off nicely so I may have to go back to running native Ubuntu on there (I had a lot of trouble with Feisty, but maybe Gutsy is better) - just to justify the sticker :)

Ok. Back to LCA. Thursday was an awesome day, started with an interesting and thought provoking keynote by Stormy Peters about paying open source developers. I then went along to Malcolm Tredinnick's tutorial on fast & efficient website... I knew some of this already, but there was a lot of real useful stuff in there - so will be watching that one again.... having the AV for almost all the talks is going to be really handy.

Ok - I think I had a lot to drink last night. I awoke way later than normal and my laptop is now covered in FSF stickers. Is this the LCA equivelent of the groom-to-be waking up naked in the middle of the countryside tied to tree? :) [it was those damn slab-drinkers!]

Will post a proper blog later when I get my act together... day 4 was a very good day and deserves to be written about.

First things first, what's with the low shower pressure in St Mary's? If this is an attempt to save work I'm afraid it's not working as you end up taking 2-3 times longer with your shower :)

Day 3 - LCA Opens. Bruce Schneier keynote was very good, not what I was expecting and could easily be digested by anyone not in IT, so I will be sharing the video for this one with a lot of people I know (The Greens will find it interesting I think). I seem to actually be one of the few people that seem to have not read Bruce's stuff before, but I'll be reading his blog from now on.

The talk of the day was the big XO giveaway - I'm not going to go on about it too much, but suffice to say I couldn't help feeling jealous I didn't get one. I did have an idea for software for preschoolers, but I tried to mention it to Jim after the keynote but he didn't seem to be that interested (it's not their target) so maybe I'm just clutching at straws here at a reason to get one.

Day 2.... I'm getting into this now.

I spent most of the day in the Mysql Miniconf but had a little departure to the packed sysadmin one for the session on puppet (sorry Mysqlers I was probably the one that instigated the switch of rooms as I did tell someone in sysadmin how much space you had!).

Puppet is awesome - I've already started some work on this, but I am still a little daunted by all the different ways of doing things. Anyway - there were some good tips from the Kennards...ahem I mean $client talk and I am pleased to hear that there is a good book that just came out. Looking forward to Luke's talk on Friday.

Anyway back to Mysql. Lots of talk about replication and proxy, which is of main interest to me. Proxy is awesome but I think I might have to put hold my plans to use it in production for a while (differing opinions on it's stability) which is a real shame as it solves a lot of problems for me. Very few seemless options of doing M/S selection in PHP so there will be some coding, at least a move to RoR there are a few options like Masochism.

Well, here we are, me attempting to blog again - let's see how this goes!

After my 4:00am start from the Gold Coast - I am finally in Melbourne (a cool 15oC as I stepped off the plane in my Gold Coast attire...brrr) at my first ever LCA!

After crawling my memory for Melbourne geography and how the trams work, by some miracle I made it to Melbourne Uni. Nice campus, the eclectic mix of beautiful heritage buildings and hideous 60's architectural mistakes reminded me a lot of my own campus - gave me more thoughts about becoming a student again, but this came crashing down again as I thought of lack of $$$!