linux.conf.au

I’ve just got through the first one and a half days of LCA2011 in Brisbane. The organisers have done a great job, especially considering the flooding they have had to deal with.

Due to the venue change the accommodation I booked is no longer within walking distance of the conference, but the public transport is pretty good.  A bit more concerning was the following change to the wiki made between the time I left Perth and the time I checked in:

I’ve been impressed with the conference talks I’ve been to so far. In particular, I liked Silvia Pfeiffer’s talk on audio/video processing with HTML5 – I’ll have to have a play with some of this. Today’s keynote was by Vint Cerf about the history of internet protocols and what the challenges will be in the future (e.g. InterPlaNet).

There was a talk today about Redis: it sounded like interesting technology, but the talk didn’t really give enough information to say when you’d choose it over other systems.

Today was the first day of the mini-conferences that lead up to linux.conf.au later on this week.  I arrived yesterday after an eventful flight from Perth.

I was originally meant to fly out to Melbourne on the red eye leaving on Friday at 11:35pm, but just before I checked in they announced that the flight had been delayed until 4:00am the following day.  As I hadn’t had a chance to check in, I was able to get a pair of taxi vouchers to get home and back.  I only got about 2 hours of sleep though, as they said they would turn off the baggage processing system at 3am.  When I got back to the airport, I could see all the people who had stayed at the terminal spread out with airplane blankets.  A little before the 4:00am deadline, another announcement was made saying the plane would now be leaving at 5:00am.  Apparently they had needed to fly a replacement component in from over east to fix a problem found during maintenance.  Still, it seems it wasn’t the most delayed Qantas flight for that weekend and it did arrive in one piece.

As I had planned to spend a day in Melbourne visiting relatives, it didn’t cause any problems with the flight on to Hobart.  I had been invited to the “Ghosts” dinner, which was to start about an hour after my flight landed, so it was a bit of a rush to get to the university accommodation and then walk down the hill to the restaurant.

The dinner was pretty good, with organisers from all the previous LCA conferences plus the people organising the 2010 conference.  Unfortunately, I was the only one from the 2003 organisers able to attend.  It sounds like the 2010 organisers have things in hand, and the location should be great.