LCA2006: Day 3
Posted 2006-01-25-2228
Day three. The weather was slightly closer to typical, not super hot like it was.
Well the first day of the main conference was interesting. I heard that one
of the presenters slept in (and he's never going to live that down). After the
interesting welcome and opening, and going ooh, priiiiitteee
at the
the prize (damn it would be nice on my network), i headed to the Open Source
Graphic Design tutorial. I only went to the first hour. I was most impressed with
what someone who actually knows what you can do and how to do it, and has some
artistic talent can do. Inkspace for Vector graphics (uses SVG, cool!), GIMP for
raster, and Scribus for desktop publishing. I already use Scribus and GIMP, and
have had a look at Inkspace before. Now I feel I might have another real go at
Inkspace.
I went to the second half of the VoIP and Asterisk. I think my timing was good, as it wasn't long before they jumped into Asterisk. I was surprised just how easy it looked, and that it actually worked. I might have a go at setting that up at home, but might have to select one of the more powerful machines to be the new firewall as the current P133mmx is on it's last legs and is fairly highly loaded already. I don't think I'll get into the hardward side of it unless work (or Uni, they could hire me) ask me to.
I think here might be a good chance to explain what I am and have been doing. There is really far too many useful presentations. During the miniconfs, I went to 4 different ones, and missed out on one completely that I would have liked to go to (Embedded, ok, it was only 4 hours long). So I am trying to pick ones that I thing I want to know more about, and could be useful. To do this, I sometimes change in the middle of a two session tutorial to hear a bit of another one. I only change at breaks as not to be disruptive. At the breaks I asked a few people for the brief overview of some of the others that would be of interest to me. I often get three sentences and a funny fact (one was about Samba). I will miss something sometime. I hope the video might be available, though as a student I might not be able to afford it.
Anyway, back to the conference. After lunch, I was at the presentation about Unwired and with Pre-WiMax setup. I know quite a bit about WiMax (IEEE 802.16) and it was amazing what they managed to do in just a year. Would be nice if we got something like that here. After that, the seminar on l2tpns was very interesting. They clearly explained what it was and many of the design decissions that lead to how it is now. The clustering is not far from what I am/was trying with something I was working on. I must look up epoll as a select replacement sometime.
The Keysigning was fun. It was quite quick at just under an hour. I have signed the keys now, the second person so far to do so, and the dot graph of the keyring looks really cool. I'm really close to the middle now. I wonder if I can find a trust path between myself and the WF keys. My poor little laptop doesn't like loading the big png graph.
Tomorrow looks interesting with talks on KDE4, 64 bit vs 32 (I run a dual opteron at home), and WBEM (which I missed out on at the sys admin miniconf). Not sure weather I will go to PHP5 or Software radio tutorials tomorrow. I don't think I'll be able to split them as sucessfully as I did today.