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Episode: 1984
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Title: HPR1984: A Love Letter to linux.conf.au
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1984/hpr1984.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-18 12:51:09
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---
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This is HPR episode 1984 entitled, A Love Letter to Linux.conf.o, it is hosted by Clinton
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Roy and in about 10 minutes long, the summer is, why I've been to 15 Linux.conf.o
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conferences.
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This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com, get 15% discount on all shared
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hosting with the offer code, HPR15, that's HPR15.
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A Love Letter to Linux.conf.o, Linux.conf.o is the name and website of my favourite conference.
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Known by insiders as simply LCA, it is an annual technical conference, focusing on Linux
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and open source technologies. LCA is a roaming conference, going to a different city of
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Australia and New Zealand every year. I've helped organise the two LCA's in my home town
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of Brisbane Queensland, and it was in fact the first of these that introduced me to LCA.
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This year LCA was held in Jolong, down in the state of Victoria, and it counts as my
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15th Linux.conf.o.
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Clearly this conference has become quite a big part of my life, and it's probably a mature
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thing to stand back and have a look at why.
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LCA is a technical conference, it's not a sales-oriented conference. As an engineer, having non-salesy
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technical content makes me feel at home. For the most part, the paper committee only accepts
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talks from people directly working on a project, so the speakers we select know their topic.
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LCA is explicitly an open source conference, and mostly a low-level conference. LCA is a
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week-long conference, so I often add some extra time on the end to make a holiday out of
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it. A fair percentage of our attendees are from overseas, and it makes sense for them
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to do the same. I've taken the train to a Perth, Western Australia, LCA. That's the Indian
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Pacific train, a three-day trip from one side of the country to the other. I've done
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a day trip on a train in New Zealand from Auckland to Wellington. I've done a couple of motorcycle
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trips down to Ballarat and Jolong, both cities in the state of Victoria. Those two tours
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are roughly 3600 kilometres, or about 2,200 miles, a round trip, taking three to four days
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each way. I've done a motorcycle tour of Tasmania and Ireland State of Australia, after Tasmania
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and LCA. Next year, the conference is back in Tasmania for the Hobart LCA. I'm planning
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on doing a week-long hike of about 85 kilometres, that's 50 odd miles, before the conference
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along the South Coast track. There are a bunch of people that I only get to see at LCA
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from year to year. Sadly, some of these come from my own hometown. Keeping these connections
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strong is an important part of LCA for me. Every year, the parent organisation of LCA,
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Linux Australia, holds their annual general meeting during LCA. I've been an ordinary
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committee member on the Linux Australia Council a couple of times now. This year, I didn't
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get enough votes, which means I have more time to devote to other things, like HVR recordings.
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Registration for LCA normally starts Sunday afternoon. There's often a beginner's guide
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to the conference. After 15 years, I don't think I've ever actually attended one, but I
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should probably help lead it next year. It's very common for LCA to choose a charity
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to raise money for. For many years, this man had allowed long, often roxious auction.
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In recent years, we've had a raffle over the full length of the conference. We've helped
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many worthy charities over the years. The one that comes to mind was the Save the Tasmanian
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Devils Fund, for which we raised a substantial amount of money, something around $40,000. Partly
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based on the auction prize of changing the Linux kernel's logo from TuX to TuX. The
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LCA mascot for that year. TuX is a Tasmanian devil, wearing a costume penguin beak to cover
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over his case of the devil facial tumor disease, a communicable cancer that is threatening
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their existence. This was also the conference where Linux shaved Beetles beard off to raise
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money for the charity. We often hold LCA at a university, and we often use student dormitories
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as accommodation. If we're lucky, this means that a large percentage of attendees can
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meet up in common areas of the accommodation at the end of the day and continue the conference
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long into the night. A particularly memorable LCA on this front, somewhere in New Zealand,
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I forget which city, had a whole level of a student accommodation centre set aside as
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a common area, so a large percentage of the conference were able to fit and continue
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the conference late into the evening. The first two days of the conference are generally
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reserved for mini-conferences, or mini-confs as were referred to them. These mini-confs
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go for one or two days and are organised around a particular topic, and separately to the
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main conference. The mini-confs change every year, but commonly include mini-confs focused
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on the kernel, this is primarily attended by kernel coders, hardware based around Arduino
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raspberries and this year an SB, multimedia and music, sysadmin, open radio, open source
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and government. A highlight from the second Brisbane LCA was the rocketry mini-conf, where
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25 odd rockets were put together and later launched. We've been blessed over the years
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to have mini-confs working to improve and enlarge in our community, including Linux,
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Hackson and the community leadership summits. After the mini-conf days are done, the conference
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proper begins. These days start off with a keynote, have four or more streams of talks during
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the day, with longer tutorials running for half the day. My favourite keynote from this
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year was Genevieve Bell from Intel. From previous years, Tim Berners-Lee, Eben Moglin and
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Kathy Sierra have left long-term marks. These are people who have fundamentally created the
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world I live and work in now. Their contributions cannot be understated. There are a bunch of
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talks from every year that change the way I think about something or the way I work. This
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year, I reckon the record replay talk will probably change the way I debug programs.
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RR is a Mozilla tool. You run the buggy program under RR, which records exactly what the system
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calls the program runs. What state effects the program has? Then you run that recording under
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the standard debugger, GDB. Typically, with GDB, you can only step forwards into the program,
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but with RR, you can actually step back in time as well. A hardware talk that really caught my
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attention this year was the Linux microwave, a regular microwave with a set of scales and a
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thermal imaging camera added. So that whenever you heat, warm, to frost something, the microwave will
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never ever burn or under or overcook the food. The other bit of hardware that I feel warrants
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to mention was the large loom that one of our venues, the National Wall Museum, was built around.
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It is programmed by a large bunch of punch cards. There's always local attractions that add
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something to the conference. During the week, ad hoc groups form around common interests. We call
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these birds of feather sessions. I usually end up attending the EMAX Bough. A recurring bough
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is the jobsbough where employers and hopeful employees come together. I don't tend to attend too
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many tutorials myself. A number of years back, I ran a tutorial on Ant-Lot, a recursive descent
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parser toolkit. There are a number of social events that happened most years. The conference
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dinner, the speakers dinner, and the professional session. These events target the different audiences
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at the conference. A favorite spin on this was during MLB and LCA, where diners were given food
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and drink tokens to use around a market, rather than a traditional sit-down dinner.
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The speakers dinner is a smaller, more private thank you to the speakers, many of whom have
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flown in from overseas. The professional session tends to be the most varied, as it tends not to be
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a full meal, but just a place where folks can meet, greet and swap business cards. I can't say it's
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always been a bit of roses. I've had a couple of hospital trips over the years. One for myself,
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where, along with almost half of the conference, I came down with the dreaded Norovirus,
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a gastro-buck that is prevalent on cruise ships. During another LCA when I was
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separating another attendee to hospital, I figured my LCA was over, but then I struck up a conversation
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with the ambulance driver, and it turned out he'd been working on PDP 11s during his uni days.
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The other awful LCA experience I have to mention was the flooding that occurred just one week prior
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to our second Brisbane LCA. All of our venues were affected, some were destroyed completely.
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We had to shift our main venue about five kilometres up the road. High buses,
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find new caterers at the last minute, a whole world of pain.
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For many years now, most of our talks have been recorded, using our own recording system.
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All of these videos are up on the Linux Australia's server and YouTube.
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This means that weeks, months after the conference is finished,
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I find myself watching recording that someone has recommended,
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and it takes me back to that one week in every year when the world makes sense to me.
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As I mentioned previously, the next Linux Confe U is in Hobart,
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January 2017. I hope to see some HPL listeners there.
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You've been listening to HECCA Public Radio at HECCA Public Radio.org.
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We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday, Monday through Friday.
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Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HPL listener like yourself.
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If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then click on our contributing
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to find out how easy it really is. HECCA Public Radio was founded by the Digital Dove
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If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment on the website
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