hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1984.txt

Episode: 1984
Title: HPR1984: A Love Letter to linux.conf.au
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1984/hpr1984.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 12:51:09

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