AUUG Day 1
Was at AUUG 2004 today. Interesting keynote by Senator Kate Lundy, who mentioned the OpenOffice.org relation with the National Archives in Australia. Plenary was by the CTO at Sun Microsystems, with some interesting thoughts (sparse notes). Later on, learnt about Martin Schwenke’s ideas about Vital Product Data and using that for persistent device naming – now that udev is in place, and hal’s being used a lot (though he says HAL’s only for desktops; servers still can use VPD for hardware inventory or diagnostics) nowadays.
Got to see Jeremy Malcolm (from iLaw) speak about spam and the various laws that can help us get rid of this pest. Then Warren Toomey, about how C Code trees can be compared (his main aim was to extend Eric Raymond’s Comparator, but use lexical tokens instead). Interesting, might be useful anti-plagarism tool. Steve Bellovin talked about Privacy, Anonymity and Security on the Internet – most interesting to see him speak!
Interesting to note that the Victorian Greens (another political party, whom spoke for a bit), are using Linux. They reckon that when OOo 2.0 comes out, they’ll be using it as a “great communication tool” and will encourage it on Windows, OS X and Linux platforms. They currently already use it, with Evolution for e-mail, and RH9.0+LTSP for their office. Their database is going to be Postgres based, Plone is used on their main site, and they run a wiki using Apache internally as well. Go Bruce!
Attended the AGM, not much, except print versions of AUUGN are ending. Otherwise, battling sleep (APM) support with Fedora Rawhide on the Thinkpad T20; and today, I’m not getting my rsync trees, for some absurd reason, the Net’s really slow. Ah, also got me a few CDRWs, because I got tired of burning development boot CDs on CDRs (waste!).
