24 hours of traveling later, we are back at Oregon State. The conference was amazing. We have a lot of thanking todo, but in the mean time here is a video of a speech we gave at the closing session of LCA2007. Thanks again to everyone that helped us have an experience of a lifetime!!

Here are some demos found during the LCA2007 open day.

A weird segway robot thing…

And some image detection found using a webcam.

I just attended a really great talk by Kimberlee Weatherall regarding digital copyright law. It was great to hear about (oz)DMCA from an actual lawyer! I think that law needs more geeks…

The talk “Demystifying PCI” in the LinuxChix miniconf by Kristen Carlson Accardi was a highlight of day two. Using sysfs and lspci on a running system was an effective way to introduce the PCI bus and is certainly more entertaining than reading the PCI spec. A couple of new things I picked up from the talk: lspci -x prints out the configuration space of the PCI devices in hex which lead to the observation that the vendor code for Intel is 8086, ha!

It was also good to meet Kristen in person; she had helped me with a patch for adding the docking station entries to sysfs. Hopefully we can get her down to Oregon State to give a talk to our open source development class.

After the conference on Tuesday Google sponsored a party for all conference goers. It was a great night to meet and chat. In particular I got a chance to meet a few of our donors including conference organizer Lindsay Holmwood. Thanks again to everyone who donated.

I (Brandon) had been meaning to post daily updates from LCA but the conference is just too awesome to get a chance to blog- ROCK!

As a Debian groupie I started the conference off with a brief by the Debian project leader (DPL) Anthony Towns. The first minute of the talk was really strong. Then his phone rang and he took the call! It was the first time I had ever seen this at a conference.

After a good minute of “uh huh *pause* yes, yes, ok ok” he got off the phone and asked one of the audience members to call his mum. Naturally, everyone was very confused. It turned out he was moving today and his mom was the only person in the area to look after the movers.

With that brief interruption the Debian miniconf was off!

A few of the highlights:

• Funny: m68k buildd is keeping up properly thanks to an emulated build box running on amd64
• Hopeful: the rework of the GNU Free Documentation License to fit into the DFSG
• Sad: There were updates on IceWeasel. Why is Sun better at working with Debian than the much more open Mozilla Corp?

The next talk was interesting because of the problem domain: honey bees. Jamie Honan, the presenter, was trying to find a way to keep an eye on his remote bee hives to prevent them from swarming. The problem with a swarming hive is that his next door neighbor is allergic to bees. The best detection method of a swarming hive is smacking the hive and listening to the frequency of the reaction. He didn’t have a mechanical process for smacking the hive yet but a device like the Fascinating Electronics USB servo controller that I brought along for show and tell would work great.

The last session I went to before the embedded show and tell was a talk by Keith Packard on the direction that X.org is heading. If all goes according to plan it shouldn’t be necessary to have much of an xorg.conf in a few more versions as most everything will be hot-pluggable. w00t!

It was a great day. Thanks to the Seven who are putting this week together.

Justin and Mike demo the OLPC….

We made it to the conference! Jeff Waugh gave the welcome and here is a photo to prove it! Philips and Burns will be at the DPL talk, Jirwin at the GNOME welcome, and Polvi is on the Education track. Cheers!

Sitting in LAX the flight attendant said, “Sorry for the delay, we had to repair a tire.” Fourteen hours later on the Sydney side she said, “Sorry again for the delay at LAX, four engines are better then three.” Uhh….

Anyway… Chris Smart from the Kororaa project met us at the airport. Chris is great! He showed us around and taught us everything from meat pies to local vocab! Ironically enough, Justin had used Chris’ project in the past. Small world.

Today we’ll meet up with the “anonymous group of hackers” that has offered to put us up the rest of the week. Exciting!!

We’re blogging from PDX. The snow in Corvallis underscored that it is Winter in Oregon. Sort of hard to pack for Summer when it is snowing outside. The snow was nice. It didn’t keep us from getting up to PDX and taking over a power outlet!

Our University is going to cover the rest of the expenses to attend the conference! A giant thank you to Shay Dakan, Director of Network Services, Curt Pederson, Chief Information Officer, and the members of the Open Source Lab.

From the community at large we raised just over $4,000 in cash. Not too shabby for a fund raiser!! We also have donated lodging, and found cheaper than expected plane tickets.

This comes just in time, as we are leaving for the conference of a lifetime this Thursday.

Thank you to everyone that helped us get to linux.conf.au. We’re all very excited!!!!

Current progress: COMPLETE