[H-GEN] LCA 2003 from my POV

[Clinton Roy]

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Hello all, I thought it might be useful for all Humbug members to hear
a little about how the conference went.

It was very well organised. Extremely well organised. Unbelievingly
well organised. I only hope previous conference organisers can take
some of the credit (by imparting useful knowledge to whoever is silly
enough to organise one of these things).

I'm not sure of the final numbers, but there were around four hundred
delegates; a big rude hand gesture to the knockers who said a Perth
conference wouldn't work.

Perth is a lovely city (apart from those bore water stains) and the
campus is so lush! The only hassle was finding shops after hours;
Perth seems to die after five on weekdays and completely on Sunday.

The conference was preceded by a few mini conferences, with the topics
ranging from Debian, Linux in education, and IPv6. I attended the
Debian mini conference, can I just say now that Bdale Garbee (current
Debian project leader) has done some very cool stuff. 

The conference proper started with half day tutorials into all sorts
of things. The following days contained shorter seminars on an equally
broad range of topics.

Humbug nearly had a Debian release named after it; at the conference
dinner an LCA 2003 t-shirt signed by lots of the Linux elite was
auctioned off, proceeds to go (as last year) to the EFA. Anthony Towns
(Humbug member, Debian release manager, better known as aj) offered to
name the next Debian release after a bid topping two thousand dollars
(of course, Anthony could just fix it so there were no more releases,
but we were too drunk at the time to realise this). This got a few
Humbug members (including me) rather excited and silly; fortunately
Sun microsystems out bid us in the end.

I won a book! By buying another book at the conference discount rate I
was put into a draw, and won Stevens' _Advanced Programming in the
UNIX Environment_.

I had a great time and learnt a lot, highlights for me were Bdale's
talks, and a talk on the legality of Open Source licences (with
emphasis on Australian Law). Oh, and teasing aj whenever I could.

Hopefully we'll see all of you in Adelaide next year!
-- 
Clinton Roy

Meetings - ``Try, or no try; there is no do.''

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