LCA2007 – End of Day 2

We have had a pretty good 2 days so far at LCA. As I expected, I flittered between the Virtualisation, Gnome and Debian mini-confs. I learned a lot from Jon Oxer’s talk on Xen Image Manager. Probably most interesting was learning about recent glue tools such as ATA over Ethernet ( a poor man’s iSCSI), drbd ( A Network RAID-1) and Unison (a better rsync). Anyway it certainly has some good ideas for building reasonably sophisticated data centres on a budget.

We also heard a little about the OLPC project from Chris Blizzard’s keynote – and catching up with James Cameron at morning tea meant that we could actually have closeup look at the one he has been testing in the bush. olpc

At lunch I was able take a ride on Geoffrey Bennett’s open source segway clone.

marty-segway

Jono Bacon exemplified the value of open source development, talking about the audio editor Jokosher that spawned as a result of the need to fill a niche for a multi-track editor that mortals could use.

Anyway a pretty good days so far!

LCA tomorrow – yay!

I’m getting all revved up for LCA tomorrow. Jez (my son) and his friend Dan will be coming along as well. Having been to Dunedin for ’06, I’m much more aware of what to expect. As I found last year, LCA is definitely a smorgasbord with an overflowing cornucopia to choose from. The difficulty of choice is inevitable – especially seeing that work is paying for my rego – so I have to decide between head (enterprise architectually relevant things) and heart (kewl toys and things to spin my propeller). Anyway I am confident that Sylvia and her team will be trying very hard to get video of the talks available to the masses this year – so I hope I can timeshift those talks that I’ll miss.

LCA is also an incentive pump some life into this blog – hopefully I can get a few posts in during the week.