LCA Day #1
I 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.
