linux.conf.au:2003

The second day of talks went well. That night we had the conference dinner which went pretty well. We continued the tradition of auctioning off a conference tshirt signed by all the speakers. This year's tshirt was also signed by many of the people who attended the kernel summit at OLS. The winning bid was made by the people at the Sun table for about AU$2100.

Everyone had a good time, although a few had too much to drink. We ended up having to take one to hospital, where he spent a night. He was okay in the morning though. This is something the next conf organisers should take into account.

The talks on Saturday went pretty well (including mine). After a year of telling me how much better PPC laptops were, jdub ended up borrowing my laptop to give his presentation because his one had no VGA connector.

A group shot of all the speakers and some of the organisers was taken as well.

The closing ceremony was pretty good. We gave out bottles of "Holy Penguin Pee" to all the speakers. I haven't been able to find a photo of these online yet. I am pretty proud of of the labels, as I did the layout myself.

At the closing, it was also announced that the next LCA will be held in Adelaide, followed by Canberra in 2005.

A Speex file is available from the LCA website containing the audio from the Q&A session. It came out at 3.4MB for about 45 minutes. This is the format we will be encoding all the audio in for distribution on CD.

On the Sunday I didn't do much, as I was exhausted. I cycled into the city to see the Australia Day fireworks in the evening though. They were pretty good this year. It looked like they were using about 6 zodiacs to launch smaller fireworks, in addition to the larger barges. A great ending to a great conference.

Update: a picture of the Holy Penguin Pee. If you look at the larger version you can see a bit more of the penguin silhouette. Another picture of Linus getting his Holy Penguin Pee from Tux.