noogz.net

posted: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 04:43 | filed under: / blog/ life/ | permalink | Tags: lca, lca2010, wellington, | Comments: 0

I'm taking what scant morning time I have away from the conference today to let you know what I'm doing during it, isn't that nice? Naturally, I've written this at 6:30AM, which is like 4:30AM Sydney Time: a fact that my body hasn't kept from me. Still, I need to be up early, if only for today... So. Here begins the brain dump:

I landed in Wellington on Friday -- as a miniconf organiser, I was fortunate enough to get picked up at the airport, and get the sights of the area shown to me. This includes Wellington's idea of an aircraft control tower (slotted between two houses on a residential block -- no photo, going too fast :(), a wind meter, which kindly blocks the road in sufficiently-strong winds, and most importantly the conference centre in which LCA will be held. I checked in to UStay (the budget accommodation booked by the conference), and got a room on the 11th floor. This wouldn't necessarily be an issue to me, save for the fact that the elevator goes up to 10 only: the remaining floor is scaled by way of a fire escape that isn't terribly well-marked. The room is pretty comfortable (really good for NZ$21 per night), and the common room is big, with plenty of couches, allowing delegates to socialise.

This is my first time staying at conference accommodation (I've been to two LCA's before), which has revealed an entirely new side of the conference: all the delegates staying here share a single common room, and there are plenty of new friends to be made just by popping over to another of the many groups that form there.

The common room, luckily, provides more than enough entertainment here, since the weather's been pretty awful since I got here -- strong wind and plenty of rain have accompanied 15-degree weather (which I am hoping will lift tomorrow). Flights for some have had to be diverted to Auckland, so it's dubious as to whether some people will even make the start of the conference. This is apparently unusual for Wellington (despite its reputation as the windy city).

Well, it's probably time I considered popping downstairs, and getting ready to go: I've got a miniconf to run today -- wish me luck!

posted: Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:06 | filed under: / blog/ life/ | permalink | Tags: sydney, melbourne, xgrid, | Comments: 0

Just a friendly prod to interstate friends (and apologies to those of you picking who are otherwise uninterested):

I'll be in Sydney from Wednesday evening for the AUC XGrid Workshop; I'll be heading to Melbourne on Friday evening for the weekend. If you want to meet up at any time whilst I'm there, you can contact me through the usual channels.

posted: Fri, 24 Jul 2009 22:06 | filed under: / blog/ life/ | permalink | Tags: uni, life, honours, graduation, | Comments: 2

Let's kill two birds with one picture, as it were...

Point 1? I got an Honours scholarship. Yay me! Secondly? I got my final mark today (for Functional Analysis), a very satisfying 95 (better than my previous marks for the semester by a long way). This means that I now officially have sufficient credit to graduate to a Bachelor of Science (though this is mostly a formality, I've been doing Honours study for two weeks now), and will do so in two weeks time. Awesome!

The third bird? My Honours thesis topic has been allocated. Put as vaguely as possible, it's about augmenting a machine learning-based object detection system (for images) to use colour images instead of black and white. My supervisor is Mike (my ACM-ICPC coach, as it were). I'll _try_ and explain it better once I've done a bit more reading than I have so far...

Normal service to be resumed later,

--Chris

posted: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:27 | filed under: / blog/ life/ | permalink | Tags: honours, uni, lca2010, linux.conf.au, | Comments: 1

Time for another status report on things that have happened recently!

More Uni!

First up, I've started on my Honours year! Isn't that exciting? As I've learnt this week, the next 12 months for me will consist of 4 coursework units, and a research thesis. This semester, it looks like I'll be studying Embedded Systems (yay! I get to program some microprocessors! Whoo!), Computing in Context (a research-intensive unit in HCI), and possibly one other, depensive on what the unit outline for it looks like. My thesis I'm not so sure about, given that the process by which we get assigned supervisors hasn't occurred yet. Currently, I have a pile of 12 project areas for my perusal, from which I must rank 6 proposals by order of how much I want to study them. At the moment, there are some interesting-looking proposals relating to Machine Learning, and some interesting ones relating to web monitoring; I find out what I've been assigned by Friday (very exciting, no?).

Linux.conf.au 2010

Linux.conf.au 2010 is being held in Wellington, New Zealand. One of the things that makes LCA a truly wonderful conference is the first two days, devoted to single-day "miniconfs" on topic areas of interest to the Free and Open Source Software communities. I'm currently involved with two proposals; I'm primary proposer of a developers' miniconf (called "Open Languages") aimed towards uniting the developer communities of open source programming languages, and I'm secondary proposer of an education-flavoured miniconf. I'd be equally happy if either of these proposals get up, but with 30 other awesome proposals competing for 12 openings for miniconfs, there's going to be some very stiff competition.

Blackjack?

Hey, turns out I turned 21 on Wednesday. How did I manage that?

posted: Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:16 | filed under: / blog/ life/ | permalink | Tags: uni, life, | Comments: 0

After a somewhat self-enforced marathon exams session, I finished my last (and arguably most difficult) exam on Monday, that was for Functional Analysis, and my first results came out this morning: 3 HD marks and a Distinction, not quite as good as my excellent run of last year, but still not dreadful either. Given that I've passed everything, it means that I've finished the undergrad component of my degree! Hurrah!

Graduation is in early August, but before then, the Honours programme starts Friday, after only three days worth of holidays. Excellent!

posted: Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:58 | filed under: / blog/ life/ | permalink | Tags: uni, life, twitter, acm icpc, europe 2009, | Comments: 0

Well, somehow we've made it to the end of the first semester of this year, and I quite inconveniently forgot to write about anything since the start of April. This is quite problematic. I guess that means it's time for me to do my semi-regular dump of notable things. Bleh.

So, where to begin?

ACM-ICPC Trip

So yes, we did arrive safely in Germany, spending a week with my relatives who live just outside of Frankfurt-am-Main in centre of the country. That was a fun week, we spent many days taking in the area, sampling the culture, and preparing for the programming contest the next week. We spent a week in Stockholm, where the contest was held, which was great fun in general (despite being somewhat colder than Germany and indeed Australia), we met many like-minded people, and thoroughly enjoyed the week. In the end, we solved three problems in the contest, which was (just) sufficient to see us getting a ranked position of equal 49th (yay!).

I'll write up the two weeks spent overseas in greater detail soon (hopefully).

Twitter & Co.

So I succumbed to peer pressure roughly two weeks ago, signing up for Twitter and Identi.ca. As a fun experiment into the field, I investigated how long it would take, and what measures would be necessary, for someone to notice that I was on Twitter, and then follow me. I did this by following one or two people per day, and getting them to drop relatively silent hints about my existence. In the end, it took about a week for someone to notice me, with a fairly blatant reference to me needed to make it obvious. Despite the great scientific breakthrough observed, I don't think the result is sufficient to write a paper about... :P

My main observation is that Twitter is miles behind Identi.ca in terms of useful features (I like group notices, denoted by '!' tags in Identi.ca, and Jabber-based updating in particular), stability (updating my Avatar in Identi.ca does indeed work first time, every time, whereas it took me 10 tries to get it to work in Twitter), and ability to store my own name (This would make Twitter the first site that I have ever needed to call myself "Chris" as opposed to "Christopher"), that said, Twitter is ahead greatly in terms of the number of people on it, which makes sticking around there a necessary evil (boo for centralisation!).

End of Semester/Undergrad

And yes, it would be amiss to not note that last week was my last week of lectures as an undergrad student (presuming, of course, that all of my exams go sufficiently well), it was mostly uneventful, with the exception of having to hand in two major assignments, prepare and present a lightning talk, and run the session in which it was presented. All-in-all rather busy!

posted: Mon, 06 Apr 2009 09:21 | filed under: / blog/ life/ | permalink | Tags: acm icpc, europe 2009, | Comments: 2

As previously mentioned I'm on one of the Australian teams competing in the ACM ICPC World Finals being held in Stockholm on April 21 -- that means that I somehow need to get to Europe, and that somehow is series of flights, today -- with a week's stopover in Frankfurt, to visit relatives who live there.

Flights today are Hobart-Melbourne (not too bad) and Melbourne-Frankfurt via Bangkok (oriental setting), an ugly 28 hours total in transit (that I'm not really looking forward to), arriving at the somewhat inconvenient time of 6AM (just to ensure that any excess jetlag will be comfortably prolonged).

I'll be trying pretty hard to document my trip here, and this will probably mean that there'll be a bit of extra noise coming from me on PLOA -- for those of you with little interest in what I'm doing: sorry about that!

posted: Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:06 | filed under: / blog/ life/ | permalink | Tags: uni, life, | Comments: 1

Wow. It's been a thoroughly busy month, lots of things to recap, so I won't bother going into too much detail... Here's a selection:

AUC Workshops

In February, the Apple University Consortium sent me to Sydney for their annual Cocoa Developement workshop, and to Melbourne for their inaugural Ruby on OS X Workshop. Both workshops were great, and if you attend an AUC Member University, you really should sign up for their future workshops; that said, I can't see me seriously using Rails for anything in the future, and Obj-C peeves me... Cocoa, on the other hand is seriously exciting, and even from a few days' exposure, I can see why Cocoa developers love their framework so much, and the lack of a similar facility for making good UIs quickly in Linux is really obvious to me now . Hopefully this is something that gets addressed in future releases of the major desktop environments.

Semester 1 Gogog!

Uni went back this week, and it's been all-in-all rather eventful. It's the start of my final semester of undergrad study, which is going to encompass holding the presidency of TUCS, our Campus Computing Society, going to Stockholm to compete in the ACM Programming Contest, all the while juggling effectively 5 units of study. How I'm going to cope with it I have no idea, presumably I will though...

This semester, I'm studying three maths units (two pure, one applied): Computational Methods (or, how to avoid doing hard maths... clever how they keep that one for third year), Algebra 3 (mostly group theory this year) and (Functional) Analysis 3; Computing-wise, I'm studying Data Mining & Text Retrieval (the 3rd-year Machine Learning unit), and Advanced Web Development (purely as a Gimme unit). Hopefully this one constitutes a reasonably good mix between fun and interestingness -- and hopefully not too time-consuming. On another note, Kumudini (the lecturer for Analysis) deserves special thanks, as she's gone out of her way to ensure that Analysis is being offered before Semester 2 for me, which I'm quite grateful for (as it means that I can graduate with the Pure Maths Major).

TUU Societies Day 2009

Mentioning the start of semester without mentioning Societies day would be quite amiss -- for those who are unfamiliar, socieities day is a 3-hour event held on the first Wednesday of the Uni year, where students signup for their chosen sports clubs and societies, generally in return for Alcohol. This year, however, the Union made the curious decision to spilt the allocated space in two, and provide a dry area, which proved to be very useful for us at TUCS (as we'd decided quite some time eadlier that we'd not be providing alcohol). The Union kindly provided us with space directly outside the wet area, which gave us a massive wall for advertising, and the dry area made all our volunteers highly visible (due to there actually being space to move about).

TUCS put on a Barbecue, and provided "Enticing Gift Bags" (full of things including leftover LCA09 schwag) to new members. The Nett effect of this was that TUCS signed up 115 members, which is almost three times as many as we managed on societies day last year. Obviously, we're pretty happy.

That's all for now, more as it comes!

posted: Tue, 27 Jan 2009 13:34 | filed under: / blog/ life/ | permalink | Tags: linux.conf.au, lca, lca2009, | Comments: 1

Friday's keynote was fantastic -- Simon Phipps (who retained his job at Sun Microsystems) spoke of the Third Wave of Free Software, which was an observation that Free Software (specifically not Open Source) is becoming a sensible business proposition. It's about time that it did. It was refreshing to see a large corporate's view of the world of Free Software largely agreeing with my own. Talks after morning tea were Tridge's talk on his automatic cluster testing framework (pretty cool), followed by Conrad Parker's talk on Ogg Chopping, which despite the name, was actually a 50-minute rant about why Haskell is cool -- I'm sold (I think), but somewhat confused about the talk -- really, I have no idea what happened. I strongly urge you to watch the video (when it becomes available) in order to figure out what happened for yourself.

Lunchtime was the Great Unbeardening -- Linus Torvalds (who was roped into the act at the auction on Wednesday) shaved Bdale Garbee's beard -- the result? Disturbing. Really disturbing, but all in the name of charity. The #lca tag on twitter was displayed on the projector screen, so live audience responses were shown as the shaving continued, including one Maclabbian pointing out the relative weirdness of the event; photos were up on Flickr well before the end of the event, and Southern Cross News came to film the event (focusing on the shavee, and not the mysterious Finn doing the shaving...).

Matthew Garrett's talk on Power Management that works was great: nothing too technical, but an excellent discussion of the user interface issues surrounding power management. Matthew's talk was unique in that his talk covered everything in his abstract -- this includes answering the question "will we ever get to beer island?" -- the answer? Yes, provided you're in Texas. Following was Geek My Ride, presented by Jonathan Oxer and Flame -- this was a pretty cool demo talk, showing how the two of them have modded their cars to include some pretty cool stuff, including in-dash diagnostics, MP3 playback, and remote ignition (wow cool!).

The final talk of the conference was Bdale talking about rockets, which as usual were pretty cool. Lightning talks concluded the conference as they did in 2008 -- nice to see them becoming an LCA tradition, I will definitely aim to present at least one next year.

Conclusion

So that's it. LCA is over for another year, and will reconvene in Wellington, New Zealand for 2010 -- I've never been to New Zealand, and am really looking forward to going there next year. The 2009 Conference was excellent, the talks were well-presented, and the organisation of the conference was such that it appeared from the outside that the everything ran well (I've been told that that was certainly not the case). The conference allowed us to show off Hobart to the technical world, which is an opportunity that does not present itself regularly -- I'm glad that we got that opportunity, and I think most delegates this year will agree that it was an opportunity that was well-received, and resulted in an excellent conference for all involved.

Also thanks to Adam Harvey and Monica Wood for helping out at UpDNS -- you certainly made my job in organising it a lot easier; Linux Australia for having faith in the organisers ability to put on the conference -- I hope your investment in the Tasmanian Free Software Community pays off.

posted: Tue, 27 Jan 2009 13:33 | filed under: / blog/ life/ | permalink | Tags: linux.conf.au, lca, lca2009, | Comments: 0

The opening Keynote on Thursday was a discussion of the Wikimedia/Wikia project, which was overall not too bad. The highlight of the talk was the relaying the Parable of the Vegan, which was quite hilarious. Sadly, I don't think the talk was quite as good as it could have been -- too much time was spent teaching the purpose of Wikipedia and the structure of the wiki community, which I think was generally common knowledge amongst the audience. Once questions were asked, it became generally more interesting.

After morning tea were the absolutely fantastic Perl talks of Paul Fenwick, the first was "The Art of Klingon Programming", which made a hugely insightful analogy between the Perl programming language and Klingon culture, and used this to inspire his talk about libautodie, a library that makes Perl behave sanely in the face of supposedly fatal errors. It's pretty damn cool, and cleans up one of my least favourite things about Perl (though quite a few still remain), Paul's second talk of the day was on new features in Perl 5.10, which were interesting. Perl 5.10 has added a swtich-alike block, which I think is a model that other languages should adopt -- instead of the C-style 'break-or-fallthrough' method (which introduces many stupid bugs for newbies), Perl adopts the 'continue' keyword to allow a fallthrough, or no statement to break -- this is pretty damn clever, if I do say so myself.

This was followed by a talk entitled 7 Things Lawyers Don't Understand About Software -- delivered by a UTAS Law PhD student, who presented some very interesting arguments about the likeness of software and mathematics, and related this to the unpatentability of mathematics. His research appears interesting and I urge you to check it out.

After Lunch was Donna's The Joy of Inkscape tutorial, the point of which was to have people tinker with inscape for two hours, with occasional supervision from experts. Sadly, the room (which holds 40 with tables) overflowed, and hence the tutorial didn't appear to function entirely as planned. I don't think this affected the ability of people with seats to enjoy the tutorial though, which is nice.

Following Afternoon tea, I relaxed for a while (indeed skipping a talk), and finished up at Hugh Blemings' talk on learning Free Software Hacking from Clever People -- this talk was a disappointment -- from casual observation, people in the audience provided more useful input than the speaker, and the speaker was mostly inaudible (partially due to his tone of voice not agreeing with the room acoustics).

Thursday Evening involved me and various TUCS people running the Unprofessional Delegates Networking Session at the Uni Bar -- this was a massive success for us (we turned a profit!!!) and we were happy to provide an opportunity for the non-professional delegates to socialise whilst the professionals enjoyed their pissup at a brewery. Never underestimate the power of meat and quanitity burger to attract and feed people. I should direct many thanks to the business staff at the TUU and the Uni Bar, who opened their facilities at 3 days notice, for what was effectively a break-even prospect. Hopefully TUCS can do more work with them in the future.

(Photo by Adam Harvey)