Linux.Conf.Au 2010 in Wellington

Last week I was in Wellington attending Linux.Conf.Au. It was an extremely well run conference, and as has been the case for many years, the highlight of my past twelve months.

I started out by cleverly flying to Auckland and taking the
Overlander train to Wellington, sidestepping the weather that diverted many flights.

The first day was spent in the Ardunio miniconf, soldering the finishing components onto my pebble board (arduino I/O break out shield, kinda). Was exposed to the Aiko library, which essentially provides a mainloop and event callbacks, which very much fits with my view of the world. Managed to burn my hands a couple of times, distraction is a killer. The organisers felt sorry for me and I won an Arduino starters kit, with lots of little odd components. I promptly gave away the actual Arduino as I already have a couple of them.

My favourite talk was on adding GCC Plugins, then the GCC update, then the Linux kernel performance event API.

There were a *tonne* of good talks besides these, and many I couldn’t attend due to lack of personal spatial redundancy.

Yes, like previous years, I intend to do a debrief, at least at Humbug and at work. I’m going to try something different this year and hire out a speaking room at the library as well.

The big news for me personally is that we were finally allowed to tell the world that next years Linux.Conf.Au will be held in Brisbane. I’ve taken on the role of Open Day organiser.

We’re running a competition through our website, followtheflow.org, to solicit ideas to augment the conference. We have a range of free registrations for the most creative ideas that we can actually execute.

Twenty Ten — Getting a Job

This post has been in the drafts pile for a little while: a lot of the facts are still open to change, and there’s a fair bit of emotion I’ve tried to weed out of the post. I have a lot of my self worth tied up in my employment, and thus changes to my employment have always been rather difficult for me.

My current contract with the CSIRO comes to an end in March, and it’s been made fairly clear to me that my current position won’t be repeated once my term is up. It’s fairly up in the air if I’m going to be offered any position. I like what I’m currently doing and there’s still a lot of useful work to be done, but money and directions of the unit I’m in are somewhat different to mine. There is at least one other option available in CSIRO right now, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Unfortunately, to really put the boot in, my travel to Linux.Conf.Au in Wellington has been canned by the very-higher-ups despite having to-the-hilt support from local management. It was made clear that the decision had to do with the end of my contract. There must be some demotivational poster in there somewhere.

Anyway, if you’re after a C/Python developer after March, I may well be free.

Twenty Ten: The Plan

Yes, it’s one of those `new year resolutions’ posts. I’m going to break up each of the goals into its own post, but here’s the collection:

• get a job
• less whining, more modifying
• figuring out what I am
• being happier
• no more [paper] books
• write more
• do more stuff with my hands
• everything in its place