LCA Thursday
Thursday was the second day of LCA proper.
Talks:
- Stormy Peters – Would you do it again for free? – interesting, Stormy is a great speaker, although not a lot new to me
- Memory-efficient and fast websites – pick two! – REALLY good! Recommended if you run some hobbyist websites. The slides are not that enlightening so best wait for the audio or video.
- By Sound and By Touch: Using Linux with Speech and Braille Output Interfaces – interesting and useful, quite technical. No slides, so wait for audio/video.
- Google, Open Source and Google Summer of Code – I’m not a huge fan of Leslie Hawthorn’s presentation style, it was a little bit “trying too hard” for me, but some interesting tidbits – including that Google will probably introduce a southern-hemisphere SoC starting in October (but aren’t uni students still at uni then?!)
- GStreamer: More than just playback – watching him type in a three-line command full of options from memory was kind of entertaining :)
- An introduction to open source animation – Elizabeth Garbee is only 15, holy crapoli. Her talk was impressive, hugely interesting and very confidently presented. And this is actually her second LCA!! Just amazing.
Reminder to self: don’t forget to check out l10n and Parrot.
Big rec for today would be “Memory-efficient and fast websites – pick two”. Afterwards I got talking to the guy next to me who does some Django development, since I am planning to try and learn that sometime this year.
Also, my laptop is so noisy that running it during a talk made all the people next to me look at me :( Definite FAIL.
I forgot to mention yesterday the surprise that they gave out about a dozen OLPC laptops to conference attendees, I think there was some small proviso that they had to use them and report back about certain things. OLPC has quite a presence here. Apparently they are trying to get some into Australian primary schools? Not sure about the details. The ultra mini Asus Ee(e?) PCs are also a big hit here.
It’s interesting how simple constraints seem to create new opportunities and new markets. Less is more!
I also wonder a little bit why OLPC appear to be trying so hard to win us over. I think we are already won over. We being open source geeks.
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