 Okay, so there may be some interesting omissions from this talk that's all part of the fun. I've tried to write it on the plane on the way here, because it was more important that before that I finished the actual talk I'm giving on Thursday, and of course jumped on the plane and went, okay, cool, let's revise it and realized of course without net access I really had no idea what was going on. So this mainly contains the lies that I made up on the plane plus any updates that I got as I was being driven here by Marco tethering through my phone trying to search for the bits that I didn't know. So this will be, even for me, unusually unreliable guide to LCA. Cool, so let's begin. Welcome. This is the first semi-official thing that's happening at LCA I should say, welcome to you. Now there are supposed to be two presenters and I was supposed to stand under here and Kelly was supposed to stand over there. Unfortunately for various reasons Kelly can't make it until Tuesday and we didn't figure that out until it was too late for me either to get a replacement or produce a giant life sized cardboard cutout, so just which I absolutely would have done, but so I'm actually going to give this by myself which is untried territory because in previous years I've always had a co-presenter to correct my mistakes. Okay, so this is what it's going to look like. Where am I, what's happening, how do we get here and then advice secrets and lies at the end. So where am I? This is a roving free and open source software technical conference. It is very, very important to remember that it is a fresh volunteer team every year that does this, less fresh about this time but they start off fresh and enthusiastic anyway before the conference proper. That's really important to remember, so these people are not paid, they don't get to attend the conference or do anything fun at all for the month proceeding or the month afterwards. The umbrella organization that puts all this on is Linux Australia and they usually run the AGM and have stuff that happens in the schedule, I think you'll see that again this year. Okay, the important stuff, what's happening? This is your week. Any questions? Okay. We're going to break this down into small bite-sized pieces but that is basically what the week is going to look like. Okay, mini-confs. The first two days of the conference are sort of the warm-up semi-official, we take no responsibility kind of days. These are independently run sub-conferences basically, they are provided with a room and some space on the web page and that's it. Now every year the paper conference committee wants to point out that they have nothing to do with the selection of the speakers or present presenters at the mini-confs and as I'm on the committee again this year, particularly now we have nothing to do with this. The first two days are basically these little conferences that are in related areas but we have nothing to do with it. So if they suck don't blame us. The only thing we do is actually the committee do choose which mini-confs to accept each year but beyond that it's out of our hands. Keynotes, somebody said to me who attended the conference the first time, I didn't attend the keynotes because everybody knows keynotes like marketing guff where somebody gets up and tries to sell you something. That's not what LCA keynotes are. The LCA keynotes are the strongest speakers we could find on the most interesting topics. So these morning sessions are actually incredibly important. These are quite probably the highlight, for 30% of you this will be the highlight of your conference day. So do attend the keynotes in the morning, do not sleep in. Particularly 9am Monday will be the opening in place of a keynote and they will tell you all the important stuff that everybody needs to know. Cool, hit the list, a random list of some of the previous keynotes that we've had and see I wedged my own name in there somewhere. I like to have a slide right up here next to these really cool people. So this is it. Take the photos now. They particularly want me to mention Vint. Who knows who Vint is? Good, okay. Those people who didn't put up their hands, turn to the person next to you who did put up their hands and hopefully they won't say, I didn't actually know but I didn't want to put up, you know, I didn't look like an idiot. Yeah, so Vint is doing a keynote this year and I recommend you attend. Tutorials. So tutorials this year are actually going to be, I think, almost all in N518. These run in parallel with the main conference. Importantly, tutorials take up more than one slot so you have to give up more than one alternate talk to go to a tutorial. You're supposed to be interactive. There's supposed to be these in-depth how-tos, huh, but there's a trap. Sometimes, the presenter has actually expected you to do stuff beforehand or bring stuff with you or something like that. So you should actually read the description carefully more than five minutes before you step in the room because tutorials often require preparation. So, and I think the rocket tutorial this year also requires you to sign up your name and all that kind of stuff and yeah, something in blood, yep. So, yes, now the meat of the conference, the main part is the talks. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. This year we had over 170 submissions of which we accepted about 70. That's actually a little bit down in previous years but usually it's between one and two and a half and one and three submissions gets accepted. So, we had a lot of options and it can often be overwhelming when you look at all the streams and all the things that you could be going to to figure out what your best options are. And here is my hint. If you can't decide or none of them look interesting, go to the one that's left most because that's always the biggest venue. And that is basically the committee's pick on the most popular talk. So, assuming that we have some idea of what's going on, go to whatever's in the left-hand column if you don't have a better choice. Cool. Okay. Boffs. Birds of a feather session. These are not talks. There is, up on the wiki, a list of birds of a feather session. And I'll be adding another one shortly after this talk. It's sort of hard to describe what Boff is. Basically, the idea is that if there's something you're really interested in that is vaguely related to the topics of the conference, then you change them in the boff and everyone who's interested just shows up. So, it's very sort of ad hoc. Conferencing. Unconferencing. It's basically a widening out of hallway conversations. Often you get into conversation with someone and you go, actually I'm sure there's a whole heap of other people who are really interested in this topic. Let's put it up on the wiki and that's how you organise the beer boff. So, specific topic. Very easy. I don't know what the venue is. Apparently, there are two rooms reserved for this. They'll be running Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, possibly in the evenings. Just for the guests. So, check out that. Now, there are... Who here is a speaker? Okay. Any of the speakers not been to an LCA before? Oh, okay, yeah. Tuesday night, for you. Tuesday night, speakers didn't. For everyone else, Tuesday is free to do whatever you want. The organised evenings are potentially Wednesday and Thursday. Wednesday is the professional delegates networking session. Can I actually borrow someone's badge? Preferably someone who's been here before. Cool. Are you a professional? Cool. A professional on your back will be a little antenna with, you know, mock radio signals coming out of it. That means professional delegates networking session. That means that you get to go to the PDNS. It's basically the very thin justification for paying a full-price ticket if you get to go to the PDNS. The details of that will be on the website. And that's Wednesday night. On Thursday night is the penguin dinner. Anyone who has a professional registration or is a speaker or has paid extra to get it, I think, will have a fish on their badge or a fish with a number sometimes, meaning that they're going to the penguin dinner. Mark is going to pick me. No? Oh. Is that better? Oh, that is much better. Thank you. Okay. So, okay. So, yes, the fish means you're going to the penguin dinner. I recommend it. It's always a heap of fun. Last year we had a bidding competition on who would be winched up a helicopter. It was very odd. I last year attended with my leg and a knee brace and there were a number of, so shall we say enthusiasts who thought that I would be an excellent candidate for this. I ended up lobbying really, really hard to get the winches for winching team chosen instead and succeeded. Okay. On Saturday, there is an open day. I didn't actually check the schedule. Is there anything else on the Saturday? Marco? That's it. That's what I thought. Okay. It's generally open to the public. It's sort of the less hardcore, although exceptions, obviously, cool stuff that we're doing. It's a chance to show off, but it's also really, really fascinating to actually go through and take a look at what people are hacking on. Aha. That got him out of the woodwork. If you're in the Rockets mini conf and you're able to be here, then my understanding is the launches will be on the Sunday. So that's the location that we have booked to launch your Rockets to 5,000 feet and see if your telemetry works. So if you're in that conference, that's what that pays for. Cool. Okay. It's the non-rock people. This is your Saturday. Okay. And that is your week at a glance. But to figure out how this happened, we have to look back at how we got here. And so I'm going to give you a very inaccurate potted history of Linux Conf for you. It all started back. I remember back then I had hair and it was 1999 in Melbourne. The horrifically named conference of Australian Linux users was run at Melbourne. I think we had, I think I'm going to say 130 attendees. On my laptop somewhere. It was best standards. But it proved the idea that we could have a Linux free software conference in Australia that people would actually attend. And for reference, I was the one who ran the first conference. So I have been cruising ever since. Because when people asked me, was there going to do a sequel, I said no way in hell. Fortunately, the guys in Sydney decided to do a sequel. They called it Linux Conf for you. And that was the Linux Conf for you number one. That was January 2001 in Sydney. This slide here, that was my talk. I'm not responsible because I submitted three talks for consideration to the committee. And they not only accepted all three of them, but they scheduled them at the same time across the three streams. So I then had to take my talk and smudge all the topics together to produce a single talk. My actual favorite moment of this was this is inside of a Tivo. This is where we discovered that Trich had been doing some Tivo hacking. You can see the PowerPC chip there. If you look really carefully. Last time we were in Brisbane, I had a lot of trouble finding really good images of Brisbane, but I just like this image. And that was the first year we had a MiniConf. The Debian guys said, hey, we should have this Debian MiniConf thing. And what happened is you turned up two days before the conference started or the day before the conference started, I can't remember. And there was a table with a roll of stickers on it and a pen. That was about the limit of the organization. You wrote your name on the sticker, you stuck it on, and then you milled around with other Debian people for a whole day. Number three was in Perth. And this is a terrible, terrible photo, but the penguin you can see on your right is actually Linus in a penguin suit. His arrival was leaked and suddenly tickets sold out. People actually showed up at the conference without tickets and had to be turned away. But yes, Linus showed up on stage and then took the head off and everybody kind of uploaded it. It was all good. He returned in 2004 in Adelaide because they got a dunk tank and auctioned off the right to throw the balls to Dunk Linus. Indeed, there's the action shot as appeared on LWN. 2005 was in Canberra. That's Andrew Trigel, who gave what I would count among the definitely the top five best, most awesome LCA talks ever. Google it if you want. Dunedin 2006. This is Van Jacobsen. Who knows who Van Jacobsen is? A subset of the people who know who Vince Cerf is, fair enough. A bit of a networking God. I have two great stories about this one. One is I was not on the paper community this year. When the list of talks came out, I scoured it and I went Van Jacobsen. I googled the check it was the Van Jacobsen that they had actually got a paper proposal from. I went, Jeremy, this is awesome. You didn't tell me. I was like, who's Van Jacobsen? On the bright side, the paper committee did not reject him. That was good. The second thing is, and I don't know if this is apocryphal, but the Dunedin guys told me that he just showed up on the first day and he said, I noted the day before, I think. It would have been the Sunday. He said, there's nothing I can do to help. Someone said, do you know how to crimp a network cable? He went, yeah, sure. They had him actually crimping network cables. The conference set up. 2007, number seven was in Sydney. This, again, is a really, really terrible shot, but this is the open day. It was inside a pavilion. That was the first year we ran open day. The tradition started in 2007 and was a huge success. For me, it was really fascinating because all these geeks, when approached about open day, kind of went, oh, well, I have this project. And they pulled out these projects that, you know, you had no idea they were into it all. They had all kinds of weird, wonderful, wacky stuff that people produced that was a way away from their normal day jobs. 2008 was back in Melbourne again. This is the stack of 70-odd OLPCs, one laptop per child, laptops, XOs, that are given away to random delegates during the conference. The theory being that people would go away and do all kind of awesome hacking on it. 2009 was in Hobart. That's Linus about to shave Bidal's beard. He auctioned it off. Yeah, he was arm-twisted into auctioning it off. And yes, Linus did the shaving. 2010, so about, what are we? 25 minutes ago I was Googling to find images of 2010 and they actually had a photography competition attached to the conference, but no particularly obvious reason. The Dunedin organizer, Mike Beatty, actually won the competition, which strikes me as a little bit incestuous, but this was the winning shot. I actually thought it was kind of cool, so that's their image. If anyone has a better one, I'll add it for next year. Okay, so that's how we got here. The conference has roved around to Hollywood places, gathered traditions as it goes. Now, there are some do's. Do attend the full conference, especially the keynotes. Let me emphasize that again. Do attend the keynotes. I try to see some of the talks. That's actually quite useful. And try to listen in some of the talks. Ask questions. As a speaker, I hate it when people don't ask questions. This does not apply to my talk, because it's actually about 10 minutes too long, so there won't be any time. Help out if something isn't right. This is run by volunteers. These are people just like you, just as enthusiastic as you, because they're not professional conference organisers. These are just some schmucks who weren't bright enough to step backwards when they asked for volunteers. Since you're obviously brighter than them, if something goes wrong, your first instinct should be to help. Just figure it out and sort it. Try to get some rest, particularly those of you who are over, say, 25, like myself. Yeah, try to sleep at least once during the conference. I like it when people blog or otherwise cast into the Internet critiques of talks and events, what they like, what they didn't like, stuff like that, because I actually look afterwards to try to get some feedback for what worked and what didn't. Because it's often very hard to tell when you're up the front. It's also very hard to tell when you're on the paper committee. Because we get these submissions from people and they go, we spoke at a previous LCA. First thing we do is Google to find out what people thought of what they said. And it's surprisingly rare that we get really good critiques of talks. In fact, often people will say talks are great, but they never actually put that into the ether proper. Do not, okay. See nothing while hanging out on ISE. Slash Facebook, slash whatever. Drink much more than you would normally do. Yeah, whatever. You normally drink, so you're okay. Yeah, drink much more water, but just don't overdo it because those morning keynotes will be a killer otherwise. Don't fanboy speakers. It doesn't happen very often, but when you've got an attendee there who's literally jumping up and down in front of you, it's a little off-putting. Obviously, don't harass others. Okay, this is my rule. Do not start or join more than one new project per conference. This is how it happens. You're talking to someone and it's all awesome and it's fantastic and you're like, I am absolutely going to be involved and this is going to be fantastic. We're going to just do awesome things, blah, blah, blah. And that happens every day. And at the end of the conference you go, I'm not going to get to sleep for the next three years because I have committed myself to volunteering on all these projects. So just try to stick to one. And I would recommend perhaps not committing to anything on the Monday or Tuesday. At least leave it to Wednesday to see if it's a really good idea. Finally, your SSH keys have not changed. We do have previous cases of a certain amount of malice involving network infrastructure, so I don't go, that's odd, it changed, I'll just type in my password again. Do not do that. A certain rather prominent BSD hacker got done that way. Okay. Secrets. This is really the secret of the conference. There is no magic source. This is not television, you don't just get to sit here and watch speakers parade in front of you. The attendees actually are the conference and the best the highlights of the conference probably will be something that another attendee told you. One of the cool things about this conference is I know that if a bus killed all the speakers at one stage we could pull random people out of the audience and get a conference that was at least 80% as good. Almost everyone here has something really, really cool to say, something really, really cool that they're doing. It makes it really hard as a person on the paper committee, but we know it's true and every time I talk to attendees ask them what they're doing, it's always great stuff. So talking to attendees is really fantastic and the speakers are attendees. There's no secret speaker, cabal, room or anything like that at this conference. So the speakers will be milling about. Okay. Yes. There is no cabal. Secrets. Okay. The badge. We've already gone through some of them. On the badge that I stole. What else do we have here? So you will have your tag down here. Who hacked their tag this year to say something other than that? Oh, yeah. Okay. That's actually better than previous years. That's good. You could either hit reload until you got one you liked or you could deal with all the nastiness and what was it? SH1 this year or was it? They salted it as well. Okay. Somebody actually asked me and said do you know what they've done with the thing this year? And I'm like, I think I gave up two years ago trying to figure out the iterations. So, yeah, if you were clever enough you could figure out how to modify this phrase into something else. I don't know what else is on this but if you look at people's badges you will see different marks. And part of the fun is to figure out exactly what they mean. So. Thanks, Nick. Cool. Surprises. There's always a surprise announce. Sometimes it's leaked beforehand. That whole open source openness mentality versus the whole surprise mentality sometimes doesn't gel all that well. But the compromise seems to be that there's a certain amount of leaking that goes on and 30% of that is true. So, there's usually some surprise the organizers announced that everyone's going on a free trip to Australia or something like that. There are in-jokes I would you'll recognize them when you hear them everyone else will laugh and you won't. That either means it's a Brisbane joke in which case they'll be talking really slowly or or more likely it's some in-joke. If it's at my expense it's definitely an in-joke. How will British people recognize it? That's actually if you're from overseas then you're in deep trouble. So having had a smattering of the history of the conference you'll have some idea. The conference T-shirt at Canberra for example on the back had a mock IRC discussion where they talked about I think we've got a conference tomorrow. Who's going to pay for it? Well I've got Rusty's credit card details. There's just a reference to the first conference where I basically put the whole thing on my credit card and hoped that people would pay me for it came due. It worked. Another reason I'm never going to do it again because the budget has gone up a lot since then. Next year's conference so the location of next year's conference is usually announced at this year's conference at the end. So probably at the closing we'll all find out officially where it's going to be next year. The constant change. Okay so who here has been to every conference so far? Okay Oh yeah if even if you've been to every conference so far they keep messing with stuff. This is how traditions are born. The current committee goes okay we like what you've done but we're going to change this so we're going to throw this out or we're going to try something else. So anyone who's been here before or they always do this has an 80% chance of being right. 20% chance of being drastically wrong. So this constant change is something that you actually had a bit of an advantage being a newcomer because everyone else thinks they know what's going to happen and you realise that you don't know what's going to happen. So just be aware that it changes from year to year and so you won't be the only one looking confused with a lot of points. Okay. There's really only one lie involved in the conference and that is that the conference is listed in the program. As I've strongly alluded to before the best things at the conference will almost certainly not appear in the pages of the program around your neck. On that note I welcome you all to the what are we, 11th or something 100th when it's come for you and traditionally now when it comes to the pub and we actually have a pub in mind I believe we have somebody to lead us we will. Excellent. Right now I'm going to gather my stuff and in five minutes we're going to meet at the top of the stairs and we are going to march off to the pub and that way you will load at least one local drinking hole for the rest of the conference. See you at the pub.