Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

First talk: virtualisation; and Jon Oxer talking about trying to manage Xen clients across multiple machines without twelve layers of abstraction and SAN thrashing. Very good stuff, and while a friend of mine commented that it was "welcome to the 1980s" as far as IBM and large-scale mainframes are concerned I think that Jon's got a lot of good ideas to bring this to the Open Source world. My tip to speakers from that talk is to assume that you get about half of your time to talk and half of your time to answer questions. Oh, and manage your questions - the microphones are being passed around so that questions can be recorded; take the question from the person with the microphone.

Second talk: Avahi. I'd noticed this a while back when I was using RhythmBox at work - all these extra playlists would turn up in my sources list. I soon realised that these were Apple iTMS instances of other people just broadcasting themselves on the net. Learning about how these things work - and learning some of the tools to add Avahi functionality to programs - is pretty cool. Now to create my Avahi Mandelbrot Set calculator that grabs whatever processors it can find around the network. World domination, here we come!

Aside: had one of those embarrassing moments that seem common at LCAs: meeting a friend and not quite remembering where I'd seen him. On the one hand, I'd gone to sell him my old car, so I should have remembered him instantly. On the other hand, he'd changed his beard (again), grown taller than I remembered him, and my memory was tricked into thinking he was a person I knew from 2001 or so and I still (logically) owe a CD of Renaissance music. My memory is weird.

Jeff confirmed that they're still working out the programme for the Conference Party, and will get back to me tomorrow regarding whether I can mix there. I'm good with that.

Now, with a good spicy Beef Rendang in me, a lead recharging my laptop and a can of V (bought along with seven others and a block of 70% cocoa chocolate on Sunday afternoon) ready to go, it's time to decide what new coolness I'll see this afternoon. Probably Jeff's GNOME talk.