linux.conf.au sessions so far -- 2

okay, it's thursday, almost noon. and i crashed and burned badly. "The Hao of testing" had a homework section and I didn't know and when I was supposed to start download gmp and its patch to follow along, i should've quitted. Some one whole lot more advanced and clueful next to me, however , was coaching me to go to ubuntu patch download site to get the package, apply the patch, and also to apply Hao patches from the homework wiki site, http://lca2007.linux.org.au/HaoHomeWork, and I couldn't say no. So I sat through for about 40minutes, downloading, compiling and frentically looking for the source that the tutorial session speaker was going over, and I heard Quantas, United and even KAL fly over my head, and I had to admit my ignorance and bail out. A big ouch! but then again, so many more have walked out before me, that maybe ... mmm... maybe it was more stupid to be sitting in on something I got no clue whatsoever. Nothing wrong with the course, just that I was clueless other than the session description mentioning that it's a tutorial on how to test kernel. Heh.

I sat through Davem's Netchannel talk and Simon's Kexec talk, about as clueless, but less in pain of being and looking every bit stupid as I was. heh.

back to tuesday's kernel mini-confs. Through Peter Chubb's session I also took notes to checkout some source control tools like cogito, Mercurial and quilt. Never knew of quilt to go w/ CVS, and never knew cogito to go with git, so something to search on wiki.

he also talked about debugging, with magic sysRQ key, kernel debugger and 'wolf fence' technique, of which I ony know the last, put lots of 'print' statement before and after. :)

After lunch was divided between linuxchix track, "Demystifying PCI" with Kristin Carlson Accardi, Rusty's "Wesnoth for Kernel Hackers (and everyone else)", and kernel hacker's panel. Heh, from PCI session I got out the basic concept for what 'driver' and 'bus' means, and thanks to Peter's session earlier I did read through /usr/src/linux-2.6/Documentation for PCI, so things made more sense. And, of course I now use lspci. heh.

i didn't go to sleep that late, yet i missed Dr. Andrew S. Tanenbaum's 9am session in auditorium on wednesday. shame on me! how do these geeks who drink 'til the whee hour of the night wake up promptly to go to these 9am session? i dunno.

luckily, i made it to Jonathan Corbet's "The Kernel Report" in full, and wide awake too.
After much internal debate, I decide to be a good gal and crashed another session before lunch. "Electronics with Linux" with James Cameron. Yup, he began w/ self introductory of no I'm not a director of Titanic bits. funny funny... I liked his demo of how he worked on night light and door bell that he designed and made himself. I particularly liked the idea of the door bell having 'how many rings you missed while you were out' idea, and the fact that i might play with pcb myself one day; hmm... maybe not at home, even with a full insurance. ;p
but the poor visitor w/ no clue as to the fact that he's used fire alarm to incorporate into his door bell? heehee. that gave me many many silly ideas while seated.

his main topic was on testing network bandwidth for OLPC, the cute old mac like white sub-laptop with green rabbit ear for antenna and hand-held. :) cute! It's pretty funny to see a big man like James holding it up to his ear to show how he tested the ping sound while walking away from the other laptop. like a giant in fairy tale, with big bearded and all. huhu. Anyways, he made it look rather simple and fun project to volunteer for a thing like that and people asked some silly and some naughty questions. someone asked if the wireless coverage had any differences day time and night time and he made a face as if he'd been too afraid in the night to go out. lol. in any case, he demonstrated that he could just run a ping on one machine, walk away or drive away from it while holding the other one, to get the idea as to how this wireless coverage would work, sometimes having a tree or other objects in between, and sometimes leaving it on the car and sometimes taping the access point to the ladder. I had much fun, and I see how this conference is encouraging for hobbists alike the professionals.