Enjoy!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/monproductions/

The keynote today was Damien Conway – of Perl fame talking about Perl 6. I can certainly see why he is such a popular speaker. His comparisons of why Perl is better than Java were excellent and certainly added alot of life to the presentation. I’ll definately have to look into Perl 6 when it’s released – it’s looking like a really cool language.

The augmented reality system developed at UniSA looks really cool. They were demonstrating a Quake like game which is superimposed on the real world. It was pretty cool! The technology is still very cutting edge though – it crashed a few times… But you get that when things are this shiny and new. The outline of the seminar is here.
Aside from the conference, there are a lot of other things to do in and around Dunedin – unfortunately due to time constraints (and not being able to drive here) I’m kind of limited to the stuff I can visit. Fortunately, Dunedin is a small city so walking is feasible. The railway station is a great example of the days when Dunedin was a goldrush town – the amount of detail in the building is crazy. It certainly makes good ‘ole Central station in Sydney look bland.

Also today, I visited the institution in Dunedin that is Cadbury. Being guided around a working chocolate factory is a great way to be put off chocolate – in particular watching 1 tonne of liquid chocolate fall from the ceiling into a vat has a really disturbing effect. I was suprised though to see the number of different products in NZ that we don’t have in Australia. In particular the Pinky and Perkynana bars – although my new favourite are the marshmellow fish (which I first encountered whilst freezing inside the Waitomo caves… but thats a different story).

Back to the conference: Rasmus this afternoon presented another seminar on PHP – this time focussing on security. Some of this was really interesting – the amount of effort needed to drastically improve security is actually very little. Remembering to do this on every variable supplied by the client isn’t.

During his presentation Rasmus used a self-developed tool to audit some of the most common problems and it was amazing to see fairly prominent sites failing these tests. I won’t go into the detail since it is posted on his own site.

I’ve now been in NZ for 20 days and I’m approaching the end of my trip. It’s a little sad actually… It will be nice to go home though. I’m starting to wonder if my computer will fire up after this much inactivity… It’s never been off for this long!
That’s about all I have to mention right now. I’ll post about day 4 a litle bit later!

OpenLayers looks cool but isn’t quite up to the level where it will challenge the maps API’s offered by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! Speaking of Yahoo! Maps, Rasmus Lerdorf talked about using Yahoo! Maps API with PHP which gave some really cool results.

The Google BOF session was also cool with Google staff explaining the setup of hardware inside Google. They said that they no-longer leave hardware dead in the racks – its cheaper to fix or replace dead hardware than leaving it using up space and power. They also mentioned that Python is used pretty extensively inside Google – I’d never really though of Python as a full general purpose language… Maybe I should look into that! The Google guys were also giving out notepads, pens and flashing badges. Again, anything free from Google is cool – yes, I’m aware that most their services and API’s are free…

The conference catering is certainly good. Between breakfast at Unicol, morning and afternoon teas I’m only needing light meals! No sitting in seminars thinking “damn I should have eaten lunch!” This morning the chinese food boxes full of chocolates, toffees and lollies were great – perfect for those little sugar fixes over the next few days.

More information about the conference as I can be bothered to post it!

This morning at the Linux TCP Developments and Kernel Developer Social Interactions keynote, Intel were handing out 64MB USB sticks to those in attendance. Unfortunately for me, I don’t really know or care about TCP/IP and the Kernel…

Going in search of dinner though, the Poppa’s Pizzeria had ‘run out of pizza…’ Instead of going to any one of Dunedins wide range of cafe’s and take-aways with good food for some reason I ended up at Dominos (it was almost 9:00PM so most places weren’t taking orders anymore). But as usual, fast-food tasted better here – not that I’m extensively eating fast food (since it’s crap). But the pizza base was crispy and light, the toppings tasted good and the cheese was stretchy. Most importantly, it was nowhere near as greasy as it would have been at home. Come on Aussies! Let’s not put up with crap fast food anymore!

I’ve got some photos up on Flickr of the conference and Dunedin for your browsing pleasure.

At least on the server I’m free to run Linux, PHP, MySQL etc. That is when I’m not doing .NET. Yes, another case of my educational institute being pro M$…

Google is feeling generous here at LCA2006, last night hosting a happy hour at Bennu bar in Dunedin. It was certainly a happening event with several hundred linuxheads converging for the free beer, wine and softdrink. A cold beer tastes alot sweeter when Google pays for it. Although, are they now tracking our usage patterns with the embedded Googlenanobots?

Tomorrow promises to be an exciting day full of interesting topics!

Greetings from Aotearoa! Otherwise known in English as New Zealand.

This is a land with incredible scenery, sheep and an uncontrollable urge to jump from high places.

I’ve been here since the 9th of January and only now can I be bothered to make a blog post about it. The fact that I am now at a computer technical conference though means compys are handy.

In the past 15 days I’ve travelled over thousands of kilometers of water, seen rainforest and glaciers at the same time (Fox Glacier does this!), mountains and sea (Milford Sound) and plains that are dead flat as far as the eye can see. In just a few hours of driving the scenery here can change completely – as can the climate!

With my Contiki tour complete, I’m now at linux.conf.au held this year at the University of Otago in Dunedin, NZ – au temporairly stands for Australasia.

There are now a few days of Linuxy goodness, seminars and tutorials – unfortunately I don’t have a laptop with me – I feel a little out of place.

Excuse the brevity of this post, I’m getting back into the Linux action!