Older blog entries for xf (starting at number 14)

jamesh: I'm the guy that handled the video stuff for LCA2004, and sudo-handled the audio (as the guy who very competently organised it had to work during LCA - d'oh) - we had some last-minute issues with the university A&V equipment; not all audio got recorded properly, unfortunately, so not all talks are available as speex. It might explain why a few videos on the DVD have suboptimal audio; it's from the microphone inside the camera :-)

It reinforces some rules about production, really; testing repeatedly is paramount, and something will /always/ go wrong (the trick is in how you handle things when they do). We managed to get most audio, fortunately (after running around like madmen making sure everything worked like it should), so I hope we did reasonably well.

I would have liked to release more video, but considering all up we had almost 3 terabytes of raw DV footage it wasn't feasable for just myself to edit the lot. I have encoded some more, that I hope to make available as downloads via the LCA2004 videos page soon; most of it bits of miniconfs and random video taken.

I'm curious what people think of the videos, as there's a good chance it'll happen for LCA2005 (fingers crossed); please shoot me an email at ryan[at]qbalt[dot]com with any comments, negative or positive.

It is just me, or is the new feature in Apple OS X 10.4, Spotlight, "innovated" from an open source project often mentioned here, Dashboard?

I'm such a geek. It's my 21st birthday today, and how am I celebrating it? Flying to Perth in a few hours to work on some wireless Linux installs for a client (HostAP based stuff, it's really neat). Not to mention today's a Sunday, but like weekends ever stopped anybody :-)

etrepum: Hrm, not complaining at all, don't think elanthis was either. Personally, I'm just impatient :-)

elanthis: I waited over 2 months for my AlBook - be patient, it might be a while :-(

In other news, getting back into coding pretty heavily - last few months has been insane, more organisational-style stuff at work (documentation, planning) due to the fact our company expanded, and my position turned from sole developer to project leader. What a change of worlds. I think the boss is still having difficulty understanding that adding programmers to a development team doesn't result in linear productivity.

I've got months of code I need to commit back into the moregroupware CVS tree, just so bogged down at the moment with all sorts of work. Having slower-than-dialup speed Internet certainly isn't helping things - plans to move soon too, which will help hugely in the long term (I'll actually be able to work at home!), isn't exactly the best thing right now.

Still editing video for LCA2004 - fortunately it's the kind of thing that although does take gobs of time, I'm able to do it simultaenously whilst coding or such as it doesn't require 100% attention (dubbing tapes, syncing in speex audio, and just playing through things to make sure nothing strange happens) - and it's a welcome change from my usual work. Still might be a while away until printing, but any attendee will recieve the DVD in the mail once it's completed, and there'll be videos up for download, too. Plenty of funny stuff :-)

Hrm, think I'm starting to get old - remember when going to concerts and playing games was loads of fun. Haven't played games for almost a year now, due to lack of interest, and Big Day Out yesterday was a huge dissapointment. Eep :-(

elanthis: I'd say you'd be fine with an iBook. If you're worried about it getting dirty, remember that an iBook /is/ plastic, it's a hell of a lot easier to clean (where'd you read that it was hard to clean?), and much harder to scratch than the AlBook's. It's sturdy as hell.

Me, I'll stick with my AlBook (it's a purchase you won't regret), as I need the extra CPU cycles, better video card, and desktop res, but my girlfriend's iBook G4/12" is still a great machine, and for the price difference, I can understand why the iBook may be the more sensible purchase. Certainly, lots of iBook owners running LinuxPPC at Linux.Conf.Au; surprising amount of PPC users, actually.

salmoni: Email me - UI design with mgw is something our company's been working with for almost a year now, and I've been wanting to give back to the open source community for ages now, but headache galore timewise. I'd really like to bash brains together on this one.

The official LCA "Linus getting dunked" video is available here. The version that'll end up on the DVD will probably have multiple angles (linus-vision!), but this seems nicer than what's already floating around out there. Mirror it if you wish, but the guy insists this server can take a beating :-)

I'm the guy doing the video editing and the DVD (fun, fun), so I'm super, super keen to get feedback on how well the file plays on various people's players, I'm proposing the same format. It's a MP4 file, which should play on most Linux/BSD media players compiled against a recentish version of ffmpeg - it's been supported for yonks, and seems fine here in xine/mplayer/vlc. It also appears to play fine on a stock standard XP/OS X system in their default players.

Email me at ryan [at] qbalt [dot] com

Hmm, is it just me or is Advogato dog slow at times? I always thought it was my crappy home connection, but the nice aarnet connection here at LCA is just as slow - often I'll go to view a diary, or post a post, and things will just completely hang.

Server load? Anybody know the issue?

Woo, jeez - you wouldn't believe how much work this conference (linux.conf.au 2004) is - like the other organisers, I'm running on less than 3 hours sleep, and tonight doesn't look much better (if I'm not making sense, you know why).

That said though, we hope the conf is a huge success and everybody really enjoys it. Hopefully the video recordings which I'm undertaking turn out well and we'll have a DVD to send out to attendees after it's all finished - Apple are *really* cool, they've given us almost a terabyte of capture space to use for post-conference editing, with more if we need it :-) Kudos.

That said, it's no substutite for being at the conference - the vibe here is amazing, and it's way cool to be involved with so many active developers, and nag people about bugs in their software you want them to fix ;-) I also found it rather amusing today talking to somebody about why software Y was better then crappy old X, and found out that person was actually the author of software X. That said though, it's brilliant to talk to people like this face to face; you get a much better understanding of the mentalities behind their decisions, and everything suddenly clicks and makes sense.

If you're not here, there's still some registrations open - remember, the main conference doesn't start until Wednesday, so there's still time to come. It's really, really, really worth it.

Still have more things to organise, tapes to stripe (timecode can suck, grr), and video to dump. If you see me wandering around the place (Ryan Verner), feel free to say g'day - and there's still room for more FIXIT sessions :-)

linux.conf.au 2004 have just announced another reason to attend - enter the hackfest, and build the best tetrinet bot (client library supplied), and you could win an IBM pSeries deskside server model p615 with Dual 1.45GHz Power4+ CPUs, 4GB RAM, 2x146.8GB Ultra 3 SCSI 10,000 RPM Hard Disks, DVD ROM drive, 21" Colour Monitor, with SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.2 preinstalled - worth over AU$39,000. Registrations are filling up quickly, though.