Random thoughts after 3 days down under and 1 around Linux.conf.au

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Back to Australia !
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Just after my arrival in Perth last Friday, I had a bit of time to walk in the city in order to have a view on it and feel the atmosphere.
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It’s an interesting mix of modern buildings and a bit less modern buildings !
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Of course, Australia is a young country, with (from my point of view) mostly young people around (that’s where I see I’m getting old !). People are very nice, friendly and always ready to help with a smile. It’s my third time here, and it’s always been like that, that’s probably why I like coming back here.
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I had a dinner in what I found a strange place, the shed, where I had to show my ID before entering, which was pretty empty despite the size. Maybe because it was a bit early. The dinner was good, but I really felt alone !
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It was then time to go back to the hotel for some mail, and the preparation of my Monday presentation.

Being in Australia during europe winter time is just great. As great that you can receive too much sun on your head ;-) Especially when you go to such a nice place as Fremantle !
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I did that on Saturday (for once I had time around an event) in that city which is similar to a french mediteranean city like Cagnes sur mer e.g. (more from a climate perspective than an architectural one)
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and so I passed the full day around, enjoying the view on the Indian Ocean (my first time),
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and beach (nearly empty as very windy)
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and the nice food you can eat on the harbour
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(remember that as french we put a lot of emphasis on this, and even more because it’s me ;-))
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One of the main building of Fremantle is their prison, which has been added to the World Heritage List of Unesco as a testimony of the role of convicts/prisoners sent to Australia to work there. One of the oldest building of the region, even if it’s just less than 200 years (old european reaction ;-))
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It’ was also interesting to see that Fremantle uses Wikipedia to document their sites. They are adding QRCodes pointing to Wikipedia pages in order to make your visit more rich. That’s the first time I see that usage BTW.
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Sunday was passed doing more preparation around project-builder.org release 0.12.3 and the presentation. I just took some time in the afternoon to go back in the city
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and bells tower
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before recognizing the itinerary to go to Linux.conf.au
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hosted at the University of Western Australia
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where we could register.
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Despite not being at LCA for the first time, I attended Rusty Nelsson session on first timer LCA attendees, which was a nice way to start the event.Image may be NSFW.
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After some more discussion at a nearby bar, it was time to finalize my presentation, and work on the demo. Took me up to 3AM, but was still not finished as I wanted !

On monday, LCA was starting.
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The first keynote was about Whistle-blowing (les lanceurs d’alerte for my french audience who like me would not happen to know what it is) and how their perception is changing in our post-Snowden era.
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That was an interesting presentation of her finding through a survey they organized to gather data. Especially after having seen the keynote at LinuxCon EMEA around Living in a Surveillance State by Mikko Hypponen, which I highly recommend to watch,as it’s a very enlightning one.
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However, during the Q&A session, I found a bit strange that the audience didn’t want to listen to the question from a doctor around how to determine what is good and what is bad, which was much more interesting that what they felt it could be. And I think he was right, as this is a real concern that should rather be dealt with, instead of just asking the person to shut up. The limit of what can be disclosed or not whether you are in a government or a private company wrt ethic aspects is really a difficult topic to solve and more debate should be left so more interesting input could be heard and answers brought to improve the quality of the debate.

And also it’s interesting that the spot is now only on the NSA, whereas we tend to forget that some months ago, we had the same questions around Facebook. Of course, people give willingly their info to Facebook while theydon’t to the NSA, and that’s a bad thing. However, it doesn’t rmove the other threat from companies like Facebook which should continue to be explained to all IT users and consumers.

There was a remark on the fact that US own 5 millions records of autralian citizens who have travelled to the US. Again, it’s easy to avoid that: do not travel to the US. If you want to go there, it seems normal to me they can ask for info beofre to protect themselves. Of course, the level of what is asked should be reasonable wrt the effect researched, and people have modification right son it and insurance it won’t be provided to other entities. But here I think they are in their own right to gather them. Of course, again nothing to do with what we’re learning regularly thanks to E. Snowden revelations with what the NSA is doing.

I passed the rest of the day mostly in the Continuous Integration miniconf which was also hosting my talk with the exception of a presentation around ansible and vagrant I wanted to follow in the sysadmin mini-conf. It turned out that this presentation wasn’t so interesting due to the lack of demo (no network). Too bad as I’m also testing ansible as time permits on my side and would have like to get insights.

So after that I took some time to finish my slidset for the pres of the afternoon and the demo I wanted to make. I think I’ll never been able to finish a presentation days in advance completely. Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of material availblle and I can make any 3 days workshop on the fly just using what I already have. However, I like to tailor the presentation to the audience, the context, polish one or two stuff, remove slides and some new ones… And same with the demo. So even if I started early before coming, I just finished to publish project-builder.org 0.12.3 the morning (time for all packages to build), realized that some feature that I hadn’t tested enough were not working, so making just a last patch (c) to have my demo shiny !

So I missed some sessions in between and went back to the CI miniconf and really heard Anita Kuno’s talk on 3rd party testing with OpenStack (a good one on latest aspects of the project I wasn’t aware of – this one is moving soooo fast !).
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And finally all went well (at least from my point of view of course, ask one of the around 40 people of the the audience for objective feedback !). Demo worked as expected (thanks for preparation ;-)) and as usual I din’t had enough time to cover all what I wanted to address. Will see now if my Continuous Packaging approach is supported more in Australia, and if project-builder.org gets adopted there to create more upstream packages for some projects. Those interested can find my presentation on SlideShare. The video is also available.
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End of day was dedicated to the CI BoF and a dinner with a lot of HP peers working on OpenStack on various aspects (always amazed to meet so many people involved in it as time passes that I wasn’t knowing before).

But that’s not the end ! More “awesome” presentations to see the days coming. And more pictures are available at https://plus.google.com/photos/112434061686721373729/albums/5966194867275136465

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