First, let me get this disclaimer out, I'm not a big Linux fan or user. I see it has it's place and I certainly use it (I have it running on my Sony UMPC at present), however, I'm not a rabid fan boy. That being said LCA is of course, very linux focused, but it's also Open Source focused and that's where I come in.
At this point, I'd also like to give big kudos to the many people working behind the scenes at LCA. Due to the Brisbane Floods, these guys and girls were able to get in 10 days everything they had done over the last 12 months. As far as I could tell, there weren't any hitches, apart from some odd issues with Linux laptops and the projectors.
The day began with registration, which was pretty painless and then we received the free schwag including a
Yubikey, which I was stoked about. Been after one of those devices for ages, but just hadn't got around to getting one.
The first session I went to was on PiTiVi (video editing software), then "An Approach to Automatic Text Generation", which was a little disappointing as it was just showing off BOM's new forecasting system, which QLD doesn't get til next year. The next session was on "Practical Go", which I thought was going to be real world examples of using Google's Go language. Google had already come to UQ last year to do an overview of Go, so unfortunately, this talk was about the same.
We then broke for lunch (which isn't included) and so we headed for the local shops that are on QUT's campus. Nandos! What's to think about -- so we headed there and I think so did everyone else :)
After lunch was a great talk on "Avoiding Development Monoculture", which I enjoyed and then I went back to the Multimedia + Music room to see the session on Making Music on Linux. Jack is a pretty good tool for routing audio, but some of the other tools such as Rosegarden and Ardour, seem a little simple but "do the job".
Afternoon tea was then served, complete with
spring rolls and then it was time for "The State of PHP" talk. PHP 6 is dead -- long live PHP 5.4 or 6 or 7 or whatever it's going to be called.