After the last presentations and talks at Linux.conf.au 2008 everybody was heading over to the big party sponsored by Google. Nice !
... sadly we noticed that somehow the catering service stopped giving out beer at 8.30 p.m ! What the h... ??
Sorry, but no party without beer so we grouped up with some people and found a nice pub in Brunswick. That was fun and we had a great night.
But LCA 2008 is NOT over yet but opening its doors to the public today. Lots of interesting projects will be presented and everybody is invited to join the "freedom lovers".
At Linux.conf.au 2008 a bunch of OLPC's were given out as present. The only premise was to either do something cool with it or to pass it over to somebody else who will do something cool with it. Nice !
... some of the guys actually seemed to "misuse" the OLPC's as mobile phones. Strange evolution, mobile phones actually seemed to get bigger and bigger.
Great introduction and tutorial about lguest from Rusty Russels at Linux.conf.au 2008 today (thursday). Lguest (former "lhype") is a very fast and lightweight virtualization approach which concentrates on "running Linux on Linux". New lguests vms are started by a lguest launcher util which basically reserves a specifc memory region in the Host kernel and then re-maps the (l)guests hypercalls.The lguest tutorial provided a ready prepared Qemu filesystem so the participants could bring up their own lguest-Hosts easy and start hacking on the the different tutorial tasks. What a fun. Even myself was able to implement a new hypercall printing out some string on the lguest console at startup (and i do not consider myself a kernel-hacker). Lguest is definitely an interesting project and i am curious how it will find its place along the other available virtualization technologies used today.
We just experienced a fire alarm at the Old Arts building used by Linux.conf.au.
Luckily it could be resolved quite quick, nobody got hurt and the talks continuing.Funny thing was that the alarm ring seemed to be in a kind of high-available mode because it tried to restart again and again even after it has being turned off..... reminded me to yesterday when a small bread on the toaster in the hotel room immediately started the fire alarm. I was flying downstairs to the reception because i read before that it is directly connected to the fire brigade and that you have to pay a real high fine if they are coming out. Luckily it was only the smoke alarm in the room and not the fire alarm of the hotel. Puuuah.Now i am looking forward to the Penguin Dinner tonight which will be at the tonight at the night market in Melbourne. The social events (and of course the partners program) of LCA rocks !
Today Jonathan Oxer presented at Linux.conf.au 2008 about "Joining Second Life to the Real World". Really cool stuff !
He demonstrated how to interact with the virtual objects inside Second Life using "real world" objects using various small hardware-hacks and making use of the famous Arduino microcontroller. One example was to use a serial RFID-reader, connected to a network socket, to open/close a virtual door within the Second Life virtual reality (John actually has a RFID chip implanted in his arm).Actually his talk remembers me to my "Data-center within Second Life" project which i was working on about a year ago. My idea that time was to rebuild a "real world" data-center infra-structure inside Second Life, connect it to an openQRM server and enable the administration of real servers from within Second Life.
Basically it is about using the 3D virtual reality of SL as a user-interface for real world objects and/or applications. It worked out pretty well and i even gave a presentation including a live-demonstration within Second Life.about this openQRM sub-project Here some links to videos of this virtual presentations:part 1part 2part 3Please find some pictures from this event here....... mhmmmm, guess i was "too early" with my idea ;)
Here a pic of Linus Torvalds enjoying linux.conf.au 2008 
... a quote from my wife : "Until now, no groupies; seems Linus is save this year"
Raphael put pictures from the Profoss.eu event online at Flickr.Here myself giving the presentation about "Conform deployment of virtual and physical machines with openQRM and Xen"
