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Linux Symposium

One of the more interesting Linux Sympsoium talks was "The Making of OpenMoko Neo", on OpenMoko's project to produce a completely free-software-driven mobile phone. Wow, the pitfalls are astonishing. Like not discovering till after the hardware is being produced (and they're trying to write drivers for it), that critical components don't have at all the specs they thought were advertised.

Mark Shuttleworth gave a keynote that was mildly entertaining but thin on ideas.

Talks on redhat's new cluster infrastructure, memory-management scalability, and the new kernel debugger were also worthwhile, but overall it didn't feel like the most interesting Linux Symposium I'd been to.

In the past they've had evening receptions, where there's free food and drink and some poor sap from one of the sponsors who attempts to give a marketing talk over the hacker's hubbub. I never felt like that worked very well, so it was a bit of a relief that they weren't doing that this year. Though the lack of organized social stuff in the evenings leaves a bit of a gap for the antisocial (ahem) or people who just haven't been before and don't know anyone. Nevertheless, I managed to find interesting people to hang out with.

The conference finished with their annual party at the Blackthorn, which seemed just slightly more subdued than in previous years--a good thing, as it was easier to talk to people. I had one beer and left after a couple hours.

My suitemate left in the evening, so I moved to a single elsewhere in the University residential complex. It's smaller, with a bathroom across the hall, but perfectly adequate. There's no air conditioning, but there's a window that opens, and the weather's been mild anyway.

As usual, I've also taken advantage of the "Librarie Du Soleil", just a couple blocks from the conference, and picked up a few comics ("Chroniques Birmane" (a travelogue from Guy Delisle), some Trondheim, a couple Monsieur Jeans, and the fifth of Sfar's "Chat du Rabbin").

Today I'm on my own, with no particular plans. Then tommorow morning it's back to the train station bright and early, and onwards to visit relatives in Waterloo.