LCA 2007 My Day 2

Today was day 4 of linux conf au, and my second day of attendance.

My first session today was Peter Miller, Erik de Castro Lopo, and Robert Collins tutorial "The Hao of testing". Since I have been to work before heading to the conference, I arrived at the tutorial a couple of minutes late to discover there had been homework. So a mad rush to get connected, gmp downloaded and built. Then I needed to write a unit test for C program, yuk, I was beginning to question my decision to attend. But once I started listening to what they had to say, I got over my initial horror and enjoyed the talk for it's lessions. And the last part of the tutorial was actually unit testing part of a python application. Looking forward to their session tomorrow where they will present a paper on what was discussed today and alot more.

After lunch I went to Malcolm Tredinnick's "Building Websites with Django" tutorial. Since I already have used Django, I attended this tutorial to see how non users picked up the framework and maybe learning some news things. Malcolm warned us that he was presenting something that normally took 3 hours but would try to condense it into the 1.5 hour timeslot. I feel he spent too much time explaining where Django came from and what people had done with it, rather than showing how to use the framework. There was no actual "Wow" factor until half way thru the session, but by then a third of the attendee's had left for other sessions. The last half of the tutorial was much better and I did learn a couple of new things. The slides and the example app for the tutorial can be found here.

The last session for my day was Ralph Giles "Screencasting Howto" tutorial. The aim of the tutorial was for all of us to have created a screencast and have it peer reviewed. Only a few of us managed to achieve this due to issues with getting the various tools working but there a good interaction between the attendee's and I learnt alot. One of the tools we used was Istanbul, a desktop session recorder for the Free Desktop which is written in Python and uses GStreamer. It's a little buggy and many of us didn't have much success until we dropped the recording frame rate to 1 fps.

Many of the sessions have been videoed by the LCA team and can be accessed from the Programme web page.

It was also the conference open day but I didn't get to see much as it was well attended (read as overcrowded), but this can only be good for OSS community.