[AUUG-Talk]: Well? (AUUG2006)

[David Purdue]

On Fri, Oct 13, 2006 at 03:14:37PM +0930, David Newall wrote:
> How did it go?  Those of us stuck in sick-beds want to know.

Well, sadly I could not be there for the whole thing, and I had to do some AUUG
work during today, but I enjoyed what I saw.

For dinner last night we went out to the The Deck in Southgate. On the
plus side we had a much nicer meal with much better wines than the
usual conference dinner fare, but on the negative side since we were
out in public it lacked the same raucous party atmosphere.

Still, as I said it was a fantastic meal in good company, we were on
the balcony with great views of the Yarra and the city, and it was
quite pleasant once the cool change came through!

Jonathon Oxer gave the closest guess to the number of smarties in the
jar, and so won the Yawarra machine that provided the conference
network. I cannot fault my methodology for estimating the number, so
can only conclude that the contest was rigged. My calls for a recount
fell on deaf ears. ;-)

One other down side of having the dinner off site was that the dinner
finished a little earlier than normal and people driffted away - so
there wasn't much of a room party afterwards. The Closes and I made a
go of it however, with some Champagne and Tequila.

In the morning there was still the usual slow start to the day with
people drifting in to Arjen Lentz's talk on consumerism and the 'net.
They missed some thought provoking stuff, especially the distinction
drawn between "consumer" and "customer", and how it is better to be
the latter. He had some interesting things to say on web design,
or the woeful lack of it, as well.

I have seen Neal Wise talk about wireless security on a couple of
occassions. He always has so much to say and not enough time to say
it in!

After morning tea I was session chairing Greg Adamson's talk on
Technology Commercialisation and the Internet. The quote that comes
to mind is, "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it."
Many of the worries we have now about commercial interests taking over
the Internet are the same as were experienced for radio and then
television in the 20th century.

Unfortunately this meant I missed Peter Gutmann's talk on Phishing
Techniques - although the slides published in the proceedings make
fascinating reading. In attempting to give us tools to secure our
Internet transactions, security people have ignored vital human
elements, and so instead have made the problem worse!

Devraj Mukherjee told us about Asterisk, the open source PABX, and
tools he is developing to allow integration of Asterisk controls
with other OSX software - e.g. one trick is to pause iTunes when the
phone rings. I like the idea of telephony and computing convergance,
and even if the computer and telephone are not the same device it is
good to have them work in a cooperative manner.

Then some dude gave a talk on Software Configuration Management which was
quite well received, but I won't go into that.

After lunch there was some AUUG business to attend to, so I was out of
the conference untill the AGM. The AGM had some quite lively discussion
on the purpose of AUUG and things AUUG should and should not be doing -
but I'll leave all that for Raymond's minutes.

So - I was only there for a day, but it seems this conference kept up
the standard for AUUG conferences of engrossing material to listen to
in the talks and intriguing people to talk to in the breaks.

Cheers,

DavidP