LCA Day 2 Sessions - Morning

My second day of talks began with the ever enjoyable Jono Bacon (a fellow Brit and all round top guy) introducing Jokosher, a new sound editing project for GNOME. He covered how it came to be (a mobilising of some of the LUG Radio audience) and took the audience through some of its features (with some very Slayeresque backing music). The session went well and the audience soon feel in to a rapport with him.

I spent the second session, and lunch time, chatting with some of the Ubuntu crowd; very smart people. After some decent ramen I went to a chunk of “Getting More out of PostgresSQL”, which was very SQL heavy (not my favourite type of talk).

I followed this with the LinuxChix lightening talks, it might be a perl monger thing but I can’t resist a set of lightning talks. Val Henson covered a “Am I more famous than SPAM” metric script she’d written, Lucy (possibly Lee - her name isn’t in the program) gave a brief but very easy to follow introduction on how to write Clam AV matchers (both the technical details and some useful heuristics), this may be the most immediately useful of the lightning talks for me. Donna did some post mortem on the number of women present at the conference (I’ll blog about this separately) and then Alice mentioned some Google tools, what they’re doing in this location and then some HR, my notes on her talk are seriously thin - I was a little distracted by her “emoter”. I’ve no idea who she was but the emoting was funny (both verbally and when doing hand gestures that had no bearing on what the speaker was saying), articulate and seemingly able to speak without taking a breath; it’ll be a shame if she’s not speaking at the conference.

The last of the lightning talks was Pia Waugh on the school talks she’d previously done. Although the slides irked me - the background graphic made the text seriously hard to read - the subject matter was fascinating. Pia has spoken to all-girl and mixed-gender classes about the IT industry and what makes it an exciting career. I’m not really doing it justice but there were a handful of quotes that would have justified a full length talk, let alone a lightning one. Such as

• the shortage of women in IT is a Western thing. Many of the more eastern Muslim countries are much more gender balanced. If you get a chance to watch the sessions video and you’re interested in Women in IT watch it.

And the word of the conference seems to be “ROCKING”