(NB. this is being written on the plane, and may have mistakes or be missing reference materials, I apologise in advance).

Friday
The keynote by Damian Conway, while entertaining, could have done with a lot less Perl. His social lessons were interesting and relevant and his presentation style was light-hearted although once or twice he seemed to get genuinely angry.

Trent presented on Avahi, the completely free and open Rendezvous/Bonjour implementation that he and Lennart have spent some amount of time working on. He did quite well and handled all of the questions. He did ramble a little bit here and there, but that is kind of how Trent talks.


Trent talks with Jim Gettys after his talk
I followed up for the second half of Carl Worth's Cairo tutorial. He covered some things that I wasn't very strong on. As well as some things that I need to incorporate into the second part of my Cairo tutorial for GNOME Journal.


Cairo gets people excited
Penguin Dinner
Unfortunately, the catering at the Penguin dinner on Friday night was a little bit disappointing. The meal was three courses, but no choice was given. There was indeed two main courses, but you were issued either one or the other without asking. There was also only two bottles of wine allocated to each table and additional drinks had to be purchased. Based off recent pricing I received from UWA's University Club for a much smaller dinner, this was expensive, but not extremely so. Still the lack of choice was rather strange.

The auction rapidly got out of hand, but I put some money into the hat at the end for myself, Richard and Miguel. Richard and Miguel also went around and got their pictures taken.








Some Irish (and Jeff) also decided they wanted in on the action:


DIY Heads on Sticks: Dave, Matt, Glynn and Jeff

Saturday
Mark Shuttleworth did a keynote on open source collaboration. It was ok, but I'd seen a lot of the content before in one form or another. Matt Garrett, the Angry DPL himself did his ACPI and how much it sucks. Andy (who did the GNOME.conf.au T-shirts) redid his art tutorial in under 45 minutes. He had to skip most of the actual part about doing the art, but did cover some fairly deep stuff with regards to making reusable abstract artwork with changable style.

Extra Photos

Perry does his impression of David Bowie in Labyrinth (he's really quite good)


Accommodation - Law Courts Hotel... in Australia, we call this a gaol


Andy getting asked at the dinner to do a Best-Of on Saturday


Richard Stallman stars in "GPL v3: GNU Reloaded"


Bernard won one of the signed T-shirts from the raffle

I'll get the rest of my photos up to my gallery soon.

All in all, I think it was an excellent conference. I will admit, we were worried for a bit when several of the dates for papers and so on slipped, but the organisers really pulled through with an excellent event. I'm looking forward to what happens in Sydney in 2007.

Only 4 more hours in flight... Happy [Chinese] New Year.

Addendum
Got home safely, almost no dramas, until the UCCan next to me (who shall remain nameless) threw up.