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One thing i will say about perth, it gets fairly hot! The first Monday was about 36C outside, which is pretty bad when you are walking long distance between buildings with a laptop on your back (or in my case, a large 17″ laprock!)

Luckily for us, all the rooms were air conditioned. In fact, since im on the subject of the Location, if you are ever in Perth, go down and take a look at The University of Western Australia

   

 

Wednesday was less hot (and by less hot i mean below 35C , but still over 30C), and we had the proper opening of the conference.

I listened to Jonathan Corbet explain how the Kernel release cycle was getting shorter each time, and that by 2027 we should reach singularity!
I heard about the GNOME Outreach Program ( http://gnome.org/opw/) which does amazing things to encourage minorities out of the woodwork and into FOSS work (mostly women at this stage, with view to others), with astounding results. It only costs $5500 to sponsor a person into this program, so if you are a company interested in helping out, contact them.

The day finished with the Penguin dinner which was held on the edge of the shore. More food and drink flowed, and i managed to meet and greet even more fantastic people.

Thursday i was beginning to be just a little tired from all the early morning and late nights.
I listened to Ashe talk about Programming Diversity in the morning. it was an excellent talk that made me think about getting people into IT who are not very well represented (gender, race, etc)
One of the stand out talks was about Mosh by Jim Chetham. Mosh essentially is SSH over UDP .Mosh is proposed as a replacement for ssh, seamlessly supporting IP address roaming, intermittent connectivity and lagging network. It was not perfect, potentially insecure, but over all it seemed to be excellent for using on mobile devices or when moving around a lot.
By mid afternoon i ended up going back to my room to put my feet up. The university was large, and i already had blisters on one foot.
One talk i will be watching on the video stream though, is the one about Disaster recovery by Bdale Garbe, it was so popular that they had an overflow room streaming it!

Thursday night was the Professional delegates dinner, which again i got a ticket into so i could see how things work. All these dinners worked out to be a good thing since food was rather pricey in Perth (especially when you take into account currency conversion).
Again the food was excellent, and i got to hang out with a lot of cool people. I got to wear my linux.conf.au penguin shirt which was gifted too me that looks like this

Friday was setting up to be super hot, there were warnings up for a heatwave for Saturday, and high of 44C. I was heading home Saturday, but not until 5pm so i knew i was going to cop it. I decided to take my rental bike home and skip a couple sessions rather than cycle in 44C heat the next day!

The keynote on friday was particularly awesome, and Jon Oxer told us all about ArduSat and how they worked, what boards they used. It was fantastic hearing about how normal every day people were putting things in space, and they were arduino which could be controllable to do experiments.
Now it seems its schools can use these, allowing school children to run their own projects.
After lunch i sat listening to Testing for Accessibility by Alice Boxhall (who works at Google) which was really enlightening. I hope to take a few things away that i can do to make life a little better.
During my whole time, i had been hanging out at dinners with Jason Cook, and his lovely wife Sarah. so it seemed only fair to go listen to his talk about TCP Tuning for the Web. Jason works at Firely which specializes in making things much much faster (effectively caching things). The talk mentioned several things you can do to speed up connections to/from your servers. It would be worth finding the slides for this or watching the video.
Finally the big finale came, and by this time i think the idea that Auckland New Zealand were doing the next LCA was less of a secret than it should be. We handed out flyers and fridge magnets to everyone and finished up.

All videos of all the talks are up at http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2014/ . the Schedule is still up at http://linux.conf.au/programme/schedule should you want to see what each talk is about.

Saturday i hit the Reptile park with Jason and Sarah Cook. It was REALLY hot, but i did manage to hold a Kookaburra, magpie, and a couple of snakes , as well as see some other cool things.

 

I will leave you with a final photo taken on my way over, catching the edge of space whilst over Australia