The 糞▯ Fonts Don't Work: A Practical Guide to Unicode on Unix
I only just caught the end of the talk by Aaron Crane of The Register about dealing with character sets and fonts on Linux. The slides have lots of useful tips in though, so I'll link to them when they turn up on the web.
Aaron's talk gets the award for giving me the most pain marking up the title.
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OpenOffice.org
Michael Meeks of Novell talked about developing OpenOffice, and how hackers can get involved. He described some of the problems with managing such a large project, and some of the nasty inefficiencies that come out of using so much C++ (particularly with linking), but recommended that new hackers try fixing small bugs or adding new small features rather than trying to fix the complex infrastructure.
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The FlightGear Flight Simulator
Alex Perry of Quantum Magnetics described his flight simulator, FlightGear, which is a fairly large open source project. He demoed it in 2001, but since then the graphics have got a lot more realistic. It aims to provide accurate simulations of a wide variety of aircraft, accurate enough to be used in training simulations for pilots. There are other people currently working on developing hardware to provide real instrument panels, which might eventually lead to FAA approved flight simulators based on this software.
After the lectures were over Alex gave a demo of FlightGear, taking a plane out of San Francisco and flying past the Golden Gate Bridge and pointing out where the San Andreas fault passes through.
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FreeNX — Taking X Connections to the Next Level
Fabian Franz of the University of Karlsruhe demoed the free implementation of the NX server he's been working on. It's derived from NoMachine software, some of which they've released as Free Software, but some of which has had to be reimplemented to make the whole lot free.
The idea is to compress X protocol streams to make remote-X graphics much more efficient, especially over low-bandwidth connections. It does things like compressing images (standard X only knows how to send raw uncompressed images over the protocol stream) and caching the effects of particular sets of commands. It all sounds very clever.
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Giving Presentations Using Linux: Being User-Friendly — and avoiding ‘Powerpoint’
Simon Myers of Donhost talked about the problems with a lot of presentations at conferences (and elsewhere) and gave some tips on how to do better. His main points went something like this:
- Think about the people who are going to read the talk later, after it's been presented, either to get the details they couldn't catch during the presentation, or because they weren't there when it was presented.
- Have something that's easy to present with, as long as it still allows you to produce a nice web-ready version for the people who weren't there.
- Read MJD's talk about Conference Presentation Judo for tips on the actual presentation
This is just what I can think of right now, but I've probably forgotten important things.
(abstract)
An EMC Vehicle Testing System using Open Source on Linux
John Pinner of Clockwork Systems talked about using free software (mostly Python with bits of C) to manage EMC testing of vehicles. Clockwork have fixed an existing installation for Ford to use more generic equipment and software, because the legacy system was hard to support. He described some of the problems that relatively small OSS-oriented companies can expect when dealing with large organisations.
(abstract)
Afterwards
To the Vic, where the ‘educators’ got together to talk to talk about Linux in education. Working for a training company I probably should have got involved, but I was concentrating on beer.
Then to Fairuz Lebanese restaurant before heading over to Smylers' place. He'd generously agreed to let us use his rooftop for a Linux geeks party, which was very cool.