Archive for April, 2005
Tux paid us a visit, he managed to bring along Linus as well…two of him in fact, their is a third one that can walk and talk, but he hasn’t turned up.
If you weren’t at the welcome this morning, you might have missed out on winning a laptop…three (or was it four) names were called before the laptop was given away. There will be one given away each day at the keynote, so if you don’t mind, don’t attend them…the less people in attendance, the more chance I can win a laptop…although Tux does have a habit of trying to run away with them.
I have a picture of Tux, but I forgot my card reader, so I’ll have to put it online tonight.
I forgot to mention yesterday, if you know nothing of SE Linux, the learn something about it…it is exciting, and possibly the best development in security of recent times.
Samuel Gordon-Stewart reporting for Samuel’s lcaLIVE
April 20th, 2005 at 01:57pm
This is definite insanity, even when I’m not writing stuff for seminars I can’t get to bed at a human time…2:30 was the time I got to bed…Maybe the Acton Supermarket sells Sleep In A Box. (oops, if you took that the wrong way, please re-read it in conjunction with the title 😉
Today is tutorial day, starting with the conference opening at 9am, then I plan on attending "Recovering from Hard Drive disasters" in T3…same room, and I think that was covered during the PyFlag stuff in the security miniconf…at least it will be in depth this time. That session includes morning tea from 11:00-11:30. After that session is Lunch @ 13:00-14:00. Then I plan on attending "Building User Interfaces With Video & 3D Graphics For Fun & Profit…again in T3, includes afternoon tea from 15:30-16:00, then concludes at 17:30, at which time I’ll have to head home to take my doggie for a walkies.
Good news about the video of my seminar…I have secured some hosting with Ibiblio.org…very good news indeed.
Samuel Gordon-Stewart reporting for Samuel’s lcaLIVE
April 20th, 2005 at 08:23am
I have good news, and bad news.
Good news: I have updated my photo gallery, it now has many more photos of LCA, including various frames from my seminar video.
Bad News: The video of my seminar isn’t quite the quality I expected, the video is fine, but the audio is BAD. It is semi audible, but their is too much echo in those conference rooms, and it has picked up an awful lot of noise from people moving about. On the plus side, it clearly picked up the audio of the best question I was asked, and did a reasonable job on most of the others…even the ones from down the front…pity it didn’t pick up the audio of me, down the front, facing the camera with the same clarity.
This isn’t all bad though, it is certainly a minor setback, but I will ask an organiser if I can get a copy of the audio from my seminar (the stuff the microphone picked up…which is an clear). I really don’t see how this can be a problem, so once I have done that, I will be able to put together the video properly. I will probably use the camera audio as background audience noise…and give it some extra volume when something important is said.
If you attended my seminar (The small business network security one at 11am Tuesday in MCC T3, Security Miniconf) and asked a question, and remember what you asked, could you please drop my a line, the audio is semi-clear, and I can roughly work out some of them, but others I may have to summarise…all help is appreciated. In fact, if you attended and remember what was asked, your feedback would also be great. Comment here or email (My email address is floating about in numerous places, google search my name and follow the links!!…no spam please.)
Samuel Gordon-Stewart reporting for Samuel’s lcaLIVE
April 20th, 2005 at 12:36am
Well, my seminar went according to plan…well almost, I did run ahead of schedule and had to slow down a bit, but other than that it was fine. There were about 50-60 people in the room, so all in all I had a decent audience. I will have a video out shortly (note to LCA organisers if you are reading this: The video is from my video camera, I decided to do it that way as it gives me control over editing etc…I beleive that you have some video thing going…and that’s great, but for my purposes I like control)
One interesting thing that did come out of it. One person asked a question about how SmoothWall knows that an update is valid, at first I thought that this was a question about the md5 check during update installation…they then clarified and asked how SmoothWall knows that the MD5 checksum is valid, this is a good question. When you think about it, there is no way for it to be absolutely sure as it gets the update list by means of a http request. I will be passing their suggestion of ssl/certificates on to the dev team.
I have found the computer terminal room, which is now a compulsory for me as the person I was going to borrow a laptop from forgot to bring it…no Tux Racer during seminars I guess!
I was planning on having some self vanity and suggesting my seminar for one of the "best of" repeats on Saturday, but there is no way I could do that again this week, for one thing, I didn’t need my notes as much as I expected, and as such, a lot of it was ad-lib, I knew what I was going to say, but never ran to the script properly. Apart from that, it was physically exhausting, I’m glad I had my coffee with me!!
Samuel Gordon-Stewart reporting for Samuel’s lcaLIVE
April 19th, 2005 at 01:16pm
Remember I said I had to print my notes for my seminar…well, that was fun…I like printing double sided across the network, print pages 1;3;5, good, print pages 2;4;6, good, turn off computer I’m not using, printer makes funny noise….yep, I turned off the print server…now page two is double printed for most of it. So if you’re in my seminar today, expect me to squint at my notes!!
Samuel Gordon-Stewart reporting for Samuel’s lcaLIVE
April 19th, 2005 at 07:53am
It is 2:25am and I have finally finished preparing my LCA presentation…for my benifit I have mirrored my OOo file on my webserver just in case the CD dies…if you want a sneak peek (exclusive to Samuel’s lcaLIVE) then take a loot at http://goggo.dyndns.org/lcaOOo2.odp for an OOo 2.0 beta file or http://goggo.dyndns.org/lcaOOo2.sxi for a OOo 1.x file.
Note that this is only an exclusivity to lcaLIVE until the end of the seminar (midday GMT+10) when I start releasing files publicly.
Oops, forgot to print my notes….now printing…
Samuel Gordon-Stewart reporting for Samuel’s lcaLIVE
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I Must be really old in dog years!!
Samuel’s lcaLIVE http://smoothwallsamuel.blogspot.com
Samuel @ LCA2005 http://lca2005.linux.org.au/security_miniconf/abstracts.html
Protect your network www.smoothwall.org
April 19th, 2005 at 02:30am
Well, the coments for this blog (there were none, so I created one) weren’t appearing on the main page…there wasn’t even anything to tell you if there were any comments…pathetic template I guess.
Anyway, I decided to update the template…this *should* have been a longish process, choose a new template, add all my links back in, decide I don’t like the template and start all over again. Instead I just copied the comments code from the permalink section on to the main page section of the template and added a few line breaks.
To be honest, I like this template, I like the colour scheme, it is just has some painful default settings. Oh well, I feel like I’ve acomplished something 🙂
Samuel Gordon-Stewart reporting for Samuel’s lcaLIVE
April 18th, 2005 at 10:25pm
Well, all in all, an interesting day, no hassles (except for working out where I was on the blasted map…it does help when you remember the correct building number…"That creek shouldn’t be there!"). Found a nice coffee place 30 seconds from the LCA venue (out the *other* door) that filled my LCA mug for $2.80…a whole 30c better than the other place that is a lot further away.
The automatic doors are odd, simply wouldn’t open for me from inside…they opened for everybody else, but not for me. Ended up using the other *other* door (that is not a typo).
During a pyFlag seminar I had an idea for my own seminar, only minor, but perhaps even a potential mod for SmoothWall.
This is Samuel’s lcaLIVE, and I should be updating it more often during the day, but at the moment I don’t have the facilities. I should be borrowing a laptop tommorow, which should be useful and help make this a bit more "LIVE".
SELinux is very interesting, and possibly one of the more useful things you could use, as I discovered today, and OWASP is also quite interesting…not overly applicable to me, but certainly a very good guide to securing stuff.
Ever since setting up a personal webserver I have been driven insane by the over simplicity of awstats, it is functional, but it has no real power. pyFlag on the other hand, would do a much better job of web server log analysis (or other log analysis or hdd forensics), and it prodcues pie graphs as well, which are much better for representing proprotions of totals than those bar graphs used by awstats.
Tonight I have to finish preparing my LCA seminar for tommorow.
It appears that there will not be a live video stream tommorow, however things later in the week probably will be. I guess I could try twisting somebodies arm over it, but it’s not that big a deal, they are all being filmed and should be available online later in the week, and I’ll have my own video of my seminar online ASAP.
Samuel Gordon-Stewart reporting for Samuel’s lcaLIVE
April 18th, 2005 at 05:32pm
To the tune of "The Twelve Days Of Christmas"
"Twas the morning of the first day of the LCA
And Samuel is happy today.
The days of the Linux conference are here
And I live rather near…"
OK OK I’ll stop singing…but it is official, I live 20 minutes away from LCA by foot.
Today I plan on spening most of my day at the Security Miniconf which should be quite good, I might also try and meet up with an old work colleague who is running one of the other miniconfs.
Samuel Gordon-Stewart reporting for Samuel’s lcaLIVE
April 18th, 2005 at 08:19am
Well, it is 1:20am and I’ve cut down the speech to something more useable, and I’ll adapt it depending on timing (that could be fun with the OOo presentation).
Anyways, my “I work better in a slightly sleep deprived state” mood is now disappearing and bed looks nice, I was hoping to have the OOo presentation done tonight, looks like I’ll have to do it after the days proceedings at LCA. Stay tuned for more news and info.
Samuel Gordon-Stewart reporting for Samuel’s lcaLIVE
April 18th, 2005 at 01:23am
Michael was right, I’m going to have to shorten it. My talking went for an hour, I need to get it down to about 45 minutes to allow time for the Q&A session. There is some stuff I can delete, so we’ll see how we go.
Samuel Gordon-Stewart reporting for Samuel’s lcaLIVE
April 18th, 2005 at 12:53am
Yes, I know that I am probably dreadfully late with this considering that it is only 1 day, 11 hours and 55 minutes until my seminar, but I am now going to have my first proper practice run.
I have created the outline notes and printed them, now I disappear to an empty room and pretend to be delivering the finshed product to an audience. Once I’m done I’ll make and neccessary changes and then produce the slideshow (in Open Office 2.0 Beta of course!)
Samuel Gordon-Stewart reporting for Samuel’s lcaLIVE
April 17th, 2005 at 11:09pm
Front: Discount Linux books, Linux.Conf.Au balloon, Mastering Requirements Process booklet, See Yourself In Canberra booklet.
Furhter back: IT Security In Government booklet, VOIP World booklet, Builder Magazine, Accelerate Your Application Performance booklet.
Furhter back: Some bizzare network cable extender (I think), HP multipurpose tool, Linux.Conf.Au handbook, Pen (Blue), Spirax note pad 200 pages, Multi Page Linux.Conf.Au programme, single page minituare Linux.Conf.Au programme, Sun Developers Toolkit DVD (trial versions of Sun software and more).
Back: Me, ANU Campus Map, Name Tag, Discount voucher for Purple Pickle Cafe, Linux.Conf.Au nametag holder, Insulated travel mug with screw-on lid and LCA logo, Linux.Conf.Au conference bag.
Background: Linux.Conf.Au shirt
My photo gallery is now the home of Samuel’s lcaLIVE photos!!
Samuel Gordon-Stewart reporting for Samuel’s lcaLIVE
April 17th, 2005 at 06:15pm
Well, I set off for LCA check-in just after 3pm today. I didn’t bring a map as I had viewed the map on the LCA website enough times to know where I was going….or so I thought. After a few bendy roads and some carparks that “you just can’t see on a map” I found some buildings, and quite a few people…seemed good, then I realised that it might not be such a good thing, I spotted the ANU Drill Hall Gallery, a people magnet, suddenly “Is this the right street” was going through my head. I turned left, went down the road and found a construction site…and extension of some faculty, “uh oh”. Ahead of that was the copland building and conference theatre, “that looks familiar, but why doesn’t the road continue, and shouldn’t this road be over there???”…Turned right and walked along a path…A sign telling me which way to go to the Manning Clark Centre…walking up the stairs, it’s not that building, it’s not that building either…ahhhh, there it is.
It appears that all photos of it are taken from the other direction, which is wonderful, as it provides no landmarks whatsoever.
Anyways I went in an collected my bag of goodies (aka “shwag”) which I will put a photo up for shortly. On the way out I spotted somebody that looked familiar from a video of LCA2004, google shirt, tallish, yes, I think it was Marc Merlin, I could be mistaken, but it certainly looked like him.
On the way out I noticed something, on the ground written in red “Linux.Conf.Au” and an arrow pointing to the venue…should have looked at the ground
Samuel Gordon-Stewart reporting for Samuel’s lcaLIVE
April 17th, 2005 at 05:02pm
Greetings internet traveller, welcome to my blog, the official site of Samuel’s lcaLIVE.
Over the next week or so, Samuel’s lcaLIVE will bring you all the latest news and information relating to me and Linux.Conf.Au 2005
Today is Sunday 17 April 2005 and the first day of the week of LCA, I will be going to the venue today to complete my registration. I could do that tommorow morning, but I expect that there will be a large amount of people doing that tommorow morning. While I am down there I will try to find out some information about live video/audio of the event.
Today I am putting the final touches on my seminar which will occur at 11am on Tuesday, stay tuned for more details.
April 17th, 2005 at 01:56pm
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