Re: conferences

On Sunday 06 March 2005 17:41, Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> wrote:
> Eric Andreychek organized the conference and gave an introductory talk on
> SE Linux. I gave a repeat of the talk on running play machines which
> didn't seem to go as well as the previous day, it certainly didn't get as
> many laughs. But the audience feedback was still good. After the talk I

I've given the same talk on play machines a few times since then without seeming to amuse the audience much. I guess that because the SE Linux Symposium was a fast paced and high-pressure event people were a little stressed and needed to relax a bit so the funny parts of what I was saying were better received.

Maybe this is something to consider for future conferences. Often there are talks offered for conferences that can be presented in an amusing manner without compromising the content. Scheduling such a talk after lunch on the final day and requesting that the speaker make it as amusing as possible might be good strategy.

> I have been encouraging Eric to run a tutorial on SE Linux based on the
> notes from my tutorial at the SE Linux Symposium. He is considering this
> and there is a member of the LUG who has volunteered to provide the
> necessary office and computers to run it.

It seems that Eric is planning to go ahead with this. Not sure about when it will happen.

After the Harrisburg event I quickly visited Philadelphia, Raleigh, and Boston. Then I went to Poland to speak at the Open Source Security conference: http://www.oss.org.pl/en/

The OSS conference was run by a Polish company that runs conferences which gave it a different feel to most Linux conferences that are run by technical people. It was a well run event and had a very high quality audience. I spoke about some fairly complex topics and the audience seemed to understand well which was quite impressive as there was only one native English speaker in the audience!

The conference had a registration fee that I believe to be equivalent to 6 weeks salary for a skilled programmer. This was very expensive (the most expensive conference I've ever spoken at). I guess the price explains the high skill level of the audience, no company will send anyone but their best people to such an expensive conference.

I had three speaking slots for a total of 3 hours and 15 minutes of talking, which was considerably more than anyone else. I am not sure whether this was due to the importance of the SE Linux project in the opinion of the conference organizers or whether it was due to me volunteering to do a lot. I suspect that both factors were involved.

I had planned to give a repeat of the hands-on tutorial I gave at the SE Linux Symposium but due to a mis-communication no computers were provided. So I rearranged my schedule (easy to do as there was only one stream and no issues of conflicts with other talks) and added a talk on my SE Linux play machines to the list and moved the talk on writing policy to the largest time slot.

The majority of the conference was in Polish as it was for an all-Polish audience and most of the speakers were Polish. So I spent a lot of time hanging around outside the conference room (there was no convenient transport to go anywhere else). I had a laptop running RHEL4 setup with a SE Linux "play machine" configuration that I showed to many people. At least a dozen people tested it out between talks and during talks that didn't interest them. They seemed quite impressed. I find that giving someone root:user_r:user_t access to a SE Linux machine and the ability to see the AVC messages in the logs often gives them a better understanding of how things work than just speaking about it.

My talks seemed well received and the conference organizers seemed interested in getting me to speak at a future event that they run. This will only happen if I can combine it with a trip to another country. The journey from Poland to Australia sucks quite badly at the best of times and I was recovering from the flu at the time with partially blocked ears which gave me a nightmare journey of the type which will give me a long-term aversion to travelling that route. I really like Poland, but the travel was awful.

Polish food is great. The hotel food very good (including many traditional Polish dishes) and the one time I got out to a good Polish restaurant it was even better. One Polish speciality that I tried was beer with jam. To make it fill a large beer glass to 2/3 and put a few spoonfuls of jam in it. Heat it in a microwave oven until it's at a temperature you might use for hot chocolate (not as hot as coffee). Top it up and then heat it again before serving. I suggest filling it 2/3 for the first heat to stop the head from overflowing and making a mess of the microwave oven. The jam should dissolve by itself without needing to be stirred. Try and avoid jam that has chunks of fruit unless you want a little snack at the bottom of your glass. The Polish use a white/pale beer that is not really bitter. I imagine that you could try different types of beer for different results. Maybe a bitter beer with marmalade or a dark beer with fig jam. But the traditional recipe involves white/pale beer with red fruit jam (strawberry or raspberry - they taste much the same when mixed with beer).

Polish milk tastes much different from milk in other countries. I asked some Poles about this and they said that the milk flavor depends on what the cow eats. If this is the case then I have to conclude that Polish cows eat very differently from cows in Australia, the US, the UK, and the Netherlands (those four countries have milk that tastes much the same). After returning home the Australian milk tastes poor in comparison, I wish I could get milk that tastes like the Polish milk. In Poland coffee is served with hot milk. This was good, as I don't like coffee I just drank all the hot milk and asked the hotel staff to bring more. ;)

-- 
http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/   My NSA Security Enhanced Linux packages
http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/  Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark
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http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/  My home page

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