Linux.conf.au 2003 | Speakers

The following list of people are scheduled to present a talk at Linux.conf.au 2003. This list is still undergoing some changes.

H. Peter Anvin

H. Peter Anvin has been actively involved with Linux development since March 1992 when he was hunting for something interesting to fill his brand new (gasp!) 500 MB hard disk with. Over the years has developed or worked on a number of kernel components, such as the console system, autofs, Unix98 ptys, compressed CD-ROM support, the i386 boot sequence and is now working on klibc/early userspace.

Outside the kernel he has developed the SYSLINUX family of boot loaders, the Linux Persistent Memory library, the tftp-hpa TFTP server, the magicfilter printer tool and the SuperRescue CD. He has also been a significant contributor to the NASM assembler and MOO mud server projects. He maintained the Linux registry of device numbers between 1995 and 2001 and is the site manager of the kernel.org Linux kernel distribution site.

Peter is a native of Västerås, Sweden, and is a graduate of Northwestern University in Chicago. He now works as Principal Engineer for Transmeta Corporation in Santa Clara, California.

Favourite shell
tcsh
Favourite editor
GNU emacs
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
AfterStep 1.7
Favourite technical book
Steven S. Muchnick: Advanced Compiler Design & Implementation
Sessions at LCA 2003

Dan Shearer

Favourite shell
-
Favourite editor
-
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
-
Sessions at LCA 2003

Hemos (Jeff Bates)

Director, OSDN (Open Source Development Network) Online Executive Editor, Slashdot

As Director of OSDN Online and Executive Editor of Slashdot, Jeff "hemos" Bates is a visionary of both space and time. Hemos handles everything from posting stories and book reviews to ad sales and business development.

As Director of OSDN Online, and as an author at Slashdot since the very beginning, (1997) hemos has watched the rise of the interactive age. During that time, Slashdot has been honoured with several industry awards including a Webby People's Voice Award for Community, as well as Yahoo!'s "Top 100" Best of the Internet Award. Slashdot has also been cited by The Washington Post, Brill's Content, TIME, USA Today, Rolling Stone and many other publications as one of the most innovative and important sites for the technical community.

Hemos has attended speaking engagements and conducted sessions at multiple industry events, including MIT, LinuxWorld, Worchester Polytechnic Institute, Northern Michigan University and Sun Developers Group.

He holds a Bachelor's degree in History from Hope College. He resides in Michigan with his wife and two children.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
nano
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
KDE
Favourite technical book
Godel, Escher, Bach
Sessions at LCA 2003

Geoffrey D. Bennett

Geoffrey D. Bennett works for NetCraft Australia as their Senior Systems Engineer. He runs the LinuxSA Users Group in Adelaide, and has presented talks on many topics. In 1999, he helped inspire the "Windows Refund Day" with his Toshiba laptop saga.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
vim
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
perl(1)
Sessions at LCA 2003

Hugh Blemings

Hugh took a radio apart when he was about eight and never recovered. He attained his Amateur (Ham) Radio license in 1991 and holds the Australian callsign VK1YYZ. He has been a casual user of Linux since the mid '90s and it has been his operating system of choice since 1997 and profession since 1999.

He has worked on various pieces of open source software and is one of the original authors of gnokii (http://gnokii.org) He also wrote drivers for the Keyspan range of USB-Serial adapters for the 2.3/2.4 Linux kernels.

He now manages the OzLabs team at IBM's Linux Technology Centre in Canberra and still hacks on things from time to time. He greatly enjoys doing both.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
vim
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
bash, vim, Gnome2 on Debian
Favourite technical book/reference
When wielding a soldering iron - "The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz & Hill, APUE by Stevens when wielding a keyboard and "Asterix and Cleopatra" by Goscinny and Uderzo the rest of the time.
Sessions at LCA 2003

Neil Brown

Neil started preschool at age 4 and hasn't managed to escape the cloistered environment of educational institutions since. For the last half of his life (so far) he has been at the University of New South Wales as student, staff, admin, programmer, and hacker, though not necessarily in that order.

Between his work, his family, and his church, Neil doesn't find either the time or the need for other hobbies.

His current Linux related interests are the bits of a fileserver between the UTP cable and the SCSI cable that don't work optimally.

Favourite shell
ae
Favourite editor
emacs
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
The Bible (not very technical, but a great reference. I don't actually read technical books much.)
Sessions at LCA 2003

Adrian Chadd

Adrian is one of the lead programmers on Squid, the leading open-source caching program. For some time Adrian worked for Interxion in The Netherlands. He calls Perth and/or Sydney home now.

Favourite shell
tcsh
Favourite editor
vi
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
Aqua
Favourite technical book/reference
4.4BSD Reference/Design & Implementation of 4.4 BSD
Sessions at LCA 2003

Alan Cox

Alan does this kernel thing.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
joe
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
xfce
Favourite technical book
Operating Systems, Andrew Tanenbaum
Sessions at LCA 2003

Thomas Dreibholz

Thomas was born in 1976 in Bergneustadt, Germany. In 1996, I became student of computer science at the University of Bonn, Germany, where he obtained the Vordiplom (bachelor degree) in 1998 and the Diploma (master degree) in 2001. Since 2001 he has been a PhD student and employee at the University of Essen, Germany. Some of his Linux-based open source projects are RTP Audio (an audio transmission system, see uni-essen.de) since 1999, RTP Trace (a video trace transmission system, see uni-essen.de) as part of his master thesis 2000/2001 and a socket API library for the SCTP transport protocol library (see sctp.de). For details and other projects, see uni-essen.de.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
joe, kate
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
KDE
Favourite technical book/reference
http://www.google.com
Sessions at LCA 2003

Bdale Garbee

Bdale is the Debian project leader elect. He works for HP. His passion is porting Linux to weird and wonderful architectures.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
emacs
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
raw X/sawfish
Favourite technical book
Of all time? That's nearly impossible, but I guess I'd have to say Tannenbaum's Computer Networks. The first edition was a significant reference to me for a long time, and I contributed to and have a credit in the second edition. :-) I haven't opened my copy in years, though. The most significant and useful book in the past few years, that I'd recommend to someone who hasn't already read it? I'd have to say Applied Cryptography by Schneier.
Sessions at LCA 2003

Dr. David Glance

David has worked in computer software for the last 15 years. Half of that time was spent writing distributed systems on a variety of platforms in the area of digital trading rooms for stock broking companies and banks. The last half involved working for companies like Tibco (European Development Manager), IONA Technologies (Managing director Asia Pacific) and most recently Microsoft where he worked on Visual Studio and Application Center. He is currently teaching Java and Software Engineering at UWA in the CSSE department to pay for his former sins working for Microsoft.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
emacs
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
TCP/IP Illustrated Volumes 1 and 2
Sessions at LCA 2003

Telsa Gwynne

So who am I? Good question. Born in 1969, I grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne in the north-east of England. I went to university at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth, where I did lots of things ranging from raising a lot of money for charity to helping start the Roc Soc there to discovering UNIX in 1990 in its ULTRIX incarnation to failing spectacularly to gain a degree.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
joe
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
GNOME
Favourite technical book
Jon Lasser's "Think UNIX".
Sessions at LCA 2003

Brad Hards

Brad Hards is the technical director of Sigma Bravo Pty Limited, a small engineering services company based in Canberra, Australia. He has been a Linux user since 1993, when he download Slackware, one floppy disk at a time, over a 14k4 modem link.

Brad Hards is a current kernel maintainer (USB CDC Ethernet class driver) and has written documentation for several open source activities, including the Linux USB guide. He ran a BoF at linux.conf.au 2001, and presented a paper on Linux USB at linux.conf.au 2002.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
emacs
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
Fielding's Dangerous Places
Sessions at LCA 2003

Philip Hart

Worked full time with computers in both defence and commercial organisations until 1998. Went as a freelance computer consultant in 1997. (Yes, those dates are correct!) Also lectured part-time simultaneously at three local colleges in England for 3 years up until 2000. Teleworked for the University of Arizona (Department of Astronomy, work on adaptive optics telescope) and King Edwards Memorial Hospital Perth (Ultrasound Department, work on medical imaging). Currently working on a public information system on buses in New Zealand.

Worked with DOS 3.3, and various flavours of Windows up to XP. Met Unix in 1995. First dabbled with Linux in 1999 (SUSE 6.4). Now writing in Visual Basic and C using Windows 98 and Debian 2.2. Using MS-Office 2000 and OpenOffice.

Favourite shell
-
Favourite editor
-
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
the Internet
Sessions at LCA 2003

James Henstridge

James is a Gnome developer. He's written lots of cool stuff from WWW-SQL, to Dia, and the Python GTK bindings.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
Emacs
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
Gnome
Favourite technical book/reference
-
Sessions at LCA 2003

Simon "Horms" Horman

Horms (Simon Horman) works on load balancing and high availability projects on a free-lance basis. Prior to this he was a Senior Engineer at VA Linux Systems and before that was the. senior technician at Zip World, an ISP in Sydney, Australia. For his honours thesis in computer science at the University of New South Wales he worked on using genetic algorithms to schedule the university examinations timetable. His main interest is computer networks and in particular how this makes information accessible to people.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
vim
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
Unix Network Programing, Volume I. by W. Richard Stevens
Sessions at LCA 2003

Greg KH

Greg Kroah-Hartman is the current kernel maintainer for the USB and PCI hotplug subsystems. He is the author of the pcihpfs and usbfs filesystems. He is also one of the main proponents of driverfs and will gladly try to work it, or the topic of /sbin/hotplug, into any discussion about the Linux kernel.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
vim
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
Lion's Commentary on UNIX(R) 6th Edition
Sessions at LCA 2003

Jeremy Kerr

Jeremy has been enrolled in the BSc course at UWA for the past five years, and is currently completing Honours in Computer Science. His Honours studies are based on network-load balancing systems, with particular reference the the LVS project. While studying, he has also been working in the Perth IT industry for three years, working on software development projects for various Internet-based companies.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
vi
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
Google, Usenet, lvs-users mailing list
Sessions at LCA 2003

Suresh Kodati

Suresh Kodati holds a Masters's degree in Computer Science and Technology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He has been working with IBM India Software Lab since 2000 and his interests include IPv6, networking in Linux.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
vi
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
http://www.google.com
Sessions at LCA 2003

Suparna Bhattacharya

Suparna works at IBM Software Labs, India, and is a member of IBM's worldwide Linux Technology Center. Her current focus includes RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability), Block I/O and Asynchronous I/O in the Linux Kernel.

An Electronics and Communication Engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Suparna has been with IBM since 1993, where an early opportunity to work on a Microkernel operating system based on CMU Mach drew her into the wonderland of operating systems which appears to have cast its lasting spell on her.

Suparna's prior experience and interests (as far as software is concerned) cover filesystems and operating system internals on multiple platforms including AIX, Windows NT, and to a lesser extent, Solaris, HP-UX and a bit of OS/2, as well as distributed filesystem protocols and implementations. She has been closely involved in the development of DB2-Datalinks, a technology from the IBM Almaden Research Center, for linking database and filesystem data with referential integrity and consistency guarantees.

Sessions at LCA 2003

Rasmus Lerdorf

Born in Godhavn/Qeqertarsuaq on Disco Island off the coast of Greenland in 1968. He has been dabbling with UNIX-based solutions since 1985. Known for having gotten the PHP project off the ground in 1995, the mod_info Apache module and he can be blamed for the ANSI92 SQL-defying LIMIT clause in mSQL 1.x which has now, at least conceptually, crept into both MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Favourite shell
tcsh (for interactive) bash (for scripts)
Favourite editor
vim (I need an editor, not an OS)
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
Debian or RedHat (don't really care, I compile my own stuff anyway)
Favourite technical book
Programming PHP from O'Reilly (of course)
Sessions at LCA 2003

Jeremy Malcolm

Jeremy is an Information Technology lawyer with a successful niche practice in Internet-related law, and am involved at board level in a number of relevant organisations such as the Society of Linux Professionals of WA, the Internet Society of Australia, the Western Australian Internet Association, the Australian Public Access Network Association (as WA Region Coordinator), the WA Society for Computers and the Law (as President) and previously Electronic Frontiers Australia. Since 1998 he has been the Manager of Terminus Network Services which specialises in the use of open source software in networked environments and in the development of online systems and is a Debian Developer.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
vim
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
The Camel book
Sessions at LCA 2003

Patrick Mochel

Patrick Mochel is dedicated to having fun, and has chosen a life to maximizing an interesting and exciting lifestyle. Because of this, he lives and plays in quite possibly the best city in the world, and occasionally hacks a bit on the Linux kernel. Amazingly enough, someone is actually willing to pay for that, which Patrick uses, along with his wit and charm, to pursue many new adventures.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
emacs
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
The Linux kernel source tree
Sessions at LCA 2003

Conrad Parker

Conrad is the lead developer of the Sweep sound editor and metadecks.org, creating free software for Linux audio workstations in media production and live performance. Other software credits include the speedmine and speedworm xscreensavers, xsel, xboids, sane-v4l2, tractorgen, and /etc/init.d/pants.

He is employed as a Senior Software Engineer in CSIRO's Division of Mathematics and Information Sciences in Sydney, where he is involved in audio analysis and multimedia networking research.

Conrad was an organiser of linux.conf.au 2001 in Sydney and served as President of the Sydney Linux Users Group 2000-2002 and Board member of the Australian Unix Users Group 2001-2002.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
emacs
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
APUE (photo)
Sessions at LCA 2003

Wayne Piekarski

Wayne Piekarski is a PhD student at the University of South Australia and has worked in the area of outdoor augmented reality user interfaces for the past 3 years. To demonstrate his research work, he developed the Tinmith augmented reality software system, as well as a number of different backpack computers to enable users to experience real time 3D environments while moving around outdoors.

Wayne was part of the team that developed the original ARQuake system in 2000, and currently maintains the software and extends it with new features, and also coordinates the design of new levels and demonstrations.

More information is available on Wayne's home page.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
emacs
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice, 2nd Edition - by Foley, Van Dam, Feiner, Hughes (this is the official bible for computer graphics people :)
Sessions at LCA 2003

Martin Pool

Martin is a software engineer working mostly on open source software. He is the author of librsync, distcc, and other projects, and the current maintainer of rsync. Martin holds a BE(Hons) from the University of Queensland. His interests include motorcycles, bushwalking and music.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
gnu emacs
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Sessions at LCA 2003

Alexander Reeder

Alexander Reeder graduated from Earlham College in 2000 with a dual degree in Computer Science and Japanese Studies. His thesis, began in 1999, was about his own fingerprint recognition algorithm and he has continued to do research personally since. Before graduating Alexander was involved in Linux and FreeBSD based consulting work which took him across the United States.

After graduating and continuing to work as a consultant in the US Alexander moved to Japan in late 2000. He continued consulting in matters of Linux ranging from kernel hacking to database performance. From September, 2001 VA Linux Systems Japan, K.K. hired Alexander where he continues to be happy doing kernel and other hacking. He recently gave a talk titled 'Trends in Kernel Development' at LinuxWorld Tokyo 2002, and attended the 2002 Linux Kernel Summit in Ottawa, Canada.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
vi
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
C Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie
Sessions at LCA 2003

Paul "Rusty" Russell

Original author of ipchains, netfilter and iptables. Author of Rusty's Unreliable Guides to kernel hacking, kernel locking, packet filtering, NAT and netfilter hacking. He organised the first Australian Linux conference (CALU in 1999), and spends his days tinkering with the Linux kernel.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
emacs
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
fvwm2
Favourite technical book
Elements of Programming Style by Kernighan and Plauger; McGraw-Hill 1974, 1978 ISBN 0-07-034207-5
Sessions at LCA 2003

Martin Schwenke

Favourite shell
emacs
Favourite editor
emacs-lisp-mode
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
man(1)
Sessions at LCA 2003

Gavin Sherry

Gavin Sherry is a programmer with many years experience in open source software development. He runs an Australian company, Alcove Systems Engineering, specialising in software develop and UNIX systems monitoring/administration.

He has spoken at several conferences, including Linux.conf.au and the O'Reilly Open Source Convention.

Favourite shell
sh
Favourite editor
vi
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
TAOCP
Sessions at LCA 2003

Andrew Tridgell

Andrew Tridgell has been involved with several major projects. He claims to have:

  • put the first bug into Samba
  • witnessed the fateful time that Linus was bitten by a penguin
  • proved that procrastination can be a good career choice

"Apart from that I'm just a hacker who was lucky enough to choose a popular project."

Favourite shell
bash, though I also like 'init=/usr/bin/emacs'
Favourite editor
emacs
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
I like both KDE and Enlightenment. I'm currently running Enlightenment.
Favourite technical book
TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1 by Stevens.
Sessions at LCA 2003
  • TBA

Malcolm Tredinnick

Moderately active member in the GNOME community, contributing mostly on mailing lists and with API documentation. Sometimes also fixing bugs just to stop people whining on IRC.

Enthusiastic Linux user since 1993. Programmer in real life using Open Source applications to produce customised solutions for clients mostly in the banking and financial sectors. Mostly using Python in day-to-day work and play.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
vim
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
The Art of Computer Programming
Sessions at LCA 2003

Jeff Waugh

Jeff Waugh is the head beekeeper of the GNOME Release Team, President of the Sydney Linux User's Group, and was on the organising committee for LCA2001. In his spare time, he is an IT consultant specialising in Free Software (on servers *and* desktops). He is especially pleased to see the keen-bean Perthies take on linux.conf.au, given their drunken enthusiasm for hosting it way back in 2001.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
vim
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
Unconscious Civilisation, John Ralston Saul (it's politechnical!)
Sessions at LCA 2003

Rhys Weatherley

Rhys Weatherley is a member of the DotGNU Steering Committee, and the author of Portable.NET.

Rhys graduated from The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, with an honours degree in Computer Science in 1990. Since then, he has worked in a number of positions at Australian universities and US companies.

He returned to Australia in late 1999 to pursue his own interests, including the founding of his Free Software company, Southern Storm Software, Pty Ltd.

His computer interests include programming language design and implementation, network computing, and user interfaces.

Favourite shell
bash
Favourite editor
vi
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1-3.
Sessions at LCA 2003

Matthew Wilcox

Matthew first contributed to the Linux kernel in 1998 with a patch to enable reading of Acorn CD-ROM extensions. Since then, he has been employed by The Puffin Group (later Linuxcare) and Hewlett-Packard to work on the PA-RISC Linux port. He became the File Locking maintainer in late 2000 after working on the File Leases extension under contract to HP. He presented a paper on PA-RISC Linux at the Ottawa Linux Symposium in 2000 and a paper on Leases & Directory Notification at linux.conf.au 2001.

He currently lives in Ottawa, Canada working for Hewlett-Packard on the ia64 Linux port. He enjoys public transport, walking, cycling, good beer and writing about himself in the third person.

Favourite shell
sash
Favourite editor
wily
Favourite desktop environment/window manager
-
Favourite technical book/reference
Applied Cryptography (Bruce Schneier)
Sessions at LCA 2003
The original Tux penguin is copyright by Larry Ewing.
Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.
© 2002 Linux Australia.