BarCampMelbourne2008 summary
Yesterday was BarCampMelbourne2008, a one-day un-conference held in the city. For those who haven't been to a BarCamp before, everyone arrives, writes down talk ideas on sticky-notes, and a timetable is put together on the day. BarCamp Melbourne was organised by Ben Balbo, who did an outstanding job at pulling it all together.

Good things about the un-conference was that it was free to attend, had a central location, and had free food and beer. Bad things were that the aircon had a hard time coping with 60 people plus machines plus projectors, the lack of gender balance, and the hangover when I woke up this morning.

I managed to do three full-length talks throughout the day, and squeezed three lightning talks into a six-minute timeslot at the end, resulting in the occasional joke that perhaps I should just take a stream to myself. My first (and best) talk was voted best presentation, and I was given my choice of SitePoint books as a prize. I think I'm going to have to stop accepting prizes for speaking, just as soon as conferences stop offering prizes that are really cool or useful. ;)

As usual, the conference came with learning experiences for me. Always pack extra business cards, know your audience (I suspect my talk on Perl 5.10 went over a few too many heads), make sure you're not competing with cool-sounding talks, and don't hesitate to put lies in your talk description to gain a bigger crowd.

The downside of me doing so many presentations is that I spent most of my time preparing for them, and not enough time watching other people's talks. This seems to have become my natural state at conferences now. The big up-side of all my air time is that it makes social networking so much easier, and I enjoy meeting both new and old friends at conferences very much indeed. Right now I have a wallet full of business cards with scribbled notes on them to go through.

The after-party was most enjoyable, and included a race against a failing laptop battery to try and get Ben a jaiku account, a demonstration of open source flight sims and custom control hardware, much talk about the open source training market, half a talk (fullscreen suggested) on HTML::Mason, a signing of my new book by one of the authors, and many pints of beer sponsored by Microsoft.

BarCamp materials, links, and imagery are being tagged with BarCampMelbourne2008 and are finding their way to delicious, flickr and the rest of the web.

Optimise your aircraft seat
I do a lot of flying, and have spent a lot of time trying to make my life more comfortable. While I don't have time for a complete set of tips, I do have some for getting a good seat.

First of all, these techniques will vary from country to country and airline to airline. In Australia it's common to have a kiosk that handles your check-in and prints a boarding pass, and then a separate "bag drop" for your luggage. Most importantly for us, the kiosks usually allow you to change your seat, and that's what I'm going to focus on.

I'm going to call a bunch of seats boarded by aisles and/or windows a "segment". Most segments have one or two desirable seats (next to windows or aisles, depending upon what you like), and some undesirable seats (jammed between other passengers). Obviously just by using the "change my seat option" you can usually get one of the more desirable seats. I personally prefer the aisle. However that seat may not be an ideal seat.

The "ideal" seat is one where you have either your preference of aisle or window, nobody sitting next to you, and near an exit so you can get on and off relatively quickly. My super-ideal seat is an aisle with an empty seat on my right, since I can then use that seat (or its tray) as a mouse-mat. But how do we get such coveted seats?

Well, first we need to understand that if your flight is fully booked, then there's nothing you can do to have an empty seat next to you. The flight is full, so by definition all the seats will be filled. So I'm going to assume your flight isn't completely full. This is certainly the case for a lot of off-peak flights in Australia.

A lot of people when picking a seat will try to go for a completely empty segment. This looks like it will give you lots of room, but this is almost always a mistake. The reason being that aisle and exit seats fill first, and if you're flying an aircraft with 3-seat segments, then there tends to be a lot of one seat "holes", leaving a shortage of places where you can seat couples. By picking a desirable seat in an empty segment, you have an excellent change of a couple sitting next to you, meaning your seat is merely "good", and not "great".

To avoid this, you should try to find a segment that already has one person in a desirable seat, and then pick the other one. In my case that means they have the window, and I take the aisle. The seat in the middle is undesirable, and so only fills if all the other desirable seats are taken.

Aircraft seating algorithms also seem to fill from the front towards the back, so picking a seat about three-quarters of the way towards the back maximises your changes of getting an empty seat next to you. Being right up the back doesn't work, partially because a lot of Australian aircraft allow boarding from the rear of the aircraft (so the rearmost seats are filled with impatient people), and partially because airlines like to seat families with children right at the back. That means not only will there be a person person sitting next to you; but they're likely to be a bored, impatient child with an ear infection.

If you are part of a couple, you can try to do some extreme seat optimisation. The trick is to find an empty segment, and to take both the desirable seats, leaving an empty one in the middle. With luck (if your flight isn't too full), you end up sitting together, but in much more comfort. If you're unlucky, there'll be some poor soul stuck between you, although they'll usually eagerly agree to swap for an aisle or window seat, so your failure condition is the same as what you would have had if you sat together to begin with.

Finally, you'll also notice that on most of the kiosks you simply can't book a seat that's in the first third of the aircraft. These are usually reserved for people with special needs, late-comers, priority customers, and business class/first class. You can get these seats, but you'll have to schmooze at the check-in desk, and that's beyond the scope of this article.

Happy flying!

Fixing the web with greasemonkey
At linux.conf.au 2008 I won the award for "best lightning talk". Now, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I've been able to make this available on-line:

If you're not reading this on my main blog then you can find the video on youtube.

Rusty Pong
I've got more writing about linux.conf.au to finish, but in the meantime I thought I'd amuse you with a video I made of "Rusty Pong" as demonstrated at LCA 2008.

For those who aren't reading this from my main blog, or otherwise can't view the embedded video, you can also find it on youtube.

Rant: The pains of publishing talks
I've just spent about 16 hours in utter frustration trying to publish my dinner keynote from OSDC 2007. Normally I'd use SlideShare for this, as I've done with some previous talks, but I've found it simply can't handle my presentation. Here's why: