Techno for Luddites

While my European friends are experiencing wild weather and hurricanes, I'm expecting a 40 degree day here tomorrow. Think I'll wander along the beach, cause it's pretty hot tonight. Time to give the computer a break.

All week, Linux developers and enthusiasts descended on the University of NSW for Linux Conf AU 2007 to network and deliver papers, workshops and demonstrate the latest open source inventions. For a novice like me, the open day was a good way to absorb the latest technical innovations in free software. There were demos on how to build an open source segway; the one laptop per child scheme that offers $100 laptops to children's education in emerging nations; and a cool self replicating machine, the RepRap, http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome. It can make it's own parts from plastic, metal or ceramic materials and will eventually be able to make copies of itself.

Constellation was a cool installation that took a live video feed of people standing in front of it. It traces your movements, so you can move your body to create different formations of stars within a network of constellations. I don't think I'm describing it very well, but check out the photo in this link to see what I mean: http://www.goop.org/constellation/

Most of the conference talks are archived online at http://lca2007.linux.org.au/. Keynote speaker, Kathy Sierra, delivered an entertaining talk about creating passionate users. Kathy's offbeat and funny presentation style had us all captivated, even the non-programmers like me. By using simple, conversational language, she had me totally immersed and thinking about how humans' brains work around computers and why people stick to using certain software. Kathy Sierra's blog is at http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/.

posted by deprogram @ 12:22 AM