On Sunday 21 September 2008 20:35:11 Alan Dayley wrote:
> I could not attend ABLEConf and missed the excitement.  Anyone want to
> give their take on the event?  I'd love to hear about it!
>
> Alan
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I enjoyed it. I overslept Saturday morning and didn't get there until after 
the first round of presentations started.

I sat in on Darrin's presentation on Open Hardware Specs. I had just had to
deal with this issue at work recently when someone had a system using
a promise raid controller in a system in the lab. They wanted to upgrade to a 
new update of RHEL, but the driver from promise would hang the system 
whenever you tried to write to the device it presented. He was using raid5 so 
using the kernel driver for the promise wouldn't solve the problem.

Next up I listened to Darrin's talk about OpenBSD and pf. Quite a packed room
for this one. Dicussion arose about how to get started with OpenBSD and 
whether generated pf confs from website forms are good.

Then I wanted to listen to the presentation on Inkscape, which is a vector 
graphics program. The LAN party presentation ran about 40 minutes over 
it's time slot. That coupled with some issues getting a laptop and projector
to talk to each other got the Inkscape presentation started late. It was a 
nice demo of the latest features in the dev build (0.47). Anyone interested
in vector graphics should check out the program.

After Inkscape I listened to Darrin's presentation about the LRO project and 
their use of free software @ ASU. They are going to be dealing with ~100TB of 
data a year, and some extremely large high-resolution (1px / 0.5m) images.

The conf ended with a wrap-up session in the auditorium where the different 
free software groups were presented.

A lot of people trekked over to Boulder's on Broadway for food and drink 
afterwards.

In between sessions there was a raffle drawing with t-shirts, media players, a 
hat, and perhaps a penguin being given as prizes. The Ubuntu loco team, PLUG, 
LOPSA, and perhaps one other group had tables set up with goodies for people 
to take.

UAT was pretty nice. I've never made it over there for an installfest. I was 
surprised to learn they have a dormitory out in back.
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