Alan Cox:

Alan Cox - who probably has the most-read one-line diary in the known universe - is the Linux community's metaphysical link to Scooby Doo. Alan currently maintains the 2.2 series of the Linux kernel, and is such a critical part of the Linux community that he has even been ported to his own architecture.

Telsa Gwynne:

Telsa, who writes considerably longer diary entries than Alan, claims to be "completely unable to answer anything technical" but has proved herself inaccurate by publishing the official GNOME FAQ, and contributing greatly to various documentation and bug-busting efforts.

Given that Telsa & Alan are going through the long-winded task of moving house right now, we hope that their trip to Australia will also be a great holiday. (And it will, unless Telsa's fear of spiders, dropbears and space stations get the better of them...)

Richard Gooch:

"Come to Australia, the jewel of the planet, and talk code, hack Linux and see how the Aussies throw a party! Me? SEX! I want all those cute groupies Rusty promised. Or seriously: code, bandwidth and flamewars^Wdiscussions."

Richard is best known for writing the Device FileSystem (devfs). Having gained infamy and pissed off people with the audacity to write devfs, he's moved on to the area of boot scripts, and hopes to radically change the way the world boots.

The Rasterman:

"Linux conference in Sydney in summer: It's like a refreshing slap in the face with a frozen herring. Wakes you up after all the good beer you had at the pub last night after staying up till 4 am rabbiting on about code and api layers and subsystems whilst eating a juicy steak and enjoying the warm breeze coming off the beach....... mmmmmmmmm Sydney in summer - where beer and linux collide."

Raster, who has been to many Linux conferences, saw potential in 1999's CALU: "I think it just needs more funding and bigger parties - way more, way more free alcohol." (MP3, 248K)

The Rasterman, aka Carsten Haitzler, is an Aussie beer drinker from way back. This probably resulted in his excellent work on the Enlightenment window manager. Raster gave a talk about Enlightenment and X at CALU 1999.

maddog:

maddog will be speaking at our official conference dinner, and will be speaking about bringing Linux home to our parents:

"Sixteen years ago I wrote a whitepaper about how my Mother and Father dealt with electronic devices. Escaping from the confines of Digital Equipment Corporation, it made its way around the net, eventually being used as a model for a Human Interface Design course at the University of Maryland.

"Today Mom&Pop are only slightly more savvy about computers. And computers are only slightly more savvy about Mom&Pop. The question is, who is winning, and who is losing?"

maddog, aka Jon Hall (but not very often), is the Executive Director of Linux International, a non-profit vendor organization dedicated to promoting the use of Linux.

Horms:

"Flim 'o' Rama. Coming back to Sydney for a conference is like going home for the weekend. Beer, beaches and great talks, what more could you want? There is nothing as rewarding as being able to speak in your home city. Beaches, Beer, Summer, Sydney, I can't wait."

Horms, aka Simon Horman, works at VA Linux on High Availability. It seems that the low availability of VB in Horms' new country of residence hasn't negatively affected his work. Horms gave a talk on high capacity email at CALU 1999.

Dave Miller:

"Roo, VB, Coogee... about the only thing that keeps me from moving permanently to Australia is the network connectivity."

David Miller wrote the original Linux port to the SPARC family of processors, developed the MIPS port as a college intern at SGI, and worked on the team that developed the Cobalt Qube. He blew us away at CALU where he unveiled his designs for the upcoming network packet queue for 2.4.

Rik van Riel:

"Rik enjoys the good life in Brazil, "working" on the Linux kernel memory management subsystem as a full-time kernel hacker for Conectiva. He hopes the Australian beer and wine will be good enough to do without the Brazillian food for a few days..."

Rik's $HOME on the web is at http://surriel.com/, and you can often find him hosting the excellent IRC channel, #kernelnewbies.

Rusty:

In this quick soundbite, Rusty talks about the success of CALU 1999, and ponders its future, "There's definitely scope for a big Linux conf in Australia." (MP3, 175K)

Rusty, aka Paul Russell, is the man behind ipcha-- iptab-- the most renamed piece of software in recent Linux history. He works on Netfilter at OzLabs, Linuxcare's Canberra office.

Tridge:

"It is nice to see a pure technical conference so well attended. With a similar style to the Ottawa Linux Symposium, attendees can look forward to good in-depth technical presentations and a great atmosphere that encourages the late night hacking sessions that make conferences fun."

Unbeliveably enough, CALU was Tridge's first Linux conference. He speaks about it here in glowing terms. (MP3, 105K)

Tridge, aka Andrew Tridgell, dances with the devil every day as the lead developer of Samba, and has helped save umpteen million bandwidth-hours with another widely-used piece of software, rsync. He hacks at OzLabs, Linuxcare's Canberra office.

Speakers: