🚀 go-pugleaf

	Well, the Melbourne summer technical conference is over and I wish to
publicly thank Ian Hoyle, Michael Paddon the speakers and any others
associated with the organization of the event.

	I felt it was well run with a wide range of topics and interesting
speakers.  Even the last minute inevitable foul-ups, late speakers, a speaker
who didn't turn up (ill we were told), missing conference notes were handled
in stride with nary an interruption to the smooth flow of the day.

	Some random thoughts on the programme;

	- Graham Jenkins talk on "Disaster Mitigation in a Unix environment"
	  struck home with many in the audience, for the disaster list 
	  included 
		"The cleaner pulls the plug on the mainframe" 
		"The manage takes his son to work"
		"A disgruntled employee leaves to establish his own business"
		"the main processor fails at 8 am on a Monday"
		"a disk falls over at 5pm on a Friday" 
		"the air-conditioner suffers an internal hemorrhage at 3 am"
		"the general manager is requested to allocate funds"
	  brought to mind a number of incidents I've had inflicted on me over
	  the years. 

	- Det. Sgt. Ken Day talk on computer crime, the laws now in place
	  and what they mean held my attention as this is an area that all
	  sysadmins will (unfortunately) need to know now, let alone the
	  future.  The frustrating part was the allusions to methods and
	  techniques used for gathering evidence on crackers that he declined
	  to explain.  (Always leave your audience wanting more).

	- Craig Bishop, "Epoch Infinite Storage Management Systems".  A device
	  to access up to 1 terabyte (1000gigabytes) of disk information.
	  Craig's comment "...its just not possible to fill this thing up."
	  brought forth the comment from Enno "That sounds like a challenge."

	- Ken McDonell, "Remote Terminal Emulators for SQA" I found very
	  timely as I'm been thinking about software quality assurance (SQA)
	  in regards to projects I'm currently working on.  While the
	  environment I want to deal with is different from the one given
	  in the talk, the approach detailed gave me much to consider.

	I have to say I gained something from each presentation. May the other
technical conferences do as well.


-- 
Neil Murray  (R&D Dept)  vk3unx    Email:  neil@wcc.oz.au
Webster Computer Corporation,	   Phone:  +61 3 764-1100  Fax: +61 3 764-1179
1270 Ferntree Gully Rd, Scoresby   
Victoria, Australia, 3156.         A.C.N   004 818 455