Tuesday, 9th May 2000
Parkroyal Hotel
Alice Street, Brisbane
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QAUUG 2000 Conference Program
Tuesday, 9th May 2000 Parkroyal Hotel Alice Street, Brisbane |
The 2000 Conference Program includes:
Please submit your Conference Registration as soon as possible. Conference registration includes a buffet lunch, morning tea, afternoon tea and post-conference refreshments.
We would like to thank our Sponsors for making
this event possible.
The Keynote speech will explore the area of the law and IT. Historically new industries have created headaches for lawmakers and IT is no different. This talk will discuss topics from the areas of Intellectual Property, Industrial Relations as it relates to IT employment and work contracts and the implications of the new federal privacy laws. The speakers, Susannah McAuliffe and Hamish Fraser, actively work in these changing fields of law for McCullough Robertson Lawyers.
Stallion has developed new networking technology which delivers site to site IPSec VPN tunnels at speeds which scale to 512 Kb/sec using low-cost dial-up analog or ISDN Internet connections whilst eliminating the shortcomings of prior connection aggregation schemes. The new solution provides secure, scalable end-to-end bandwidth over an arbitrary number of Internet connections and does not require special provisioning by an Internet Service Provider (ISP).
David will discuss the shortcomings of today's Internet connection technologies, which offer forms of bandwidth improvement through aggregation of dial-up connections. He will cover the practical limitations with established and new aggregation, bonding or bundling methods, which do not scale and require ISP intervention.
Stallion has solved these problems with the ePipe product. ePipe is a standalone network appliance running a version of OpenBSD which was ported to the small footprint ePipe platform by Stallion. Additional products under development will bond multiple, generally available, xDSL, cable, T-1 or E-1 Internet connections together for site-to-site VPN tunnels in the 512 Kb/sec to 20 Mb/sec range without requiring special ISP intervention at the Point of Presence (PoP).
Two years ago, Mincom embarked on an ambitious project to build a new Mine Monitoring & Truck Assignment System based on leading edge technologies including Java, CORBA, publish-and-subscribe, XML and wireless IP. This presentation will summarise the technical and management lessons learnt during this time.
SpeechBot is an experimental index of all the words spoken on a selection of popular US radio shows. Before SpeechBot you might (in rare cases) have been able to read transcripts for some radio programs and you might have been able to listen to recordings of some programs, but you couldn't easily search for a specific word. Available on the web at http://www.compaq.com/speechbot, SpeechBot makes it possible to find and play exactly the portion of an audio program you're interested in listening to. It is the largest audio index available today on the web.
The SpeechBot system runs on an eclectic mix of UNIX, Linux, and Windows machines.
I'm going to speak about our experiences developing the site, concentrating on how we discovered and rectified usability problems present in our first prototype of the user interface and how it is possible to build a useful search service despite the less than perfect transcriptions produced by a large vocabulary continuous speech recognition engine.
Providing high availability systems in remote locations presents a number of challenges. Include relatively harsh physical conditions and the situation differs greatly from the traditional high availability scenario of a data centre near vendor support.
BHP Coal operates eight mines and two ports in regional Queensland. These sites host database and technical planning systems based on Sun and Silicon Graphics hardware respectively which have been configured to provide a guaranteed level of availability.
This presentation will cover environmental and locational constraints, design requirements and technical overviews of these systems. Comparisons between the systems will be made with particular reference to the differing design requirements. Incidents and insights gained from managing these installations will also be discussed.
Linux is making serious in-roads into the embedded systems space. With its open source development model and unbeatable pricing structure, Linux is finding its way into all sorts of embedded devices.
This presentation will present some interesting examples of embedded Linux devices, with a technical commentary on the development of these devices. It will cover in detail the hardware platforms used, the software pieces used in the devices, the tools required, and the process of construction.
All of the example devices are based on Linux running on Motorola ColdFire micro-processors. The session will start with a brief introduction of the Linux/ColdFire environment. This will concentrate on the embedded characteristics of the environment, and the small resource requirements.
The first example device will be a low-cost small/home office router. This device shows true internet connectivity options in an embedded platform. It also demonstrates the usefulness of embedded web servers and other common "server" style applications.
The second example device will be a stand-alone MP3 music decode device. This box is an internet aware MP3 engine, capable of downloading (or streaming) MP3 music format files direct from the internet (or local network) and decoding and playing them in real time.
The third example embedded Linux device will be a small stand alone, network connected, robotic arm controller. This device is similar to real factory floor style machine controllers. There is a nearly-real-time requirement for accurate control of motors and sensors.
The session will end with some thoughts on where embedded Linux will go, and where it may be or may not be appropriate.
Increasingly the WWW is being used as a medium for commerce. One of
the common requirements is to accept payment for goods and services.
The most common way of accepting payment today is via Credit Cards over
SSL. In the future this will include other payment instruments and
protocols.
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