LCA2009 CFP Closing Soon

So, you contribute to Open-Source? Got something to say? Want to recruit others to your project? Want to spread the word about cool stuff? Looking for recognition for your contribution? Then you should consider responding to the Call For Presentations for linux.conf.au 2009!

Submissions close in about a fortnight, so you need to get your skates on and read up on making a submission, and then submit your proposal. You won't regret it - being a speaker at linux.conf.au is very worthwhile :-)

linux.conf.au 2009 - Monday January 19 to Saturday January 24, 2009 - the conference you want to go (and be a speaker at if you've got the stuff to say!)

/lca2009 | 24 Jul 2008 | #

Very Sad

It's a very sad situation when whinging leads to other people asking for their feed to be removed from ploa.

Think before you post. The world is listening.

| 10 Jul 2008 | #

ploa poll on which Mikal feed to use :-)

To answer one of life's toughest questions - Should ploa use Mikal's blather or non-blather feed? ploa is now running an on-line poll :-)

Vote now!

[Aside: I'm using yourfreepoll because it's the first one I found when googling - but be warned, there's a google ad over there so if you're sensitive to such things don't go there]

| 04 Jul 2008 | #

Zookeepr - Hearding the Elephants

Awesome! - Zookeepr is seeing some open-development lovin'.

/lca2009 | 16 Jun 2008 | #

The Ghosts of Conference Past, 2009

This past weekend was The Ghosts of Conference Past meeting at the location of linux.conf.au 2009 in Hobart, Tasmania. For me it was a chance to meet with Ben Powell and Leah Duncan, the lead organisers of next year's conference, along with the rest of their team - Garry, Josh "A", Josh "B", Michael E, Kevin and John (I think I got that all right).

Boy! Was it a busy weekend! I flew in on Thursday night, and was met by Michael E at the airport, and took me off to the hotel - via Mt Wellington. If you ever get some free time in Hobart, it's worth having a look. I hear that there's running and cycing tracks leading up the mountain - something some of our regular LCAers might indeed be interested in doing come next January.

The rest of the crowd came in late that night, but I had already hit the sack. Next morning over breakfast the postmortem of Melbourne's conference began - with lots of reminiscing of all the fun we had only a few months ago.

We then met with Ben and Leah and the crew for a facilities tour around University of Tasmania, Sandy Bay where the conference proper will be held. The usual checking out of keynote venue, lecture theatres, tutorial rooms, "secret conference business" rooms, eateries, networking points etc etc etc was had, along with the unravelling of some of the wonderful secret plans lca2009 will hold for us.

After that it was onto accommodation of various grades and costs, walking between the various options to trial run what it will be like in January. We then had some lunch and time to get to know the Tassie team a little better and to start dumping conference knowledge to the team. We continued face to face discussions all afternoon that then continued into the night over food and a few drinks, making for a tired Michael at the end.

The alarm clock rang far too early on Saturday morning for my liking, although it was entirely necessary as we had an early start - lots to get through on the agenda. Breakfast with the other ghosts was highlighted by Steve's talk of deep frying baby ducks, and Donna's excessive coffee consumption.

Saturday was an all-day meeting as we went through the conference line item by line item, with plenty of hints, tricks and tips from previous conference organisers. We talked through things that worked well in the past, things that bombed, and encouraged the Hobart team as they shared some of their plans. By Saturday night we all were simply exhausted - we broke off into a couple of groups with some heading out for curry and Open Day discussions, while others stayed at the hotel and called it a night early on. Both the curry and the conversation was flavoursome, leaving our brains and bellys full.

Sunday was rinse, lather, repeat with more face to face meetings, followed by looking at more venue options. After that it was off to the airport for the trip home, via Melbourne. I slept on both flights, only waking up as the aircrew prepared for landing. An exhausting weekend with little sleep, but a very exciting time seeing what lca2009 will bring - hopefully the weekend helped the Hobart team in their preparation to bring us one fantastic conference in January 2009.

/lca2009 | 11 Mar 2008 | #

LCA2008 Days Four and Five

Thursday

The morning started with Stormy Peters' keynote on Would you do it again for free?. It was a thought-provoking keynote on the motivation behind OSS development. Do open-source developers lose motivation once companies pay them? Once they leave that job, do they continue doing open-source development? Stormy suggests they don't lose heart, but suggests that hackers may move to another of their itch projects if they no longer are paid to hack on the original.

Then it was onto Clinton Roy to talk about Antlr. This was useful for the fact that using YACC and Bison can be black magic, so having another tool in the toolbox is great. Would have been better if we'd gone as far as generating a grammer and hooking it up to show the ease of building something real end-to-end. Tutorials are best if they kick-start usage.

After lunch was the usual high-quality Tridge talk on ctdb. Interesting to see the scaling of Samba instances being almost linear after this work, as well as various tridge hack discussions.

Next was Leslie Hawthorn on the Google Summer of Code program. While being an interesting talk in and of itself, what I really liked hearing about were the developers who were bootstrapped by the program continuing into open-source contribution afterwards. This is a wonderful outcome for OSS. Thanks Google!

Next was Michael Smith with Gstreamer followed by Dtrace by Peter Karlsson. This last one was more of a vendor talk, and would have been better if the presenter didn't spend 20 minutes trying to get video output working on a Solaris/MacBookPro combination, followed by failing to get OpenOffice to display his slides full-screen. That and the 15+ typos in the slides didn't reflect well on Sun or on Dtrace. The talk had so much potential, but the most useful part was the questions by SystemTap developers in the audience - hopefully both projects will benefit was better understanding of each other.

Dinner with Mikal and Steve tonight out at some random Italian place - quite nice food to go with the excellent company. Of course, after dinner on Lygon Street there is no better thing to do than to follow up with sorbet from Casa Del Gelato ice-creamery. Walking down Swanston found us Andrew Chalmers with friends Sam(??) and Amanda. Good hilarity followed, along with a kind offer from Sam and Amanda to bed down on their lounge room floor to save me from the backpackers. Some people are just genuinely kind - I'd never met them before, so their offer was very unexpected. Thank you for your offer and all the best for your trip Europe bound soon.

Friday

Wonderful keynote by Anthony Baxter on Python 3. Anthony presents well, and the confirmation of a supported 2.X series during the early days of 3.X deployment was appreciated. Glad to see that the Python project is taking the opportunity to clean up the inevitable cruft that accumulates in the language and reduce it so hopefully it stays small. Of course I'm biased with python being my favourite language right now, but I found this the best of the keynotes this year.

I went to Ralph Giles talk on Ogg Design Internals, followed by Paul McKenney on efforts to put concurrency into C and C++. Paul is a clever cookie, and did a great job of explaining how the C/C++ standards don't guarantee sequential execution as most people subconsciously assume, with the result being pain and suffering where you don't expect. Fortunately Paul has been there at the standards meetings representing our community's interests well.

That brings us to the afternoon with Keith Packard talking on fixing various X limitations. He started the talk with an Intel announcement surrounding their release of full developer documatation for the Intel 965. Wonderful news! Should mean that advancement on that platform should skyrocket even further, and hopefully spur the other graphics chip manufacturers into providing better support for the developers who generate end-user sales! But I'm preaching to the choir now...

Last talk of the conference for me was Eric de Castro Lopo on Library API Design. Another important topic, but I would have loved more depth.

Moving on, we went to lightening talks and conference close. We had the usual bag of both ok and excellent lightening talks - some of the Gaming Miniconf lightening talks could have been repeated to the larger audience to great effect. Bling bling bling. Notable was Pia announcing OLPC Australia, hopefully making a difference here with that excellent project.

Conference close was a time to reflect on all the cool stuff that the week contained, and gave the chance to wrap up all the loose ends. While Open Day follows on Saturday, the official conference close is Friday afternoon. We also got to meet Ben - and found out that the conference is going to Tasmania for the first time! Cool! Less than 400 sleeps to go now :)

Jeff Waugh went on to announce the transfogrimifation of the Rusty Wrench Award into (hopefully I get this right) the Australian Open Source Awards. It'll be great if the whole community get behind this and it becomes something truely representative of our community here in Australia. Website launch occuring soon.

Finally was the Google Conference Party. A traditional bbq stand-around and chew the fat s'more with conference attendees. A good time was had by all - thankyou Google and Leslie Hawthorn for organising it. Finally two old and tired previous conf organisers wandered back to Casa Del Gelato for that last sorbet of the week, contemplating with great expectations what Tasmania will do with linux.conf.au 2009 next year.

And for the absolutely final thought, a big say thank you to Donna and her team for putting on a very solid and fun conference! Thank you LCA2008 organising team! We know it's been hard-work, but we appreciate your sacrifices to serve the Australian Linux, Free and Open-Source Software community!

/lca2008 | 02 Feb 2008 | #

LCA2008 Day Three

Wednesday

I forgot to mention that I had a great time last night talking to Keith Packard, Jon Corbet and Paul McKenney at the Speakers Dinner. Talking was both technical and social - I really enjoy catching up with these guys whenevr I can get to a conference where they are.

Wednesday morning started with the Bruce Schneier keynote on Reconceptionalising Security - explaining why both the feeling of security and the reality of security are both important. Introduced how the Lemon Market applies not to just used-cars but also to security products and technology in general. Mary has more good stuff to say on his talk.

Actually, before the keynote we had a small issue with chairs not being setup for the keynote. Fortunately the OSS community here in Australia came to the rescue - suddenly 20 people dropped everything to set up 600 chairs in a hurry. Seeing Leon Brooks rolling up his sleaves and just getting the job done was inspiring - thank you Leon.

After that I went to Jon Oxer's tutorial on Second Life and hardware integration for Linux. This was really cool - not just hardware interfacing to Linux over USB, but controlling Second Life objects via the hardware, and then triggering real-life from inside Second Life. A talk to open your eyes to the possibilities. I bought the Arduino kit Jon assembled and plan to play around with that s'more. So far, this has been the conference highlight talk for me. What was fun during the tute was getting this going on Linux running under virtualisation on Mac OS X - just another level of indirection :-)

From then it was off to Jon Corbet's talk on what's happening in the Linux Kernel, and where things are likely to be going. Being primarily user-space oriented, it's great to get this summary at LCA. It's interesting also to see how the linux kernel development process morphs to continue to scale - sociologically very interesting.

Then it was the OLPC report from Jim Getys. This wasn't your usual technical talk, but rather seeing how this technology is making a difference in the lives of the world's most disadvantaged children. I don't think anyone would have left this talk not touched.

From there I sat in on Bdale's talk on Peace, Love and Rockets (link). Bdald was his interesting self - I have no idea how someone so busy can find the time to have such interesting hobbies. He's building his own altimeter because the commercial offerings don't meet his needs - a standard case of scratching an itch. Thanks Bdale for inspiring us to not accept things the way they are.

Wednesday night was the Penguin Dinner. This was at Melbourne Markets and was the most relaxed conference dinner yet. It also was a very cool idea. Spent the night talking to Mikal Still and Steven Hanley - also had a good chat with a husband and wife (whose name I cannot remember) about the conference and where it has been and where it should go. We had a good fun night. I also ate too much sorbet, but am glad I did :-)

/lca2008 | 01 Feb 2008 | #

LCA2008 Day Two

Tuesday

I started Tuesday by going to the GNOME Miniconf in the morning. We had a talk about Conduit by John Stowers, which showed off the potential of having a generic mechanism to sync devices. It's quite nice to be able to visualise data sources and sinks, and to hook them up visually. I'm hoping that many data connectors get written so that the ease of moving data around between web2.0 applications.

Then it was Martin Sevior talking about bringing Sugar concepts (from OLPC) into the desktop. We ended up spending lots of time talking about collaboration and presence - projects like Telepathy and Empathy - to achieve our dreams. Again very nice stuff with great potential.

In the afternoon I moved over to the Gaming Miniconf, which was a lot of fun. Since OSDC 2006 I've been a big fan of pyget, so sitting in on a tutorial by Alex Holkner and Richard Jones on the topic was something I was very much looking forward to. The tute was writing a cross-platform space invaders-style game in python in less than 40 minutes! Quite amazing what can be achieved in such a short time. It helped that Alex types very fast! :-)

Brett Nash then spoke on using Enlightenment for 2d Games. Then it was back to Richard Jones for an intro to PyWeek. I wish I had the time to commit a week of evenings to try it out.

/lca2008 | 30 Jan 2008 | #

Keynotes now for your streaming pleasure!

Just a quick public service announcement - if you're not at the best technical conference in the world today, you can watch the action live streamed to your computer. See Steve Walsh's post.

Thanks LCA and AARNET for making this happen!

/lca2008 | 30 Jan 2008 | #

LCA2008 Days Zero and One

Sunday

Arriving in MEL at around 3pm on Sunday meant that I got to survey the lay of the land ahead of the unofficial conference opening on Monday (otherwise known as Miniconf days). It looks like I wasn't alone, with 80 or so others wandering around the conference venue. Rusty's & Kelly's Newcomers talk on Sunday afternoon was so full that they had to stop people going in.

But now I'm already jumping ahead of myself. I decided this year to stay at the recommended backpackers, which I have to say is interesting. The benefits are that I get a 25 minute walk to the conference venue each day, whereas the problems are that they don't servce breakfast until 8am (too late) and it's a bit too rowdy to get much sleep. Mea culpa.

Back to the conference venue - Rusty led the masses off to the pub, so it was natural to follow. Much socialising continued, including talking quite a bit to Alli, Hugh, George and Tim. I find it really interesting to find out what people have been doing with themselves since the last conference when we chatted.

Monday

Like I said, not much sleep was had, which was a bad thing leading up to my talk on Source Code Integrity and Protection with the sample toy implementation of zign. Fortunately it all went well except for a brown-bag bug that I showed everyone during the demo part of the talk. Still, I got some good feedback from people, so hopefuly the talk achieved it's pupose by making people think about the unspoken assurance of the source code they release.

More catching up with people - Andrew, Grand Pajamaran Donna, Peter, Steve, Stewart, Grant, Eric, Jon and many others. Catching up with the community from all around Australia is one of the big benefits of LCA.

The day was really a jump around the conference as I sat in on various miniconfs - Fedora for Eugene Teo's Writing System Tap Scripts which was excellent and made me realise that a whole class of difficult problems are now potentially solveable, Security for Guy Gershoni's Security Programming in Java and Damien Miller on OpenSSH which did nothing but increase my confidence in OpenSSH's design and team that are supporting it, and Debian for Martin Kraftt's Version Control Systems for Debian packaging. My brain is already full, and its only Monday :-)

The evening was spent out at the University Hotel with Eric, Dennis and Grant chatting about OCaml, writing yet another text editor, multi-national companies that move their software development offshore, Fourier transforms, low pass filters and music genres. Good food and company and a good time out!

/lca2008 | 29 Jan 2008 | #

It's not MS Comic Sans!

I can't let this accusation by Mary go. My presentation was using Marker Felt, not MS Comic Sans :-)

Sheesh :-)

/lca2008 | 29 Jan 2008 | #

Planet linux.conf.au 2008 - Feeds welcomed!

LCA2008 Grand Pajamaran Donna Benjamin recently put out a call on [chat/mel8ourne] for LCA2008 attendees to add their feeds to Planet LCA 2008 by emailing planet at spanner linux dot org do au (just remove the spanner from the works).

I'd like to second that call, but also add that if you can provide a RSS/Atom feed that is LCA 2008-specific then please do so, e.g. my regular feed is http://www.michaeldavies.org/weblog/index.rss, but the feed up on plca2008 is http://www.michaeldavies.org/weblog/linux-australia/lca2008/index.rss (that's with pybloxsom, but a similar scheme should be applicable for your blogging system of choice).

Thanks, and see you at linux.conf.au 2008!

/lca2008 | 05 Jan 2008 | #

24 days until LCA2008

linux.conf.au 2008 is only 24 days away! That's 24 days until the security wisdom of Bruce can be heard in Melbourne, Australia.

But wait, there's more! :-) Have a look at the whole enchilada - another fun-filled, brain-exhausting, week-long party for the Australasian Free and Open-Source Community!

Bring it on.

/lca2008 | 03 Jan 2008 | #

World Domination, part 317

Cool, I've just been publicly called a shadowy underworld evil genius.
Now I just need to work on getting that on a business card :-P

| 18 Dec 2007 | #

linux.conf.au 2008 CFP closing soon

Are you planning on submitting a talk or tutorial for linux.conf.au 2008?

Get your submissions in by Friday 20th July.

And for those of you concerned about the video option - please don't worry. It's entirely optional. We are aware that many people don't have the means or expertise to make a video and get it online - but for those who do, for those who want to, go for it!

** please forward this message to friends and colleagues you believe should make a submission to present at linux.conf.au 2008 **

/lca2008 | 16 Jul 2007 | #

linux.conf.au 2008 Call For Papers (CFP) opens

linux.conf.au 2008 opens up the Call For Papers (CFP). So,

• If you are doing something cool in the linux/open-source world,
• ...and if you can make it to Melbourne, Australia between Jan 28 and Feb 2, 2008
• ...then submit a proposal, and see if you get accepted as a conference speaker. Trust me, it's a worthwhile thing to do!

As someone who is on the CFP Committee, come on! - submit a paper if you're involved in doing something cool/important/different/zany in the open-source world. We want to see your proposal! :-)

/lca2008 | 01 Jun 2007 | #

Planet Linux Australia migration

Planet Linux Australia is in the progress of being migrated to a new server, so please be patient of any disruptions to service over the next couple of days.

As part of the migration, we've also upgraded the Planet aggregator software to Sam Ruby's Venus branch. And not just that, but now all of the p.l.o.a. install (code, config, artwork) is managed in bzr branches.

| 03 Apr 2007 | #

linux.conf.au 2008 Ghosts

This weekend was Ghosts Of Conference Past for linux.conf.au 2008 (otherwise known as http://mel8ourne.org/). Friday night after I flew in I had the chance to catch up with a remote team member for my day job - James Cormack. Over dinner at a nice restaurant with James and Kristy, I was well prepared for the hard slog of Ghosts 2007. Saturday morning was meet up with some of the Linux Australia committee, a couple of ghosts, and some of the Melbourne team met together to debrief LCA2007 and to talk about the wonderful things Melbourne has planned for next year! Ghosts went remarkably well, lots of great discussion - seeing the things that LCA2007 learnt, seeing they things they didn't :-( and hearing about a bunch of stuff that I didn't know happened. Well done Seven, you put on a rockin' conference!

The Mel8 team are well advanced, and certainly look on track to again raise the bar. Donna is going to be a good conference organiser. I always enjoy seeing the transition between Ghosts and the conference proper - the organising team just continue to come up great stuff! Except for the long days (and nights) stuck in a office, ghosts is fun because of the people you get to talk to. BTW, thanks to Red Hat for providing the office facility.

Why is there a photo of Sydney and not Melbourne here? Because for the first time we held ghosts in the city of the last conference, rather than in the city of the next conference. We did this to save on travel costs - so that all of the Seven didn't have to travel.

Ghosts ended with flying out back home on the last flight of the night to Adelaide. Goes without saying I was pretty exhausted.

/lca2008 | 04 Mar 2007 | #

LCA2007 rocks

So from all reports linux.conf.au 2007 rocked. Well done Seven!

Now it's time to block out time next year for linux.conf.au 2008 (aka Mel8ourne 2008). I'll be doing that when I return to work.

Now of course I missed LCA this year, but for really good reasons :-) So in response to those asking where I was - Nathaniel was born just a few days before the conference opening. Next year LCA, next year :-)

/lca2007 | 20 Jan 2007 | #

LCA2007 Programme and Registrations!

The hard-working, hermits-for-a-year Seven have released some further details about the to-be-rockin' linux.conf.au 2007 conference. The salivating geek-hordes gave them no choice.

The conference programme is now available, as is your chance to secure your spot by registering. From what I hear, the stampede of registrations have started, so don't delay - if you leave it too long you'll miss out on the early-bird discount, and maybe even miss out on a spot altogether! Register today, and start counting down - only 75 days to go! :-)

/lca2007 | 02 Nov 2006 | #

Atom complaints

So Russell complains thus "James Purser said I'm betting that your feed is an atom feed. We had the same problem on PLOA with Jeff and Pias feeds when they switched to atom. Planet needs to be upgraded. Well I am using an atom feed, so this probably explains it. Sorry for the inconvenience to the Planet Debian readers, I guess that things will stay the way they are until it is upgraded."

Now Russell, I do't want to have too much of a go, but when Jeff and Pia's problem arose, I upgraded p.l.o.a within about a week. Upstream only had proper support for Atom for about a month earlier that that anyway.

Anyone running an aggregator (p.l.o.a, Planet Debian, etc) is likely to have other interestes too - it's unlikely to be the main gig for anyone. It's just a service that is (normally) happily provided. So if you change to a new, (currently) less supported syndication format, you may find it takes a while for all the aggregation software installs to catch up. Afterall, this is a volunteer-run service - we could have dropped your feed until we had upgraded instead, y'know :-)

| 19 Oct 2006 | #

linux.conf.au 2007 CFP time

linux.conf.au is coming. You can feel it inside. That week-long, sleep-depriving, brain-bursting overflow of excitement and geekyness is coming. And it's less than 6 months away.

Got cool stuff you're working on? Open-Source related? Then you want to submit a proposal to the Call for Papers.

Now.

Why should you bother?

• You will be contributing to the Australian Linux and Open-Source community by inspiring them,
• You might become famous and get recognised by your peers,
• You'll be treated like a rockstar during the conference,
• Employers might offer you a job,
• The pressure of being ready on time will force you to finish that feature for your project that you've been dragging your feet on :-)

Go do it. Submit a paper. You know you want to.

/lca2007 | 31 Aug 2006 | #

Planet Linux Australia upgrade

We interrupt this blog feed to announce that Planet Linux Australia has been successfully upgraded to a new version of Planet.

An unnamed source at Linux Australia's Planet team reports that the reasons behind the upgrade are World Peace and decent Atom support.

Returning you now to your regular program...

| 22 Jul 2006 | #

linux.conf.au 2007 Ghosts of Conference Past

Spent the weekend in Sydney for the Ghosts of Conference Past meeting for linux.conf.au. Typical fly in Friday night, go to the local LUG, crash, up early Saturday, meetings all day, crash, meetings all day, rush to airport humming the last plane out of Sydney's almost gone, fly home, taxi, find my family already asleep, crash and find myself a zombie on Monday morning at work.

A busy weekend - now my 4th ghosts attended (if you include "ours" in Adelaide).

There was an unusual amount of secrecy, but what I can say about the weekend is that the seven are well on track to bring us a great linux.conf.au 2007! I'll plead with the organisers and leak what I can when I can :-) But I will say this - you will be disappointed if you're not there in January 2007!

| 03 Apr 2006 | #

LCA2006 [photo]blog competition is now closed

And.... time!

The linux.conf.au 2006 [photo]blog competition is now closed! Judging will now commence. Watch for an announcement from Mike Beattie for the winners...

/lca2006 | 31 Jan 2006 | #

Planet LCA2006 RSS feed now available!

Due to popular demand, Planet LCA2006 is now even better - an RSS 2.0 feed is now available for your sucking pleasure!

/lca2006 | 24 Jan 2006 | #

LCA2006 Blogging

Are you blogging LCA2006 in Dunedin, NZ?

If so, you'll be pleased to know that Planet LCA2006 is now available for you to read and contribute to.

If you want your feed added, just send email to planet@lca2006.linux.org.au and we'll add you in a jiffy.

And BTW, you must attend the conference opening - Mike Beattie has some surprises to announce that are related :-)

/lca2006 | 24 Jan 2006 | #

LCA2006 has started

Well, the pre-conference mini-conferences have. Rock!

/lca2006 | 23 Jan 2006 | #

LCA2006 programme available

The programme for linux.conf.au 2006 is now available. And there's some surprises in there for those who've been before - 8 simultaneous miniconfs, and 6 streams including seminars and tutorials running side-by-side. More value for money every year. And I know of a few surprises that the conference program doesn't show :-)

Just remember, there's only 7 days of early bird registration still available. Don't you think it's time you registered to come to this great Australasian tradition? :-)

linux.conf.au 2006. Dunedin, New Zealand. 23rd - 28th January 2006 - Register now!!!

/lca2006 | 11 Nov 2005 | #

linux.conf.au 2006 Registrations now open!

If you didn't see the announcement, registrations are now open for linux.conf.au 2006!

Also note that an ever-growing list of speakers and miniconfs are now available.

/lca2006 | 11 Oct 2005 | #

So, just how much money would it take....

So, how much money would it take to make AJ be the Subservient Chicken for just one day? :-)

Any takers? (just so long as its recorded using Annodex, or other free software)

| 04 Oct 2005 | #

LCA2006: paper judging just about complete

I just finished judging papers for linux.conf.au 2006 last night, which really meant transcribing my results into the system and double checking the scores.

Again we have a great range of familiar faces presenting new stuff, and a lot of new faces too. LCA2006 should again be a nice eclectic mix of warm and fuzzy open-source goodness and cool fun - the best conference mix on the planet!

Which of course brings us to you. The excitement is building in the community, the logistics are well at hand, the speakers are almost decided and announced, but are you going to be there? If you haven't been yet, it's time to change that.

linux.conf.au 2006. Dunedin, New Zealand. 23rd - 28th January 2006

/lca2006 | 28 Sep 2005 | #

The masses complain, I fix.

Ryan, it's all fixed.

Well, at least that problem is.

| 15 Aug 2005 | #

p.l.o.a. Updates

More people and hackergotchis added to ploa tonight.

| 18 Jul 2005 | #

LCA2006 Website Up

The linux.conf.au 2006 website has been turned on, replacing the dummy page that was there beforehand. Well done mjb and team!

Hint: book your airline tickets early :-)

/lca2006 | 05 Jul 2005 | #

On p.l.o.a. skin

sjh, have a look at the right-hand pane. What does it say?

As you can see, I'm not claiming the new look is my work :-) Most of the nice artwork belongs to p.g.o - I've just modified it to fit in with the LA website theme. There's more changes to come to p.l.o.a., but given my availability it'll be piecemail for a while, so I rolled out what I had so far.

| 05 Jul 2005 | #

Will he fix it?

Yes I will!

Ok, so I should have said in that previous post that I'll be fixing up p.l.o.a RSN. Just a bit time-strapped this morning :-)

| 04 Jul 2005 | #

p.l.o.a. upgrade - sortof

So I "finished" the p.l.o.a. upgrade, except that some people have found that it looks a bit broken under various OSes, browsers and configurations.

So why did I make it "live" if it's still broken? Astute readers noticed that in preparation for the new skin, I accidentally broke the original p.l.o.a. site. Whoops! So I had the choice of putting back the old site, or pushing out a nearly-but-not-quite-there new site.

The choice was easy - release early, release often :-)

Any reports of yuckiness welcomed. Just make sure you shift-reload in your browser to get the new CSS files before complaining.

| 04 Jul 2005 | #

Logo Update

p.l.o.a. has a new vectorised logo. Gone from

| 28 Jun 2005 | #

Adelaide LUG, huh?

Pia seems to be suffering from post-marital stress syndrome. Or something.

Does she mean Armidale LUG instead of Adelaide LUG (otherwise known as LinuxSA)? Or is this some thinly veiled attempt to overtake the efforts of the incumbent cool organiser? :-)

| 22 Jun 2005 | #