After some more SQL, some pointing and clicking, some jiggery and a fair bit of pokery, some more useless graphs have appeared. The paper committee members rated all proposals on a scale of -2 to +2, and this of course lends itself to the creation of lies statistics.
After doing some more poking around in the database and twiddling with Gnumeric, I have another pretty graph with usseless stats. This one shows the ratio of accepted versus rejected talk and tutorial proposals by date.
Offhand it seems your chances of having a proposal accepted are higher if you submit in the week just before or after the deadline.
After a few questions on IRC as to what the numbers were on the distro, editor and shell fields for linux.conf.au registrants and a tiny bit of egging on to make me do graphs, here is the first cut; DistroWars, EditorWars and ShellWars.
That's a hands down win for Ubuntu and deb based distros in general.
Looming it is, this conference. We've nearly sold out of non-keynote tickets as well now - 5 left!
This means we can shift the focus of promotion to Open Day, on February 2. We're hoping to attract lots of interested people and have cool stuff to show them. Donna did some posters yesterday, which we will put up at libraries and other public places around town.
In other news, there is a silly competition for LCA-goers. If you're attending you should bring a pencil sharpener and upload a photo of this sharpener to Sharpenr!
All attendees get to vote on the best/silliest sharpener and the winner receives a prize - provided they can both produce the sharpener at the conference and use it to successfully sharpen a pencil in front of an audience.
A mere three weeks from now we'll be in the middle of set-up for LCA.
Earlier this week the conference bags arrived at our storage facility (2 pallets!) and we've now organised a date and time to stuff the bags with conference shwag.
The badges and booklet designs are being finalised, so we can get them printed next week and we'll be confirming the various social events this coming week.
The planet is now live and the delegate wiki only needs linking in to the main site navigation.
Slowly but surely, things are taking shape :-)
Nearly one week ago tickets for linux.conf.au sold out, leaving a lot of people with a tentative (unpaid) registration - unable to attend the conference, as we have a hard limit of 600 on our keynote venue.
These people with tentative registrations are now on a waiting list, and as spaces are becoming available when we process cancellations, we will offer newly freed spaces to the people on this waiting list. Mini-conf speakers get priority, then we'll go in order of original registration date.
Nearly there.
With just on 38 days to go before linux.conf.au opens, we have 13 12 11 9 8 7 6 tickets left to sell, and they're going fast.
If you've registered - but not yet paid - you're probably missing out as you read this! Your place is not guaranteed until you've paid.
So, if you did miss out and you still want to go, consider volunteering. As a volunteer you won't be able to go to many talks, but you'll certainly be part of the buzz.
It's official! As of 17 minutes ago, early bird tickets for linux.conf.au are no longer available. They sold out less than a day before EB would have closed otherwise.
I would say we had estimated it very well, but we all know everyone leaves these things to the last second ;-)
Next milestone, here we come!
In other news, your tax invoice is now available as PDF from your registration status page too.
You're attending linux.conf.au, the sessions have finished for the day, the food court is closed and now you and your friends are in desperate need of food, but you don't know where to go.
This should be a problem no more. Melbourne has thousands of restaurants, many of which are only a short walk from our conference venue. The main restaurant strips are marked in purple on the map page, but a purple line isn't helpful in finding out what is available.
