A quick update on LCA2009. The zookeepr hackathon has been progressing nicely over this weekend, so it looks like the call for proposals can be opened as per scheduled, even if the computer says "no" ;-)

The ghosts of conference(s) past meeting took place in Hobart over the past weekend and some members of the Mel8ourne team as well as a few other previous LCA organisers all got together with the LCA09 team to pass on information and share experiences.

I had been to Tasmania for a few days many moons ago, but had forgotten what Tasmania looked like. Wonderful, even though the grass is a sickly green instead of a healthy brown like on the mainland. If nothing else, 2009 will be the most beautiful LCA to date.

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.