Wow, I got my name mentioned in the press, I must be moving up in the world :-)

The school tech and head of IT at Westall Secondary College gave me a nice plug in an article called "Ubuntu breathes new life into school's abandoned hardware" just because I help them out with Linux stuff every now and then. Cheers guys!

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.

... not dead yet! 

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.

After over a year of using myth on my laptop (which has tv out) to view video files on tv, I now have an honest-to-god working mythtv setup with dual tuners, remote control and everything.

For my birthday I obtained a DViCO FusionHDTV DVB-T Dual Digital 4, after doing a spot of googling about Linux compatibility. This is a PCI card that, after plugging in, is detected as two USB tuners and an input device.

Hardware 

I had scrounged together a pile of hardware from various defunct machines in the house and been given a mobo by a friend (Thanks Steve!) The system is an Athlon64 2800+ with 512Mb ram, a fanless nvidia FX5200 with an RCA tvout connector and an 80Gb harddisk. (Though all recording is done to a 500GB LVM volume in another room via NFS over 100baseT)

Well, as it turns out Rasmus Lerdorfs filter made apache segfault, so I've disabled it again. XSS indeed!

On a lighter note, this work of art was created last night during the OSDC dinner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfVL_4uRLSo