conference

T minus 20626558

cafuego — Sun, 25 May 2008 14:24:40 +1000

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" ;-)

Taswegia

cafuego — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:47:53 +1100

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.

T plus 810875

cafuego — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 18:14:42 +1100

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.

vim ftw. What else is there to say?

And this speaks for itself.

Note that on distros and editors, I've had to group a few single entries into 'Other', so that the graph was actually readable.

T plus 138371

cafuego — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 23:27:33 +1100

... not dead yet!

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cafuego — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:09:44 +1100

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.

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cafuego — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 11:12:09 +1100

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 :-)

linux.conf.au ticketing update

cafuego — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 16:07:11 +1100

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.

Don't despair though! In addition to processing cancellations, we've decided to make available a limited number (around 60) of non-keynote tickets. After all, we can fit more people into all the theatres combined than we can into the keynote venue.

Again, mini-conf speakers will be offered a ticket first, then the waiting list and if there are any left, we will open up registrations for these tix.

In addition, we will release a number of day-tickets for the mini-confs only. On one of these tickets you can attend a single day of mini-confs. They don't grant access to the penguin dinner or the main conference days and you won't get conference shwag (though you can of course order an extra t-shirt or dinner ticket).

If after all that you still miss out, consider volunteering. You'll be in the midst of things all week long :-)

you're about to miss out

cafuego — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 15:03:25 +1100

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.

To volunteer, email v o l u n t e e r i n g @ m e l 8 o u r n e . o r g and we'll take it from there.

osdc reprise

cafuego — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 17:07:28 +1100

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

a spot of php tweaking

cafuego — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 12:59:27 +1100

Well, as it turns out there is a ready-made fix to some of the horrid inser-input-filtering problems I - and probably any PHP coder - encounter.

This morning was the first time I saw Rasmus Lerdorf speak and, although his views on web security want me to give up coding in general and become a potato farmer more specifically, he did point out some tools to make it a lot harder for a macilious user to abuse any web app you write.

The pecl filter module contains ready-made data validation and input filtering functions that you can relatively easily stick on the top of any page that takes user input and impose some saniation. Additionally, you can force a default filter on all GPC vars.

A short but helpful tutorial is available at http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/1113