It’s 15:11pm and there are only 11 tickets left for linux.conf.au.
WARNING: If you have registered but haven’t gotten around to paying yet then you are going to miss out.
So hop to it. Otherwise you are going to be a sad panda.
linux.conf.au brings about another change
Being Technical Guru for linux.conf.au 2007 was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve had in recent years. It was a lot of hard work but it was totally worth it. Having a room burst into applause at the penguin dinner when you say your the network guy is pretty unbelievable.
I went up to the Hunter for a week to recover from the conference and as usual after linux.conf.au I did a lot of thinking as to whether it was time to try something new. This time change won out at the end of the day and after 6 years at Bulletproof I decided it was time to move on.
At the beginning of March I started as Director of Engineering at Vquence. Since we are a video company it was decided that we each needed to have our own video on the web.
The past three weeks have been so hectic that Bulletproof already seems a lifetime ago. I’ve been involved in everything from setting up the new office and the corporate infrastructure to product development.
Joining a startup right at the beginning is always an amazing experience. With just a few people on the ground you always get pulled in a few million directions and there is always a new challenge just another five minutes away. I definitely recommend anyone else to jump at the opportunity if it ever presents itself.
linux.conf.au payment gateway
Some of you may have noticed that we have been having a few problems with the linux.conf.au payment gateway. These have ranged from timeouts due to email and DNS issues to 500 server errors due to one or two bugs.
For those of you worried about duplicate payments, don’t 
We were just sending duplicate receipts for a while. You see Commsecure as well as redirecting the user back to the payment_received page, also does a GET on the page themselves. Which means we effectively receive duplicate transactions for everything and this meant we were sending two receipts.
Other than that the Commsecure setup is actually quite nice and does its best not to let users pay twice. It also seems to be written in python.
I had always tried to avoid python, being a long time perl hacker. In the last few months I’ve been dragged into it kicking and screaming. Scarily I’ve actually come to like it. Its nice having real exceptions! Pylons, Myghty and SQLAlchemy are also pretty cool frameworks and have meant I’ve come up to speed on the website code pretty quickly.
Anyway back to LCA, we are a handful of rego’s away from having 500! Don’t forget you’ve got till the 8th December to pay if you registered early enough to get earlybird rates.
250!
We’ve just hit 250 registrations for linux.conf.au, only 5 days to go before early bird registrations close.
So here are some interesting stats of the attendee breakdown so far:
By Country
| Country | Number |
| Brazil | 1 |
| Canada | 1 |
| France | 1 |
| Ireland | 1 |
| Liberia | 1 |
| Nigeria | 1 |
| China | 1 |
| Singapore | 1 |
| Spain | 1 |
| UK | 1 |
| Croatia | 4 |
| Germany | 4 |
| Japan | 4 |
| Romania | 9 |
| New Zealand | 13 |
| USA | 18 |
| Australia | 188 |
Australia by state
| State | Number |
| NT | 1 |
| TAS | 3 |
| WA | 19 |
| QLD | 20 |
| SA | 20 |
| ACT | 23 |
| VIC | 24 |
| NSW | 77 |
LCA2007 Paper Review
The seven review team met all day Saturday to work out which of the almost 300 submissions were going to make it into the conference.
I had created some statistics based on the reviews the team had performed, this helped the team easily pick the coolest papers and the mildly cool for inclusion and exclusion. Which then left the difficult job of sorting through the ones in the middle.
The hardest job was rejecting papers, even though the team had to pick 80 out of 300 papers I can easily say that the quality of what was rejected was exceptional. They would almost all be included if we could hold a 3 week conference.
Here is some info from those on the review team on how to make sure your paper is near the top of the list.
Of course what would statistics be without pretty graphs, I’ve posted daily and cumulative submissions graphs. As expected this proves that people always leave things till the last minute, and sometime a little bit later than that
One enterprising individual even tried to submit something yesterday!
Software Freedom Day - AV and ISPs
This Saturday is Software Freedom Day, the main Sydney event sponsored by SLUG will be being held at UNSW, more specific details can be found at the Sydney SFD page.
As part of the lead up to linux.conf.au 2007, the AV Team is going to be using this day as a trial run to test out some of the technology we will probably be using at the conference, this currently includes
- Flumotion for streaming of talks
- Streaming from a scan converter for slides
- Recording to DVDs using a consumer DVD recorder for post production and upload to the website
- Standard recording to DV Tape as a backup
Apparently I will also be giving a workshop at 1pm, I say apparently because as usual we get to justblamepia.com. For the unwary, suggesting to Pia that you might be able to give a talk means that you will The talk is currently titled How to build your own ISP - But why you shouldn’t, it will focus on the right way to set one up from scratch from my experiences at ZipWorld and Beagle Internet.
just blame Pia!
At a couple of linux.conf.au meetings we kept coming across the same recurring theme, everything just seemed to be Pia’s fault
So one dark and rainy night justblamepia.com was born.
We even get to blame Pia for this post because the site isn’t even ready yet, it is supposed to get a spruce up (I have no artistic skills you see), but she seems to have stumbled over it overnight.
Just blame Pia!