Safety first!

As part of getting the catering for LCA sorted, Susanne has been keeping track of everybody's allergies and dietary requirements. Some of the responses were truly helpful:

> Dietary Requirements
> ====================
>
> In registering, you have noted a dietary requirement of:
>
> Vegetarian
>
> For health and safety reasons, please let me know how you react when you eat
> the above foods, how severe the reaction is, and what medical attention you
> need, if any, should a reaction occur. If you have already told us this
> information, then please ignore this message.

When I eat vegetarian food I develop a warm glow of satisfaction,
severity depending on the deliciousness of said food. The best medical
treatment is to take in fluids; either water or malt-based drinks are
fine.

Philip R.

Thanks Phil, we'll keep that in mind! In case of emergency, you may collect said beverage at the rego desk.

LCA delegates are a helpful bunch

Organising linux.conf.au is a lot of fun, partly because we have such a great community. For example, someone took the time to point out how wrong we were in saying that New Zealand power is 240V:

> Technical
> =========
> Please note, the power in New Zealand is 240 volts. If you plan on
> bringing a power board with you, please do not bring one that is
> lower than this (ie: From the USA).

Actually, it is 230 volts +/-6% (ie anything within 216..244 is within
spec). 230V is also the standard in Australia and Europe. The change
from 240V was made in 1997.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_power_around_the_world

Russell S.

So there you have it, 230V +/- 6% since 1997, thanks Russell!

New Miniconf: Bridging the gap

A few people have noticed that a new Miniconf has made it to the LCA2010 programme: Bridging the gap.

Run by Tim Penhey, one of the Launchpad team leads, it's all about reducing friction between upstream projects and distributions by using the recently Open Sourced Launchpad platform.

If you are interested in proposing a talk, email Tim. And be sure to ask him when Launchpad will natively support git ;)

Note that this Miniconf replaces the "Free the Cloud" Miniconf which, for reasons outside of our control, will not happen this year. I'm really hoping that it makes it to LCA 2011 though!

Sysadmin miniconf open for early submissions

Following the Open Programming Languages miniconf, the sysadmin miniconf is now accepting early submissions for prospective presenters.

They have openings for:

• 45 minute double-length presentations
• 20 minute full presentations
• 10-15 minute "How we do things" presentations
• 5-10 minute "lightning talks"

For more information, visit the miniconf website.

If you are interested in presenting in one of the other miniconfs, watch the wiki for their announcements or get in touch with the organisers directly.

300 submissions for the main conference!

Following my post on the incredible number of miniconfs we received this year, I have to say that the paper submissions (both presentations and tutorials) have also impressed the organising committee.

After extending the deadline for another week, we received a total of 300 submissions!

(Can you spot the original deadline and the beginning of the extension on this graph?)

Not only do we have quite a good number of them, but the quality is actually very good. It's making life harder on the reviewers :)

One of them posted this to the papers' committee list:

"Is anyone else finding it difficult to reject papers?"

(The answer of course is YES!)

32 miniconf proposals!

The call for miniconfs is now closed, but we've received a very large number of quality proposals. It'll be quite hard to pick only the best 12 proposals out of the 32 we have received. We could almost have miniconfs during the whole week and have a really good LCA :)

If you want to have an idea of the stress level of the organisers, look at this graph showing the cumulative number of submissions:



As you can see:

• Until the 15th of July, we didn't even have enough miniconfs to fill the two days!
• Two thirds of the proposals came within 4 days of the deadline.

Thanks to everyone who submitted a miniconf, you guys rock!

Easy Ways to Help Improve the LCA Website

If you know Python and are interested in helping to improve the LCA conference management system, zookeepr, then you can:

look on the bug tracker for low priority / wishlist bugs which haven't been assigned to anybody yet.

Alternatively, we'd love to have others help out in these general areas:

• make it work in different browsers
• improve readability/usability of forms (stylesheet tweaks?)
• add more witty/funny comments

How to get started with zookeepr

Grab the latest branch from Launchpad:

1. Download Bazaar
2. Signup for an account on Launchpad
3. Identify yourself to Bazaar:

   bzr launchpad-login username

4. Create a local branch of zookeepr:

   bzr branch lp:zookeepr zookeepr.trunk

Then install the latest development version of pylons:

1. Download the Pylons installer
2. Install pylons:

   python go-pylons.py my_pylons_python_dir

3. Add this shortcut to your ~/.bashrc:

   alias pylons="source /full_path_to/my_pylons_python_dir/bin/activate"

Follow these instructions to install zookeepr and its dependencies, then:

1. Initialise the environment:

   source ~/.bashrc
   pylons

2. Initialise zookeepr (from within your bzr branch):

   python setup.py develop
   paster setup-app development.ini

3. Start the application:

   paster serve --reload development.ini

4. Connect to your own zookeepr instance: http://localhost:5000/"
5. Login using the default credentials: admin@zookeepr.org / password

Yes, the initial setup is a bit of a PITA. Unfortunately, it's unlikely to change since we are, as you can imagine, currently focusing our energies on organising a conference :)

But if you want to help simplify the bootstrapping/installation process or if you're keen on improving the developer documentation, we definitely want to hear from you!

Extended zookeeping weekend

Only one sleep left! Tomorrow a few former "zookeepr keepers" will be flying over to Melbourne to attend a 3-day hackfest on zookeepr, the linux.conf.au conference management software.

Last year's gathering turned out to be very useful to the LCA 2009 team and that's why the Capital Cabal and Linux Australia decided to sponsor a similar event this year.

Each of the participants will have an opportunity (and an excuse!) to finally work on the zookeepr bits they wish were better. I know that I'll be spending a lot of my time on the 2010 wishlist.

I'm looking forward to a very fun and productive weekend with Josh, John, James and Jiri!