Andrew & Susanne's blog - (Entries tagged as lca)

LCA2010: On LinkedIn

andrew@etc.gen.nz (Andrew Ruthven) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 17:08:24 +1300

Attending LCA2010? Use LinkedIn?

How about showing you're attending on the LCA2010 event on LinkedIn!

LCA2010 - Call for Miniconfs are now open!

andrew@etc.gen.nz (Andrew Ruthven) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:21:47 +1200

WELLINGTON, New Zealand - Monday 15th June 2009 - Linux.conf.au announced the opening of its Call for Miniconfs for LCA2010. Miniconfs provide the opportunity of hosting 1-day mini-conferences on a variety of topics that run for 2 out of the 5 days during linux.conf.au. The Call for Miniconfs will remain open until 17 July 2009, after which time successful Miniconf Proposals will be notified and the best twelve selected to be included on the programme for LCA2010.

"Miniconfs are an important part of Linux.conf.au each year, and provide a great opportunity to host an entire day of sessions specific to a topic", says Andrew Ruthven, LCA2010 Director. "We're proud of hosting LCA2010 in Wellington, New Zealand and hope to see a variety of Miniconf Proposals to showcase the technical expertise of world's leading experts in free and open source software. When you gather IT experts together like this, the collective energy can help shape the future direction of emerging projects and developing technologies. That's what LCA2010 is all about â people getting together and making a difference".

IT businesses, government and community groups from around the world will also have the opportunity to showcase their work through presentations, displays and demonstrations at the LCA2010 Open Day, which will be held on Saturday 23rd January 2010. The conference will open its doors to the general public and highlight the best of breed Free and Open Source technology.

LCA2010 is easily affordable for professionals and hobbyists alike, thanks to generous sponsorship by leading proponents of free and open source software, and because the conference - much like the software - is largely organised by volunteers. If your business or organisation would like to take this opportunity to support LCA2010, please visit http://www.lca2010.org.nz/sponsors/why_sponsor.

Registrations to LCA2010 will open to delegates in September 2009.

About linux.conf.au

Linux.conf.au is one of the world's best conferences for free and open source software! The coming Linux.conf.au, LCA2010, will be held at the Wellington Convention Centre in Wellington, New Zealand from Monday 18th January to Saturday 23rd January 2010. LCA2010 is fun, informal and seriously technical, bringing together Free and Open Source developers, users and community champions from around the world. LCA2010 is the second time linux.conf.au has been held in New Zealand, with the first being Dunedin in 2006.

For more information see: http://www.lca2010.org.nz/

About Linux Australia

Linux Australia (http://www.linux.org.au/) is the peak body for Linux User Groups (LUGs) around Australia, and as such represents approximately 5000 Australian Linux users and developers. Linux Australia facilitates the organisation of this international Free Software conference in a different Australasian city each year.

For more information see: http://www.linux.org.au/

Emperor Penguin Sponsors

LCA2010 is proud to acknowledge the support of our Emperor Penguin Sponsor, InternetNZ.

For more information see: http://www.internetnz.org.nz/

Media Enquiries

LCA2010 Organisers
Email: media@lca2010.org.nz
Phone/Fax: +64 (4) 802 0422

Ghosts of Conference Past

andrew@etc.gen.nz (Andrew Ruthven) — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 11:43:31 +1300

Wow, has it really been two weeks since the Capital Cabal had a bunch of the Ghosts of Conference Past in Wellington? It feels like it was, well, this weekend - and it's only Saturday morning!

One of the traditions of linux.conf.au that works really well is called the Ghosts Weekend. This is when the current organisers invite a selection of previous organisers somewhere for a weekend so they can perform a brain dump about things that went right for them, and in some cases, more importantly, what went wrong. They also go over the organisers plans to make sure that they're on track.

This all leads to a pretty intensive weekend!

The ghosts

We started on Friday with picking everyone up from the airport (my final pickup was 00:30, then we had to find some soda water for Ben & Leah's duty free Gin!). Saturday morning was a walk around all the venues, yes they're all within walking distance of one another. After a fantastic lunch at Coyote's we then hit a meeting room and got down to discussions.

If you're running a discussion like this, and most people in the room have laptops then I highly recommend using Gobby to take your notes. Everyone has a slightly different take on things, so note down slightly different things. Fantastic.

Our discussions continued over dinner on Saturday night which was at Fujiyama Teppanyaki, which is certainly a fun place to have dinner. Stewart did an amazing job at dodging the bit of cooked egg that one of the chefs flung his way!

nom nom nom

Sunday was back in the meeting room for continuing discussions. Followed by a few well earned beers and dinner at Wellington Brewery Bar. nom, nom, nom.

All in all, it was a fantastic weekend and I'd like thank the Ghosts who attended, give apologies to the Ghosts we couldn't invite and give a huge thank you to Susanne for organising a fantastic weekend that went incredibly smoothly!

LCA2010 in Wellington, New Zealand!

andrew@etc.gen.nz (Andrew Ruthven) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:05:44 +1300

Awesome! Susanne and I have just announced at LCA2009 that linux.conf.au in 2010 will be held in Wellington, New Zealand! The website for LCA2010 is at www.penguinsvisiting.org.nz.

During our announcement we wanted to show a fantastic little clip from 42 Below about Wellington. But following the tradition of Hobarts annoucement at LCA2008 we had sound FAIL, so it didn't work. Please, go and check out the video clip on YouTube. (But ignore the bit about winning a trip to Wellington, the competition has finished.)

Follow the signs, visit Wellington!

Keysigning - done!

andrew@etc.gen.nz (Andrew Ruthven) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:46:00 +1300

Wow, this is probably the first time I've managed to sign the verified keys from the GPG keysigning within 24 hours of the keysigning finishing.

One task crossed off my imaginary todo list!

MythTV Mini-conference - a success

andrew@etc.gen.nz (Andrew Ruthven) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:00:00 +1300

The MythTV mini-conference has been and gone and from my point of view from organising it, it was a total success. We had a stack of great talks (including an impromptu talk by Paul Wayper on the customised wooden panel on his Dell laptop).

Nigel Pearson was great, giving us all an insight into the development of MythTV, not only how the development process works, but also the complexitiy of the internals of MythTV. That was really interesting.

An unexpected bonus was that all the talks were recorded. We weren't expecting the A/V stuff to be setup until Wednesday, but it was all ready to go (after one minor cable change) on Monday morning in our room. Fantastic! A big thank you to Josh and his A/V team. The recordings aren't up for downloading yet, I'll post here (and on the mythtv-users mailing list) when they're ready.

At the end of the day we had a large discussion about what features people wanted to see in MythTV, and in particular what features people wanted to see in MythTV for a 1.0 release. The general consensus was that MythTV as it stands has more than enough features for 1.0. Once the recordings are up I'll write a list of the key items that were discussed.

Finally, thank you to all my speakers, and everyone who came along to listen, and who took part in the discussion afterwards.

Cheers!

MythTV Lightning Talks

andrew@etc.gen.nz (Andrew Ruthven) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 10:00:11 +1300

For the MythTV Mini-conference at LCA 2009 we're going to have some lightning talks, and have a few spare slots.

If you'd like to tell people how great your setup is; your current pet project; or almost anything else, then please let me know.

MythTV Mini-conference Schedule

andrew@etc.gen.nz (Andrew Ruthven) — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 12:28:52 +1300

The MythTV Mini-conference schedule has now been published here. If you want to attend the mini-conference you have to be registered for linux.conf.au! The talks are:

MythNetTV: by Michael Still
Transcoding in MythTV: by Paul Wayper
MythTV Internals: by Nigel Pearson
Debugging DTV: by Steven Ellis
MythTV Development from '04 to Now: by Nigel Pearson
Lightning Talks
Presence Awareness
: by Jonathan Oxer
Panel

It is an awesome line-up and I'm certainly looking forward to hearing all about them!

MythTV Mini-conference

andrew@etc.gen.nz (Andrew Ruthven) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 13:10:32 +1300

I just realised that I hadn't blogged about this at all. I'm hosting the MythTV mini-conference at linux.conf.au 2009 in Hobart, Australia in January. How could I have forgotten about blogging this?! The little blurb about the mini-conference is:

MythTV is a personal video recorder (PVR) for Linux which allows
you to decide what you want to watch; when you want to watch
it. MythTV has been increasing in popularity since Isaac Richards
first started working on it in 2002. It is now very usable, and has
several dedicated Linux distributions, as well as several books
written about it.

This mini-conference is intended to bring together both users and
developers of MythTV to discuss topics of interest to both groups.

The programme is looking really good, and it should be a rocking conference. I'll post another blog entry once the programme is officially released.