catalyst - 3

WELLINGTON, New Zealand – Friday 24 July 2009 – The LCA2010 Organising Committee have been overwhelmed by the numbers and quality of the papers submitted to linux.conf.au so far!

The success of the papers so far has put us in a generous mood. So we've decided to give all you slackers out there an extension on the Call for Papers by one week!

Call for Papers Now Closing: Friday 31 July 2009 at 17:00 NZST

Remember, to increase your chances of acceptance, check out the Papers Info page on our website before submitting your paper.

Wow, the linux.conf.au 2010 team have had a an awesome response to our Call for Miniconfs with over 32 amazing submissions. But the work isn't over yet!

Our Call for Papers is still open, but closes on Friday. That's right, Friday. If you'd like the opportunity to speak at one of the best FOSS conferences in the world, this is your chance, we want to hear from you!

For more information about submitting a paper, have a look at the Papers Info page on our website.

The linux.conf.au 2010 organising team is proud to announce the first keynote speaker for LCA2010!

Our first speaker has a distinguished reputation in the free software world, with significant contributions to Debian, Ubuntu and OLPC across a variety of areas including development, policy, advocacy, activism, education and writing. He is an active board member with several non-profit organisations including The Free Software Foundation and Software Freedom International, and he is involved in the global discussion of copyright, software patents and free culture.

We'd like to welcome Benjamin Mako Hill as our first confirmed keynote speaker for LCA2010!

For information see the full announcement

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 – 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

I run Debian Unstable on my workstations, which can lead to "interesting" experiences with new versions of software. The latest interesting experience was the upgrade to Evolution 2.24. In previous versions the default sort order for folders was the time and date the messages were received on my computer.

Due to some changes under the hood, the folders now appear to be displayed in a random order (at least, on my boxes that is the case). You can either go through every folder and change the order by right clicking on the column headers (like "Subject") and going Sort by -> Received.

Don't use the "Date" header, because if people sending you email have the wrong date on their computers (which is so common) the messages appear in random places in your messages list (and with over a 1,000 messages in my INBOX that is an issue).

The catch with this method is you have to change each folder. I have a lot of folders. A lot.

But it turns out you can save the view setting once you've made it in one folder and then apply it to all of them. Make the change. Then go View -> Current View -> Save Current View. In the dialog window that appears, select the "Replace existing view" option, and then select "Messages" from the list of views. Now, because Messages is the default view applied to folders, everything just works.

Thanks to mrcha in #evolution for pointing in the right direction of custom views.

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!

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!

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!

From www.enum.nl:

ENUM NL has set up the ENUM Linked In group for developers and others interested in new technology. The initiative is intended to increase familiarity with ENUM and stimulate the development of new applications.

‘The ENUM Linked In group is a global forum for knowledge, good ideas, applications and talent,' commented Elmar Duiveman, ENUM Project Manager.

By creating the Linked In group, ENUM NL is looking to encourage discussion about ENUM and its potential applications. Before long, demos will be made available to inspire more developers to start working on new uses for ENUM technology. An on-line ‘ENUM lab' is also planned, where developers can put their innovative ideas to the test. If you would like to learn more about ENUM or share what you know, visit the ENUM group.

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!

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!

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.

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!

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.

Here's an email I've just received about a new IPv6 group in New Zealand, if you have an interested in the future of IPv6 in New Zealand, please join:

A workshop at held at InternetNZ on the 28 November in Wellington
saw the formation of a New Zealand IPv6 Steering Group. This group includes
representatives from telecommunications carriers, internet service
providers, ICT vendors, and industry and user associations. The members of this
steering group consist of invited senior representatives from the following organisations:

InternetNZ
TUANZ
ISPANZ
Telecommunications Carriers Forum
Digital Development Forum
Telecom
TelstraClear
WorldXChange
Orcon
FX Networks
REANNZ
Canterbury Development Corporation
Kordia
Cisco
Vodafone
Juniper Networks
Alcatel Lucent
Braintrust


This steering group will primarily be concerned with high level discussion
regarding the deployment of IPv6 within New Zealand. The steering group
will not necessarily be a place where technical discussion takes place.

As with so many things these days, a combination of business and
technical expertise must be bought together to solve a given problem.
To this end at the same workshop a Technical Special Interest Group
(TechSIG) was also established.

The goals of this group are:

. To act as a central point for IPv6 technical discussion within the
    New Zealand Internet community.
. To identify to the IPv6 Steering Group any business related barriers
    to IPv6 deployment which have been identified by the SIG's
    technical contributors.
. To comment and provide potential solutions to technical related barriers
    identified by members of the IPv6 Steering Group.
. To stimulate the production of relevant technical documentation.

The co-conveners of this group are

Andy Linton
Nathan Ward
Brian Carpenter
Dean Pemberton

A mailing list has been created and membership is open to all interested
parties.  Subscription details can be found at the link below;
http://listserver.internetnz.net.nz/mailman/listinfo/ipv6-techsig

I would encourage anyone who has an interest in the deployment and growth
of IPv6 to join and contribute to the list.

Please do not feel that this is a 'Networking Specialist Only' list. The
deployment of IPv6 (and depletion of IPv4) has just as significant an
impact on system administrators and content/application providers as it
does on network administrators. I welcome all technical viewpoints onto the list.


Thank you for your time.

Dean Pemberton
(Co-convener, IPv6 Steering Group Technical SIG)

S and I are looking at switching ADSL providers to a provider when also provides a phone service over VoIP, and I thought, "Hey, since I'm going to switch our phone over to VoIP, and our 'net connection will have to be online all the time for the phone to work, it'll have a fixed IP as part of the plan, right?". So I finally found the right person to ask at the new ISP and was told "No". It turns out I need to pay an extra $10 a month for a fixed IP.

Is it just me or is the whole attitude towards fixed IP addresses on ADSL lines crazy? First a little bit of history.

Back in the early days of dial-up Internet usage all users were allocated a fixed IP address. You just got one, I still have my letter from Actrix Networks from 1996 which had my connection information, including my allocated IP address. Then when the number of users grew large enough that ISPs didn't have enough IP addresses available to allocate to more users, users were switched to dynamic IP addresses (so you received a different IP every time you connected). This worked okay since most people were only online for short periods of time, and allowed for the customer base of ISPs to grow, without further exhausting the IPv4 address pool.

So, the reason that the industry switched to dynamic IP addresses was to make the best use of a limited resource.

But now, having a fixed IP address is seen as another revenue stream by the ISPs. Which is crazy. I'm going be online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I'm going to be using an IP address from that dynamic pool the entire time. That IP address will never be available for anyone else to use.

I can get around this by using a dynamic DNS service (which is what I'm already doing). But this seems crazy when my plan new will require me to be online 24 hours a day. If I'm not online we won't have a working phone.

The up-shot? I won't be paying the extra $10/month, I'll continue to use my dynamic DNS service and I'll continue to consume a dynamic IP address never allowing it to be used by anyone else.

Update: It was suggested to me that this could be due to the APNIC IPv4 Guidelines, but APNIC classify DSL as a permanent connection, therefore static allocations are fine, in fact it appears that they expect organisations to use static IP addresses for DSL connections.

Well, as of debian-maintainers version 1.39 (uploaded on 2008-07-08) I'm now a Debian Maintainer.

w00t!

Francois will upload a new version of MythTV Status soonish which amongst other things adds the magic fu required to allow me to upload it directly. Oh, and I've changed MythTV Status to be GPLv3.

More w00t!