what are we doing today, brain?

Since linux.conf.au Jeff and I have basically been catching up with work and kicking off some new projects. I’m down in Canberra with some clients today and speaking at FOSSACT this afternoon about how to grow the pie for FOSS businesses in Australia. FOSSACT is kind of like a localised OSIA for the ACT. I hope to see the day when FOSSACT partners or joins up with OSIA, as maintaining a clear message of industry cohesion and maturity is important to gaining more influence and credibility as an industry. I’m looking forward to it, as there are some great businesses doing good FOSS work in Canberra, which is particularly important when you consider government is the primary client base in Canberra.

Afterwards a bunch of CLUGers will be meeting at the All Bar Nun for drinks and catch up. Come along if you are in Canberra to meet and geek

My goodness, the last week just flew and now here we are saying “wow, it’s all over!”. I’m still putting all my thoughts together but I wanted to reiterate thanks to everyone, including the Seven team, all the helpers, sponsors, speakers and attendees that all made lca2007 such a sterling success!

Some favourite photos:

Thanks nekonoir, Jeff and Chris! Great photos!

Great story about the virtualisation miniconf, which is the most attended miniconf in all lca2007 and the first to beat Debian!

Speaking at this year’s Linux.conf.au Linux and open source conference in Sydney, Intel software engineer Jeff Dike spoke about three virtualization methods - User Mode Linux (UML), Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM), and hardware virtualization.

See the full story here.

(In reference to the “distro chairs” at lca2007)

Gentoo gets a box and people then have to build the chair themselves! What more could a Gentoo user want? There is at least one satisfied Gentoo user on his chair. It might take a while to build but that chair is your chair and you know exactly what is in it! - Chris Duckett

I love that our media person from Builder Au is a Gentoo nut. Yay Chris! See the rest of the interview here.

Now an independent open source developer based in Tokyo, Haitzler will be returning to Sydney next week to speak about the bulking up and slowing down of open source desktops at linux.conf.au.

Check out this great interview with Carsten Haitzler for linux.conf.au 2007.

I’ve been to the previous two LCAs (2005 and 2006), presenting at 2006. LCA is an absolutely wonderful conference to visit, but the reception to my presentation amazed me - the audience is wonderful, with an excellent mixture of experience levels, and everyone made me feel very welcome. As a result, I’m hugely looking forward to being there again this year. - Matthew Garrett

We’re looking forward to seeing you too Mattie! Interview available at Computerworld

Currently I have two roles: to help people learn tough technical topics with the least amount of pain; [and] to help developers create passionate users regardless of the type of product (or service). - Kathy Sierra

A great interview with Kathy Sierra, the third keynote speaker at linux.conf.au 2007.

Check out this awesome interview with Jim Gettys about OLPC in Computerworld today. Jim is doing a talk about OLPC at linux.conf.au 2007.

You will see that from the base up, our system is aimed at enabling collaborative applications: browsing the Web together, chat, playing music together, and applications where kids learn by doing. Sugar is providing this infrastructure, to make developing such applications much easier.

This is not “just another desktop” system.