Fox Force Five

Linux.conf.au is done and dusted for another year, and its been revealed that we’ll be heading to gorgeous NZ in 2010 - yay! I didn’t have even a spare second to blog from the conference (running a miniconf and giving two papers will kind of do that to you!) but I did write a couple of news stories for ZDNet.

• LCA ‘09: Wikipedia’s new mobile platform - a writeup of Angela Beesley’s keynote. The news hook was the new mobile platform, but I was much more interested in the fact that WikiMedia has set a goal to remove tech roadblocks and get more editors involved in Wikipedia this year, but they hadn’t identified the need to get rid of some of the social barriers which might put people off.After her keynote, Angela told me she’d raise that as a suggestion – I hope she does. Wikipedia is such an incredible resource, it would be a shame if things like the ‘deletion wars’ and other actions by a minority of the community continue to dissuade people from participating. 

• Sysadmins after the cloud - my writeup of Tom Limoncelli’s keynote. As I noted on Twitter, he used his employer (Google) as an example of taking an abundance approach to tech support via it’s famous Tech Stop, but unfortunately they recently laid off a bunch of contractors, including making cuts to Tech Stop headcount. So tech support’s not as abundant at Google as it used to be. (Tom responded here, but unfortunately we didn’t get to discuss it further than clarifying that it was contractors rather than inhouse Tech Stoppers who’d been laid off).

• NZ location for Linux.conf.au 2010 -  LCA weathered the economic crisis despite 8 speakers pulling out, plus LCA raised $38,000 for the Tasmanian Devil.And finally, many thanks to Donna Benjamin for helping out with photos of Linus Torvalds shaving Bdale Garbee’s beard to raise money to help Tasmanian Devils. I’d prefer to have seen Linus in the dunking pool circa 2004, but maybe I’m just a cruel person.