The Dark Doodad

Dark Doodad

It's been a while since I did a blog, so after twiddling the way the front page of the site displays, it's time to post a new one.

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The Dark Doodad

early bird - sold out

It's official! As of 17 minutes ago, early bird tickets for linux.conf.au are no longer available. They sold out less than a day before EB would have closed otherwise.

linux.conf.au 2008I would say we had estimated it very well, but we all know everyone leaves these things to the last second ;-)

Next milestone, here we come!

In other news, your tax invoice is now available as PDF from your registration status page too.

the election

Once in a while I can be bothered watching (political) news on TV. Yesterday was such a moment and it struck me once again that what with both the libs and labor (but mainly the libs) yammering on about the economy, it looks like you'll be expected to elect an accountant, not a new government.

How boring. 

eating in mel8ourne

You're attending linux.conf.au, the sessions have finished for the day, the food court is closed and now you and your friends are in desperate need of food, but you don't know where to go.

This should be a problem no more. Melbourne has thousands of restaurants, many of which are only a short walk from our conference venue. The main restaurant strips are marked in purple on the map page, but a purple line isn't helpful in finding out what is available.

time machine, kinda

With hard disks getting larger by the month, keeping all your data backed up can be tricky. Raid will give you reliability, but no possibility of taking your data off-site, and tape drives are expensive.

I found myself needing to keep backups of an 80GB raid array for a small office server, and recalled an article I had read a few months ago in Linux Journal. The article details how you can keep snapshot backups of thumb drives on your harddisk... and that made me think doing the reverse should be workable too.

x86_64 lightning extension

I'm not sure why, but it seems pretty tricky to find a v0.7 copy of the lightning extension for thunderbird on amd64. (Ubuntu Gutsy only comes with v0.5)

This is the version that supports remote calendars and is as such much more useful than the versions that don't.

I had a go at changing the targetPlatform tag in the i686 package yesterday, but that resulted in my Thunderbird being broken and not even displaying mail correctly. Not good.

Anyway, to make a long story short, today I compiled one and please find attached lightning 0.7 for x86_64.

linux.conf.au update

I suppose it's been pretty quiet on the linux.conf.au front since we've opened registrations, so perhaps an update is in order.

Things are progressing well and we seem to be tracking okay. Data is being generated for graphing purposes :-) There are 16 days to go until Early Bird registrations close!

Nothing major has broken as of yet (*tap*) and we're just about to do some updating on the main site.

Until that's done, here is a quick listing of the social programme for those who asked:

  • Speakers Dinner - Tuesday Jan 29, 2008
  • Penguin Dinner - Wednesday Jan 30, 2008
  • Professional Delegates Networking Session - Thursday Jan 3, 2008
  • Open Day - Saturday 2 Feb 2008

Shiny Newness

After quite a long time of hosting drupals for clients, I've finally succumbed and set one up for myself.

On the todo list are fixing up the theme, fixing tiny-mce integration and adding my gallery in here, so it can magically show the image of the day and stuff like that.