Last week the busy organisers for the linux.conf.au 2009 conference launched a new website and put out the call for speakers and miniconf organisers.

We are looking forward to lots of great proposals, and while we can't accept them all, we expect LCA09 to have a very full and interesting schedule.  Read More »

zookeepr.org has been updated to include some more relevant instructions on how to get yourself a copy of the conference management software and how start making changes.

Here is John Ferlito's announcement:

Hi,

After last month's hackfest I've done a bit of work cleaning up all
the Zookeepr infrastructure so we can move forwards with development.

We now have a core team. For the moment this consists of

Jiri Baum
John Ferlito
Joshua Hesketh

Our responsibilities basically entail

Organising the project
Keeping the code clean
Merging other people's code
Managing the bugs
Keeping the website up to date

I've also reorganised the infrastructure.

We have three mailing lists

zookeepr-core@zookeepr.org - Core Team Discussions, Security Issues
zookeepr-devel@zookeep.org - General development discussions
zookeepr-announce@zookeep.org - Announcements

Down the track I see us adding a -users but I don't think there is
much point right now.

All of you are currently on the -devel list. If you aren't interested
in day to day development discussions then it might be worth moving to
-announce.

The website http://www.zookeepr.org has been moved from trac to
pmwiki. At the moment the wiki is closed and you should ask me for an
account if you want to actively make changes. I'm open to making it
public but didn't really have time to put anti-SPAM measures in place.

For source code management we will continue using bzr but are going to
use launchpad for hosting as this makes management a bit easier. You
can find the trunk as well as everyone else's branches at
https://code.launchpad.net/zookeepr

To add your own branch, basically just sign up for an account on
launchpad.net, go to the project and select "register branch"
(https://code.launchpad.net/zookeepr/+addbranch). This can be either
hosted at launchpad or mirrored off your own server. Once you have
registered your branch, zookeepr will provide you with instructions on
how to pull and push to your personal development copy. Once you are
done making your changes in the branch, please select "propose for
merging" where somebody on the core team will merge it into the trunk.

We will also use launchpad for bugs at https://bugs.launchpad.net/zookeepr.
I didn't bother moving any of the bugs from trac as none of them
seemed relevant any more.

So that's about it from me. I think our next step if for the 09 team
to create some blueprints in launchpad for what they need and start
filing bugs like crazy for us to all start working on.

Lets get hacking!

Cheers,

John

Important parts to note is that we recommend using launchpad for reporting bugs, creating branches and proposing your code for merging.

Happy hacking!

So a few weeks back a few of us flew into Melbourne to meet up with Jiri and other members from previous LCA conferences to discuss, program and work on zookeepr - the software that powers the conference.

Hackfest report:

On the weekend 23-25.5.2008 a zookeepr hackfest^[1] was held.

The zookeepr hackfest this last weekend was a great success :) . Myself and the LCA09 team really appreciate everybody's help, input and company during the weekend.

Attendees:

• Joshua Hesketh (2009)
• Josh Bush (2009)
• Jiří Baum (2008)
• John Ferlito (2007)
• James Iseppi
• also present for part of the time were Peter Lieverdink (2008), Donna Benjamin (2008), Ben Powell (2009), James Turnbull (2008).

The event was very generously held in the homes of Peter and Donna (Friday) and James Turnbull's (Saturday and Sunday).

We made a lot of progress discussing both long-term and 2009-specific changes and in cleaning up the code and working on CFPs and Registration. However the most valuable part of the weekend was being able to pick Jiri's and John's minds about the code.

Some notable changes:

• John F spent most of the weekend fixing up the testing suite for zookeepr (test coverage is now 36% overall) and making a new website for zookeepr.org
• James Iseppi and Jiri refactored code for account registrationand tied that into CFP's and Conference registration. James also cleaned out a lot of lca08 specific code
• Josh Bush fixed up all of the CSS and started validating the HTML. He also made things look sexy.
• Joshua Hesketh added a very (very) basic CMS for editing plain content pages and set up the menu and also continued moving hard coded stuff into configuration files
• Peter Linderdink and James Turnbull found typos and bugs and helped out where they could. (Including Peter making an algorithm for CFP review!).
• Ubuntu Hardy^[2] was agreed as the current target platform; nothing is now required to run zookeepr other than what's in the bzr repository and the Ubuntu Hardy packages listed in the INSTALL file.

Clearly on top of this work a lot of other bugs, code reworking and other stuff has happened :).

For those interested in hacking on zookeepr please note that the LCA09 branch is hosted on launchpad in my repository here:
https://code.launchpad.net/~joshua.hesketh/zookeepr/lca09
John is updating the zookeepr.org website to contain some more instructions on how to get started hacking. There is still lots to do for the conference, but expect linux.conf.au to be updated soon with some more information soon. If you are keen to help out and contribute towards conferences to come, shoot me an email: josh@nitrotech.org and I can help you out getting started and point you towards some tasks that need doing.

A few photos can be found on Josh B's flickr page here: http://flickr.com/photos/cheeseness/sets/72157605311163915/

LCA is scheduled the 19th - 24th of January next year and we hope to see all of you in Hobart for the 10th installment of the world's best open source conference.

Let me know if you have any questions :-)!

1.

A hackfest is where programmers program and rock out

2.

Please, no distro wars! Hardy was chosen for it's LTS and recent libraries which make for easy maintenance.

Hmm, so recently on two of our blog articles^[1][2] there has been some interesting spam in the comment sections^[3].

As you can see the messages could nearly be mistaken for a legitimate (but somewhat confused) comment. Clearly spammers are looking at the content, following links and looking at what links to my blog posts to determine (somewhat) relevant spam. Whichever method they are determining what to post, it's still quite obvious that it is spam. But it does make you wonder how long it'll be until spam and artificial intelligence is good enough to post information as realistically as humans? In my opinion, when this happens, we'll actually have useful spam. It'll be just like wikipedia, without the editors^[4].

(PS: They also got past my CAPTCHA!...^[5]).

1.

What can Linux do for the Average Joe?

2.

Diving into GNOME Development

3.

The spam has since been removed.

4.

Disclaimer: Wikipedia's editors rock and ensure the information is accurate. No spambot could do this!

5.

Shock, horror!

Just thought I'd post a quick blog message about our recent completion of the University of Tasmania's project to deploy Linux Live CD's on computers for conducting exams.

For the full announcement, please visit this link.

I hope to keep you up-to-date with the progress and outcomes of this little test project.