Over this weekend the Seven Team and our merry band of helpers will be bumping in and cranking over to conference mode. To those of you already here in Sydney, have a fantastic and restful weekend. If you’re still travelling or yet to leave, have a safe and comfortable journey. We’ll have everything ready for you when you get here.

See you all bright and early on Monday morning for the official conference opening.

… ROCK!

Thus, as of the opening of the conference on January 15th, linux.conf.au will henceforth be known as linux.con f.au.

1. Another cat out of the bag! This time it’s Chris Blizzard, keynoting at linux.conf.au 2007… Chris is a director of the Mozilla Corporation, heads up One Laptop Per Child software development at Red Hat, and has hacked on numerous projects including Mozilla and GNOME. Addicted to the bleeding edge and driving mass adoption of Free Software, he is a one man Statler and Waldorf. Chris has the words “freedom” and “innovation” tattooed under his eyelids. This announcement should not be used as a factual reference on Wikipedia.

2. Foundations of Open Media Software developer meeting! If you’re in town for linux.conf.au, and you’re a multimedia developer working on Free Software, make sure you don’t miss FOMS, on the Thursday and Friday ahead of the main conference. This is a no-holds-barred working meeting put together by developers, for developers, to map out the next steps towards open media and Free Software world domination. Check out the FOMS website for more information.

3. Registrations have shot through the 500 mark, and we haven’t even hit the traditional one-month-to-go Procrastinator’s Spike yet! Jon Oxer knows the score. He can smell inevitability a mile away. Make sure you register soon, to secure your spot at linux.conf.au — not to mention on-site accommodation and dinner tickets… Oh wait, I just mentioned them.

If you want to keep track of all the rocking stuff happening in the lead-up to the conference, subscribe to the linux.conf.au announcements mailing list, and the Seven team’s Atom or RSS feeds.

The only problem with the Pants Palais is the lack of hot caffeine. Yes, believe it or not, the usual occupants just don’t roll that way.

So we’re stocking up on some of Paul Wayper’s Kaldi fundraiser coffee for Linux Australia. Rock on!

Freedom and coffee — two great tastes that taste great together.

1. We’ve been leaping out of our skins to reveal our first keynote speaker, and now we can! He’s a scholar and a gentleman, and leads a double life as a kernel hacker extraordinaire. Without this man, we may have missed an entire generation of kernel hackers, and certainly wouldn’t have had a penguin to go with our GNU — that’s right… We’re going to make you click through to find out who!

2. The linux.conf.au 2007 programme has been updated with all the gory details about each and every session and speaker. You will also find updated information about our miniconfs, and lots of extra-curricular activities before and after the conference. It’s going to be an EXTREMELY busy week… ROCK!

3. We’ve already swept through the HALFWAY POINT for registrations! Please register as soon as possible to guarantee your spot at linux.conf.au, particularly if you’d like stay at the on-site accomodation or bring your friends or partner to the official conference dinner. Despite growing the conference, places ARE limited. We are now accepting credit card payments on the website, so there’s no reason to delay! Aside from procrastination. But there’s not a lot of time or space left for that either.

If you want to keep track of all the rocking stuff happening in the lead-up to the conference, subscribe to the linux.conf.au announcements mailing list, and the Seven team’s Atom or RSS feeds.

Please send us to linux.conf.au is such an audacious and well-prepared stunt (much like their previous work, pictured above), that we’d be heartless not to support it. At least for the first attempt at a stunt like this.

Four students, who have to suffer the injustice of living, learning and working in the Open Source capital of the USA (the entire state of Oregon), want to come to linux.conf.au 2007: and they need our help.

So, if you can, go support the insanity… and dudes, when you get here, the Seven Team will have something special waiting for you at the registration desk.

Nutballs!

Get in quick — on-site accommodation and places at the Penguin Dinner are limited!

1. Registration has opened, with early bird discounts available until mid November! Due to issues with our payment gateway that have delayed this announcement, we will not be able to accept payment immediately. Please register, and as soon as our credit card facilities are up and running, we will contact you for payment.

2. The linux.conf.au 2007 programme has been published! By all accounts, it is completely awesome. We’ve tried very hard to avoid terribly obvious clashes, but with so many exceptional topics and speakers, there will be the inevitable desire to see three or more things at once. Do not try this at home. Complete information about the talks and speakers will be up soon — we just wanted to whet your appetite first.

3. Our first round of sponsors have confirmed their support! Sponsorship is crucial for a volunteer-run, non-profit conference such as ours, to ensure that we can fly in excellent speakers from around the world, host the conference in a fantastic venue, and for all the… extra-curricular activities and benefits for attendees! Many thanks to our sponsors for contributing to linux.conf.au 2007.

Plus, we’ve updated the linux.conf.au 2007 website with lots of cool new stuff, such as flickr images on the front page and a feed of the Seven Team’s blogs about the conference — Atom coming soon.

Within less than two hours, we’ve already had 20 registrations. Get your skates on!

It was hard reading through the test logs, looking at the people and topics we had to decline. I was sorely tempted to sprinkle a few buglets into smackdown (the shell script equivalent of a plunger detonator), to accept a bunch of the really good talks we didn’t have room for. Turns out I sent rejection emails to all of the miniconf organisers, who were already given notice, positive and negative, a couple of weeks ago. Oops. We sorted it out in post.

Last night we mapped out the first — and possibly last! — draft of the schedule. We still have to get feedback from the review team, but aside from adapting to change as it’s thrust upon us, the programme looks good to go. But you’re still gonna have to wait for it!

Jaq, being a total rocktease, has put up some blurry camera phone pictures of the programme. So unless you have Movie OS image enhancement software, you’ll just have to suffer in your jocks!

The night before the Boston Summit, I joined the linux.conf.au 2007 programme review team meeting by phone. Despite the horror of a 19:00 to 02:00 meeting, I had it easy: Our reviewers had already spent countless hours doing personal ratings of the 280 submissions we received; it’s pretty hard to get into a fist-fight about reviewer opinions over the phone; and I got to schlep off to see Jon Stewart halfway through.

Leading up to the CFP close, we were pretty happy with the quality of submissions, but kinda disappointed with the quantity. It seemed like we wouldn’t even hit 150, so the review team decided they wanted to review every submission. Then we hit the traditional, ever-punctual, post-extension spike:

Booyakasha!

The personal ratings process — when individual reviewers separately rate each proposal — took its toll. I had to assure quite a few concerned onlookers that Rusty’s review-rage commentary was not actually linux.conf.au policy!

After the group meeting, Mary wrote a cuddlier version, based on criteria the review team used throughout the decision-making process. It turns out that culling 80% of about 300 great submissions is hard, and sometimes you have to suffer a few arbitrary choices here and there.

For all the heartache, we have a fantastic result: We received more submissions than ever before, and have an extremely impressive line-up of speakers, talks, miniconfs and tutorials to show for it. We’ve created a substantially larger budget for travel assistance, so we can bring out the very best speakers, no compromises.

We’ll be in touch with hopefuls over the next few days and have the first cut of the programme published soon after that — ahead of schedule!

Update: Erik also blogged about his experience on the review team.