Wed 1 Nov 2006

Programme For linux.conf.au

The linux.conf.au conference programme has now been made available. So everybody can drop what they're doing and finally book that trip to Australia they've been wanting to make.

Will be interesting to see how some of the changes made for this year's conference work out. They have moved the tutorials to the middle of the conference and put keynotes on both mini-conference days. I like the former idea, not necessarily thrilled about the latter, but I guess it's an attempt to include the mini-conferences a bit more. The Saturday has become a bit of an intentionally unplanned day. Kudos to the organisers for taking some risks here; if they don't try new things out, we'll never know if they work.

One item of interest (possibly only to me) in the timetable: Andrew Cowie is giving a tutorial on building GNOME/GTK applications in a few different languages. Back in 2004, I gave a tutorial on the various pieces of the GNOME platform, intentionally keeping it language-neutral. It seemed to go well. A couple of days later, at the conference dinner, Andrew came up and introduced himself to me and said he ahd gone back to his hotel after the tutorial, grabbed the GNOME-Java bindings and played around with them until the early hours of the morning. Sounds like he has continued to remain interested and involved. I have no idea what Andrew's level of interest in GNOME application development was prior to my tutorial, but he was somebody who stood out in my memory for making the effort to come up and say "thanks" and talk about he'd followed up what he had just heard; I remember him sounding really enthused at the time and he was exactly the sort of person — a third-party software developer — I was trying to reach.

Topics: conferences/linux.conf.au