Planet::Articles
I send this report off to Linux Australia detailing our activities for the past few months. I’m posting it here for posterity, because we had a pretty good couple of months:
- Registrations have been open for a month now, we’re about to equal our record for Early Bird registrations,
and should reach our limit of 80 Early Bird tickets this week(we actually sold our last 20 early bird tickets in one day. oops
) - Our CFP closed in early April, presentation submissions were up 25% — a record haul by quite some amount. International interest has increased a lot too, benefiting from on-the-ground promotion I did at PyCon US in March (many thanks to the Python Software Foundation for funding my trip).
- We’ve announced our first keynote speaker, Alex Gaynor (core Django, PyPy and CPython board member; PSF & DSF board member); our second keynote presenter is confirmed, and we’ll be announcing that in due course.
- Our programme committee met on Friday, we’ve selected our programme in its entirety. We have a great selection of local and international speakers lined up. Speaker acceptances will go out shortly.
- We’re finalising the details of our financial aid scheme. We hope that this will make PyCon Australia more accessible to people who could not otherwise afford to attend.
For those of you reading along at home, registrations are still open, and we really want you to come along. This is going to be the biggest PyCon Australia yet, and is going to feature one of the strongest programmes of any regional PyCon anywhere — all the details are up at http://2013.pycon-au.org/register/prices
We’re down to just over 20 early bird registrations left of our original quota of 80. That means that we’ll probably run out of Early Bird tickets before our deadline of Friday.
The big announcement to every mailing list I can think of will happen tomorrow, so today’s a great chance to to get in before the tickets suddenly disappear.
Early Bird Registrations start at $165 for individuals, with discount registration available for students at $44. All the details are at the PyCon Australia 2013 web site.
At the recent PyCon North America, I presented my lightning talk on coding in Python in a way that is sure to keep you employed.
This was my first time presenting in front of an audience of thousands (2500, I believe), but I’m pretty happy with how it went.
It’s embedded below, or it’s available over at YouTube.
[!IFRAME FILTERED! ]
Just a friendly reminder that PyCon Australia – running this year on July 5–7 in Hobart – has just opened Early Bird registrations. All details are on our website: http://2013.pycon-au.org/register/prices
Can’t wait to see you all register!
Hamish and I went kayaking today. We paddled out from Roaring Beach several K's to a beach he's never been to before. He had a ball. I took some amazing photos, videos and tracked it via Google Maps.
Except we caught a boomer of a wave in which broke on the back of the kayak seat which had a pocket containing my phone in a hitherto waterproof bag.
As a result I was later re-introduced to the age old formula:
salt + electricity = magic smoke
So all of that data was lost and I'm currently without a smartphone. As Hamish said "How will you take photos and videos of me?". I'm more concerned about how I survive without constant Internet connectivity.
R.I.P. Google Nexus.
Now for the tough choice: Samsung Galaxy SIII or ASUS Padfone 2? I wonfer if I can boot Debian on either or them...
I picked a bad time to rebuild my laptop this week. I've been tracking Debian 7.0 (Wheezy) since it was frozen and using Enlightenment 0.17 (E17) for yonks. When I rebuilt my laptop, E17 was no longer available. The reason for the removal is essentially a result of the good news that a stable version of E17 has been released.
Hopefully the Debian Pkg-e Team will be able to build the entire suite of E17 modules to bring a complete E17 experience to Debian.
If you're not ready to run Debian unstable and would like E17 on Wheezy, you can run this command:
apt-get install e17 -t unstable
It's still version 0.16.999.70492-2 but it's better than no Enligtenment at all.
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Walking to my car this afternoon, I had the misfortune to find the naked body of a woman hanging from a tree:
More Hobart randomness.
I've still got some Ubuntu servers in production that I've not transitioned back to Debian. One of them needed to be upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 but it would not recognise that a new release was available at all. Yep, nearly 12 months after 12.04 was released. It reported the following:
$ sudo do-release-upgrade
Checking for a new ubuntu release
No new release found
After some serious head scratching and giving Google a good work out, it turned out our hosting providers had kindly placed a proxy line in /etc/apt/apt.conf
Acquire::http::Proxy "http://proxy.engineroom.xxxxxx.xxx.xx:3128";
Once this was commented out, do-release-upgrade did it's thing. Broken upstream proxy, grumble grumble grumble
The South Hobart tip-shop gods were smiling on me this afternoon. I went there after work to score a cabinet I'd seen the week before but in typical tip-shop fashion, good stuff goes fast and the cabinet was gone.
However for the last six months I'd been itching to move to a standing desk, with an eye on the AUD$28 IKEA conversion.The only catch being there is no IKEA in Tasmania, which until that point had been a good thing 
Whilst I missed out on the cabinet the tip shop finally delivered on the standing desk. There was the equivilant of a lack side table for $5 but the real score was the Ergotron Neo-Flex® LCD & Laptop Lift Stand with a 20" DELL P2011H monitor still attached for $40:
Let's take a look at the savings here:
- Ergotron Neo-Flex® LCD & Laptop Lift Stand- ~$330
- DELL 20" P2011H monitor: ~$209
- IKEA Lack side Table: ~$12
- Total: $551
- My Cost: $45
I took the lot home, plonked it an old table we'd had lying in a paddock for 10 months, bolted on an old sliding keyboard tray I had in the rubbish pile and voila!a standing desk is born:
Just had to clean the dust off and now I'm dancing while I hack. Happy days!
Breathtaking. Surely there are legal ramifications for this:
This means that Nokia has deliberately been wiretapping all traffic that has been advertised as encrypted on Nokia handsets - including but not limited to banking, dating, and corporate secrets - and looking at your secrets in cleartext.
This means that Nokia puts itself between your bank and you, and presents itself as YourBank, Inc. to your phone. This wouldn't normally be possible, if it weren't for the fact that the phone had been specifically designed for this deceptive behavior, by installing a Nokia signing certificate on the phone.
Nokia has confirmed this behavior in correspondence with TechWeek Europe (my highlights):
What's most unsettling is that no techies inside Nokia leaked this before it went live.
Full Story: Death Twitches: Nokia Caught Wiretapping Encrypted Traffic From Its Handsets
