The Flow of Consciousness

I’ve finally finished my Ontario Linuxfest review.

It’s on BIOS_LEVEL, Sean’s and my Linux advocacy and hardware review site.

Check out the Ontario Linuxfest review!

We just got back from the conference. Wow, what a great day!

I took more than 100 pictures.

maddog gave a keynote similar to his talk at Ohio Linuxfest, so I think I’ll have all the slides between the two presentations.

Of particular interest to me was the talk on open formats. The presenter is the guy who implemented all of the import and export formats for Gnumeric, an open-source spreadsheet program that is a part of GNOME. He basically said that the ODF vs OOXML argument is silly, and that open source people should be advocating open office suites such as OpenOffice.org, KOffice, and GNOME’s office programs (Gnumeric, Abiword, Gnome-DB). He said that Microsoft is doing a very good thing in releasing the specs for its format, and that we wishes that ODF was subjected to the kind of scrutiny that OOXML has endured. I’ll write more on this in my write-up; I took pics of all the slides and made a lot of notes because his argument was so well-developed and his experience so deep that he is really quite authoritative.

We’re headed out now to get some sushi at a nearby Japanese bistro, then we’re headed to the after-party at the Toronto Congress Centre, the same location as the conference.

Keep an eye on BIOS_LEVEL this weekend and early next week: I’m headed to Toronto with Jonathan and Pat for Ontario Linuxfest. I’ll be taking pictures and maybe writing a blog post if I have Internet access.

I covered Ohio Linuxfest a few weekends ago for BIOS_LEVEL. If you missed it, check out the Ohio Linuxfest review at BIOS_LEVEL.

Check it out over at BIOS_LEVEL, Obsidian‘s and my hardware review and Linux advocacy site!

Several members from BIOS_LEVEL attended the Ohio LinuxFest on the weekend of October 3rd. The trip in was easy–Columbus traffic didn�t get us down. Morning session was awesome. Keynote was great, Max Spevack of Red Hat/Fedora gave an talk on community and freedom.

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I’ve got an interest in attending Ontario Linuxfest in Toronto the weekend of October 13, 2007.

I can get a hotel for a little less than $300 for the weekend, and if we can get four people, that’s $75/person. Add in about $70 for 264 miles worth of gas (25 mi/gal, ~$3.10/gal, leave from my house in 16156) and it’s about $92.50 per person plus food. Unfortunately, there is a cost of registration—$20 for students and $40 for not-students. I have a feeling that will keep quite a few people out.

maddog is one of the keynote speakers. There are a few other talks I want to hear, too:

• Khalid Baheyeldin – Performance Tuning and Optimization of High-Traffic Web Sites
• Ian Darwin – OpenMoko: Free your phone and your mind will follow
• Mike C. Fletcher – One Laptop Per Child
• Jody Goldberg – ODT vs. OOXML
• Sarah Pullman – Yoga for Geeks

If you’re interested, leave a comment on hit me up on Skype or AIM.

The Columbus-based conference recently posted a list of the speakers to present at its conference September 29. Warren Woodford, founder of MEPIS, Dave Grega of UsabilityRubric.com, and Jon ‘maddog’ Hall, executive director of Linux International, are among those presenting at the conference.

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