As recently announced, the fifth Italian Perl Workshop will take place in Pisa (Italy) on October 22nd and 23rd. 120 people subscribed already, and more are expected by the first day of the Workshop. A full list of the accepted talks is available.

Two major Perl events will take place in Italy, thanks to the effort of the Italian Perl users and the Pisa.pm users group.

Here are the details!

I had the pleasure to talk to Amanda McPherson, one of the minds behind LinuxCon, “LinuxCon is a new annual technical conference that will provide an unmatched collaboration and education space for all matters Linux”. Where and where: September 21 - 23 2009, Portland.

Amanda, you are one of the people behind the LinuxCon, one of the most exciting Linux conferences out there. Can you give us some details?

Linuxcon is a new conference created by the Linux Foundation and the Linux community.

The Open Source Convention, or OSCON as it’s more readily known, is an annual confluence of all things open source that has taken place since 1998. From its origins as an informal get together of Perl aficionados, OSCON is now regarded as the place to go for all things open source.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of OSCON, and I was fortunate enough to be a part of that history.

The guys at Perl.it are at it again! The fourth Italian Perl Workshop is taking place next September in Pisa, Italy.

Recently, I attended a small symposium here in Texas, with just over 70 people attending: the inaugural “Texas Open Source Symposium” (TexasOSS). Although small, it was a pleasant conference. Topics ranged from 3D applications to business models, to introductions into the inner workings of the free software community process.

http://lfnw.org

LFNW is the showcase for what people in the Northwest are doing with Linux and open source software. It’s a place for Linux enthusiasts to get together to share their passion for what good software can do. This is an opportunity for everyone… satisfy your curiosity… get free stuff… ask experts… explore the latest in software technology… support freedom… experience the magic of grassroots software.

The 7th Sakai Conference took place from the 12-14 June in the Movenpick Hotel Amsterdam.

Some of you newer readers to my random ranting may be asking what Sakai actually is? Well Sakai is a rather excellent and rapidly transforming Collaboration and Learning Environment. With a solid history of rapid release cycles, ever evolving functional requirements and delivered features, it has a solid set of architectural principles supporting scalability.

July 6 and 7, 2007. Italy discovers “The most advanced open-source database” with the first PostgreSQL Day ever to be held in Italy. On behalf of Free Software Magazine I have interviewed some of the most active members of the organising committee. The event is one of the most important in Europe for the current year as far as relational database management systems are concerned, with conferences, talks and presentations on the usage of PostgreSQL. Entry to PGDay 2007 is free.

Introduction

FOSDEM - a geek trip to Brussels. Going abroad to experience different cultures. Or at least, a chance to eat chips, suffer rain, and watch American TV in a different country. What follows is my diary of the event, told from a primarily personal and social aspect… but with all personal details withheld to protect the innocent and guilty alike.

Well, I didn’t quite make it to all of day 3 of PyCON, but I got a good piece of it, starting with some very nice presentations of scientific software from Enthought and finishing with some questions about the future of Python packaging for GNU/Linux distributions.

I’ve come back from day two of PyCON, exhausted and red-eyed, but also really excited. I’ve learned about several different ways to integrate C libraries into Python, including ctypes which, though an old library, has only entered the standard library in Python 2.5 (released earlier this year). I’ve heard the story of modern cyberpunk heros braving the wrath of the information police, patching code on the fly to evade the notice of the oppressive governments they are exposing for their censorship practices (that is so cool).

This year’s Python Convention [1], being held this weekend in Dallas Texas, started off with an inspiring presentation by an engineer from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project [2] (Ivan Krstić) , showing off the hardware features of the new “OLPC XO 1” prototype, as well as some “dangerous ideas” about its software design: a large part of the user space code for the laptops will be implemented in Python, mainly because of the ease of manipulating the source code. The OLPC laptop software will be 100% free software, not just in principle, but in spirit as well—the assumption of open source design is literally built into the hardware.