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.