inamerrata

It appears the first draft of the linux.conf.au 2011 schedule (described by some as a thing of great beauty) is up as of this morning. Looks promising to me.

Of note:

• There’s lots of electronics-related talks (Arduino miniconf, Rocketry miniconf, Lunar Numbat, Freeing Production, “Use the Force, Linus”, All Chips No Salsa, e4Meter, Growing Food with Open Source, Lightweight Messaging, Misterhouse, and the Linux Powered Coffee Roaster). If you count mesh telephony too and don’t count the TBD slot, you can spend every day but Wednesday ensconced in hardware-hacking talks of one sort or another.
• There seems like reasonable female representation — Haecksen miniconf, LORE, HTML5 Video, Documentation, Intelligent Web, Incubation and Mentoring, Perl Best Practices, Project Managers, Growing Food with Open Source; so 7% of the miniconfs and 13% of the talks so far announced.
• Speaking of oppressed minorities, there’s also a couple of talks about non-Linux OSes: pf and pfsync on OpenBSD, and HaikuOS. Neato.
• Maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be a lot of “graphics” talks this year: GLSL, OptlPortal, Pixels from a Distance, X and the Future of Linux Graphics, HTML5 Video, Anatomy of a Graphics Driver; and depending on your point of view Print: The Final Frontier, Non-Visual Access, Can’t Touch This, and the X Server Development Process.
• The cloud/virtualisation stuff seems low-key this year: there’s Freeing the Cloud, Roll Your Own Cloud, Virtual Networking Performance, Virtualised Network Bandwidth Control, and ACID in the Cloud (that somehow doesn’t include an acid rain pun in the abstract). Of course, there’s also the “Freedom in the Cloud” and “Multicore and Parallel Computing” miniconfs which are probably pretty on point, not to mention the Sysadmin and Data Storage miniconfs which could see a bunch of related talks too.

And a bunch of other talks too, obviously. What looks like eight two-hour tutorial slots are yet to be published, maybe six more talks to be added, and three more keynotes (or given the arrangement of blank slots, maybe two more talks and four more keynotes). Also, there’s the PDNS on Wednesday, Penguin Dinner on Thursday, both over the river. And then there’s Open Day on Saturday, and an as yet not completely organised rocket launch sometime too…