Paw Prints: Writings of the maddog

July has two conferences where I will be presenting, but first I will remind people that the Ohio Linux Fest has extended their call for papers another week to July 7th.

Since I have already submitted the abstracts for my Ohio Linux talks, on July 6th I will be leaving for the FOSSED conference in Bethel, Maine on July 7th to 9th. My good friend David Trask has been putting on this conference for eight years now, and has helped hundreds of school teachers learn the benefits of FOSS for teaching. Lately some of these same teachers have come back and are sharing what they know. Very practical courses in networking, use of Moodle, LTSP systems and more. I will be teaching two three-hour courses, one on “Beginning Linux” and one on “FOSS Multimedia”. Registration includes the option to take just the courses or to live “on campus” in the dormitories of the Gould Academy, and all of the meals (and they feed us very well).

The second conference I will be attending is FISL, in Porto Alegre, Brazil on July 21st to 24th. FISL is Brazil's largest FOSS conference, and has been happening for over 11 years. FISL is a technical conference, with a good combination of end user, developer, systems administrator and corporate contributions. From the site I can see that there are 2636 participants already registered, and knowing the people of Brazil, this is only the start. Last year President Lula attended, gave a great speech with no notes and no teleprompter. It will be hard to top that...but I am sure that the organizers will try!

For those of you in North America who are not willing to travel to Brazil, I would be negligent not to mention the Linux Symposium being held in Ottowa, Canada on July 13th to 16th. I attended the Linux Symposium for many years, and if I had not already committed to leave for FISL on July 14th I would have attended. The Linux Symposium is another very technical conference, with a wide variety of different talks, Birds-of-a-Feather sessions and Tutorials. There is also a “Hacker Bike Ride” on the Saturday after the symposium. Ottawa is a beautiful city, and not that far from the Canadian/U.S. Border.

Comments