I’m helping (a little) organise the SysAdmin mini-conf at linux.conf.au 2010 (Wellington, NZ) and we’re currently in “call for papers” mode. We’re looking for a range of talks - short, medium, long - on cool SysAdmin related things: Systems Administration, Backups, Security, Troubleshooting, Buying Decisions, Virtualisation, Enterprise Monitoring and Management, Identity Management, Web and Email management, Wiki, Clustering and High Availability, Log Management, Spam and Virus Filtering, VOIP, Ticketing systems, Bootstrapping and automated installation, Configuration Management and packaging.

I am in sunny San Francisco for Puppet Camp. Looking forward to meeting a whole bunch of Puppeteers in person finally. Woot! Actually got a lot of work done on the plane - upgraded to business class - on Pro Puppet. Chapters 1 & 2 are pretty much done and I’ve made a start on Chapter 3. Since I’m not actually technically scheduled to start writing yet that’s pretty damn good.

If you have an interest in open source and haven’t come across Ohloh then you should take a look. It’s a register of open source projects but with some nifty features … using the source of projects it peers into the life and community of a project and shows you the structure and nature of the project. For example, you can find the listing for the Puppet project and see the history and development of the project.

I use a lot of GitHub - in my view it’s the premier Git hosting solution out there and keeps getting better and better. Every now and again I stumble across a useful little trick or technique that I don’t know about. This one is a means to output commits on GitHub as unified diff files. I’ve blogged it because I can’t find it anywhere in the GitHub documentation. The trick is very easy - simply add .

Waging war on drugs is utterly mad. What he said.