CeBIT 2010

I'm amazed at all the technical people living here in Lawrence, Kansas, so I've decided to do a series of interviews to highlight what our small college town has to offer the international tech community. Recently I sat down with local author Stephen Figgins at a coffee shop to talk about what's new in the latest release of the popular Linux in a Nutshell book.

If you can't make it to LinuxCon this year, you can participate remotely through our live video stream, which includes all presentation slides. Keynotes are FREE and three days of conference sessions are only $99!

Last week I took the 20-minute BART ride from the East Bay over to Moscone West in San Francisco to visit what was once known as LinuxWorld and is now OpenSourceWorld, Next Generation Data Center, and CloudWorld all rolled into one event. Like many others, having been to previous LinuxWorlds, I was curious to see how this re-branding and grouping of events would pan out. LinuxWorld had been getting quite the panning (no pun intended) over the last five years or so, so could the new event cut the mustard and reel back in its once committed group of sightseers?

Recently, five college professors spent an intense five days with Red Hat employees and other members of the free and open source software (FOSS) community. Red Hat called the experience POSSE (Professors' Open Source Summer Experience). The goal of the week was to show how FOSS could be used in post-secondary education, and to create a community to further the goal.

O'Reilly's Velocity Conference, held June 22-24 in San Jose, California, was one of the most relevant conferences on the state of the Web.

FISL 10.0 in Porto Alegre, Brazil was the best yet, for many reasons. For a long time I have been impressed with how the FISL organizers (most, if not all of which are volunteers) have brought together government, industry and the community to put on an ever-larger and more complex event.

When he attended a rally in Munich this month, Richard Stallman took time out of his busy schedule to talk with our News Editor, Britta Wülfing. The conversation covered everything from Software as a Service, to patents, protests, international politics, and protecting your freedom.

The South by Southwest Interactive conference purports to showcase the best minds and brightest personalities in emerging technology. The Interactive portion of this year's event took place from March 12-16 in Austin, Texas. The entire SXSW festival is composed of Interactive, Film, and Music conferences and turns the city of Austin into one large media fest.

Great designers understand far more about building web sites than just generating markup and style rules. They know that organization, layout, color scheme, and even writing style are fundamental to creating a successful web presence. Head First Web Design treats each of these subjects and dozens of others with thoroughness and flair.

Self-contained pre-conferences marked day zero at the seventh annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), including the Women In Open Source (WIOS) conference, Open Source Software In Education (OSSIE), a Fedora activity day, two training tracks, and a Zenoss community day. One mini-conference grew large enough to spin off as a self-contained entity: the Demonstrating Open Source Healthcare Solution (DOHCS) conference, now in its third year, examined the comparatively low-profile work undertaken in the medical field.