Stuff I learned this week
Turns out that Brad Fitzpatrick has been working on open API for sharing information about social networks. I think about 12 people in the world were surprised. Oh, also, SWEET! I'm so tired of reconnecting on every new social network that comes out.

Puppet is a tool to create high-level OS/distro/whatever independent descriptions of computer configuration, including packages to install, config files to edit, etc. in a modular way. I'm going to create a configuration for my laptop so I can reinstall it as often as I want (which is pretty damned often). As a file systems developer, I (a) really love repartitioning my disk, (b) need lots of packages not part of any easily installed package group, (c) am a total control freak.

I've never seen Dave Miller talk before this year's LCA, so I didn't know what a great speaker he was. Upon reflection, open source is saturated with excellent public speakers, like Rusty Russell, Zach Brown, Dave Jones, Matthew Garrett, Luke Kanies, Bryan Cantrill, ad nauseum. I guess the best way to describe it is technical stand-up improv comedy. Now, granted, LCA is strongly biased towards entertaining speakers, but still, this seems unlikely to be pure chance.

Latency in Australia SUCKS! Doesn't Google have a data center here? WTF?

Air New Zealand will serve you food at the slightest provocation.

There's more, but I have to leave for a flight in about half an hour. In summary, a high bit-rate week.