At Linux.conf.au 2014 in Perth, I gave a talk about the “scopes” system I had worked on at Canonical as part of the Unity API team. Scopes were pluggable search providers for the Unity dash. A future version of the framework drove the launcher on Ubuntu Phone.

I've just got through the first one and a half days of LCA2011 in Brisbane. The organisers have done a great job, especially considering the flooding they have had to deal with.

Due to the venue change the accommodation I booked is no longer within walking distance of the conference, but the public transport is pretty good. A bit more concerning was the following change to the wiki made between the time I left Perth and the time I checked in:

Today was the first day of the mini-conferences that lead up to linux.conf.au later on this week. I arrived yesterday after an eventful flight from Perth.

I was originally meant to fly out to Melbourne on the red eye leaving on Friday at 11:35pm, but just before I checked in they announced that the flight had been delayed until 4:00am the following day. As I hadn't had a chance to check in, I was able to get a pair of taxi vouchers to get home and back. I only got about 2 hours of sleep though, as they said they would turn off the baggage processing system at 3am. When I got back to the airport, I could see all the people who had stayed at the terminal spread out with airplane blankets. A little before the 4:00am deadline, another announcement was made saying the plane would now be leaving at 5:00am. Apparently they had needed to fly a replacement component in from over east to fix a problem found during maintenance. Still, it seems it wasn't the most delayed Qantas flight for that weekend and it did arrive in one piece.

At Linux.conf.au 2004 in Adelaide, I gave a talk about controlling GNOME applications from Python via the accessibility framework.

I gave a talk at Linux.conf.au 2003 about the experimental “EggMenu” framework I had been working on. This code was eventually merged into GTK 2.4 as GtkUIManager.