Greg Kroah-Hartman kicked off the second day of the 9th annual Ottawa Linux Symposium with a talk entitled "Linux Kernel Development - How, What, How fast, and Who?" to a solidly packed main room with an audience of more than 400 people.

The second of four days at the 10th annual Ottawa Linux Symposium got off to an unusual start as a small bird "assisted" Rob Landley in giving the first talk I attended, called "Where Linux kernel documentation hides." The tweeting bird was polite, only flying over the audience a couple of times and mostly paying attention.

"Here are some news about the upcoming 1st European Lisp Symposium, that will take place in Bordeaux/France on May 22-23, 2008. First of all, registration is now open to everybody, and you can register for the symposium and the accompanying social event at the symposium website..." -- Call for papers: http://p-cos.blogspot.com/2007/12/european-lisp-symposium-2008-call-for....

Please join us for the Sixth Annual Symposium on Hot Topics in Patent Law on July 17, presented by the George Mason University School of Law and co-sponsored by Banner & Witcoff.

Day 3 of this year's Ottawa Linux Symposium featured a number of sessions, most notably a keynote address by Ubuntu founder and space tourist Mark Shuttleworth, who called for the greater Linux community to start thinking about discussing syncronicity, his term for having major software releases synchronised.

"...You can still submit papers to the symposium. The deadline for paper submissions is February 4, 2009, and the program committee accepts both original contributions, including research papers and experience reports, as well as descriptions of work in progress. Again, see the symposium website for more details."

Recently, I attended a small symposium here in Texas, with just over 70 people attending: the inaugural "Texas Open Source Symposium" (TexasOSS). Although small, it was a pleasant conference. Topics ranged from 3D applications to business models, to introductions into the inner workings of the free software community process.

The third day of the Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS) featured Jon 'maddog' Hall talking about his dreams for the spread of the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) throughout the third world as an inexpensive, environmentally friendly way of helping get another billion people on the Internet, along with an update on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, and several other talks.

"The purpose of the European Lisp Symposium is to provide a forum for the discussion of all aspects of the design, implementation and application of any of the Lisp dialects. We encourage everyone interested in Lisp to participate..."