This year's linux.conf.au — which will, despite the name, be held in Wellington, New Zealand — is fast approaching. For those waiting to get in on the action up front, the time to act is now,...

In the Ubuntu world, we release a new version of Ubuntu every six months, and inside each Ubuntu release cycle we cram in a huge amount of work. Through the cycle there is a sync with Debian, a merge of our patches, six alpha releases, a beta, a release candidate and all the feature development, bug fixing and other work that goes into making our favorite Operating System.

What's the first thing you should do if you're thinking of developing software for cloud computing? At ZendCon, Zend Technologies user group yesterday, three members of a five member panel answered the same way: adopt Simple Cloud API, the open source cloud services interface.