I'm out at New South Wales university this week for
linux.conf.au, a tech-oriented conference. This is the fourth time I've been along to one of these (they run every year), and this year it's being held in Sydney, back where the first one was that I came to in 2001.
The free software culture is generating some amazing things - one of the highlights for me has been the talks on the
One Laptop Per Child project - these guys are really thinking how to bring technology to huge numbers of people (their target market is one billion children in the world), which involves quite a lot of rethinking existing ways of doing things. One telling statistic is that 60% of the children in the world have
no power at their place of residence, so requiring a device to be able to draw power off the grid just was never going to work.
Plenty of talks more related to my work as well, the details of which I won't bore my mostly non-technical audience with! Suffice to say it's a nice break from work in the pleasant campus surroundings.