Bits from the DPL

Hey folks,

At the risk of sounding like a broken record here, apologies for
taking so long to write this. It's been a few too many weeks since I
wrote my last summary. In the last couple of months, I was ill for 3
weeks (as you may have seen from my blog post[1]) and otherwise very
busy. I've been struggling to catch up with everything, but I think
I'm just about there.

So, what's up?

Debconf!
--------
Debconf 8 [2] has been and gone. We had an excellent time in Mar del
Plata, with the usual mix of great technical talks and lots of
socialising. The local orga team put in a huge amount of work to make
the conference happen, and they did astoundingly well. I'm sure there
are places where they'd disagree (*grin*), but as far as I and other
attendees could see everything ran smoothly. Woo!

Due to the typically long travel distance to Argentina (and,
therefore, the high cost of travel), unfortunately many of our
developers could not make the trip this year. However, the video team
did an amazing job this year [3] - a combination of live streams of
all the talks plus volunteers forwarding questions from IRC meant that
people could stay involved despite the distance.

For those of us that did make it down to Argentina, it was great to be
able to meet up with friends old and new, and to have some very useful
technical discussions. As ever, people came away re-invigorated and