“We’re halfway through and we haven’t even started.”

Today was the first official day of linux.conf.au 2005 and it was the most enjoyable so far. The day was split in two, with tutorials running in four seperate streams.

I decided to attend Building GNOME Applications with Python by Malcolm Tredinnick. Python and PyGTK are two things I’ve been interested in lately, so this tutorial was right up my alley. If you want to download the tarball of his presentation, you can. It contains the code that the talk is based on, even though it’s relatively blank.

It was in this talk that the penny dropped for me with the abbreviation “i18n” or “I18N”. I knew it was a shortening of “internationalisation” but didn’t get what the “18″ part meant. Cound the letters missing and it makes sense :) Like wise for “l10n” or “L10N” which is “localisation”. I smiled when I worked it out.

The second half was spent with Adam in Rasmus Lerdorf’s talk on PHP. Adam had caught the first half when I was doing the Python tute. Rasmus is a good speaker, and I paid particular attention to the part about compiling custom extensions. He used a CDDB example to show how in about 30 lines of C code he extended the CDDB libraries for PHP. Even though he only implemented a single function, it was good to see. I’ve been interested in this also for a while, but like everything else, finding time to play with it has been hard.

Adam and I got dinner at a local pub and spent the night listening to the pub trivia competition next door. We did OK.

By 8:30PM we were home, and I think I’m going to read for a while before catching a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow is another busy day!