EuroBSDCon 2008 will be Oct. 18-19th at the University of Strasbourg, France. NYCBSDCon 2008 will be October 11-12th at Columbia University. BSDCan 2008 will be May 16-17th, in Ottawa, Canada. AsiaBSDCon 2008 will be the 27-30th of March, at the Tokyo University of Science, Tokyo, Japan EuroBSDCon's dates were recently announced, which is what caused this post. Has anyone noticed that not so many years ago, BSD conventions were just informal gatherings held at Linux-centric events? An interesting change.
Dru Lavigne posted that the latest issue of the Open Source Business Resource is available; this issue being about "open data".
The 1.12 release is out now, and should be available on any of the mirrors. I'm blockquoting the announcement:
This release is primarily a maintainance update. A lot of work has been done all over the kernel and userland. There are no new big-ticket items though we have pushed the MP lock further into the kernel.
The 2.0 release is scheduled for mid-year.
Of the current big-ticket item work, the new HAMMER filesystem is almost to the alpha stage of development and is expected to be production ready by the mid-year 2.0 release.
If you're a student, start thinking about potential Summer of Code projects, as Google's starting their 2008 edition.
BSDTalk 141 has Kris Moore from PC-BSD talking about their recent release 4 of PC-BSD's packaging system, PBI.
Matthew Dillon's latest HAMMER update covers the last 3 items needed, and it's almost-but-not-quite testing time.
I'm changing the layout of the pkgsrc binary archive; see my message to kernel@ for details.
Ohloh.net keeps statistics for a variety of open-source projects, including DragonFly.  It tells a story mostly based on source code analysis.  Which committer for DragonFly has the least commits?  Me!  Of course, it's my news articles from this blog that show up on the project page, so it's missing out on what I've heard called the "atmosphere" around open source projects.  Hubert Feyrer seems to think the same way.
Pardon while I indulge in my favorite language, but OnLAMP.com has some interesting stuff on mod_perl6 (the linked presentation is interesting) and REST, shown in a way that is both terse and complete.
The most recent FreeBSD progress report is out; among other things, it talks about work on multi-IPv4/IPv6 jails, TCP cleanup, and TCP reassembly optimization.   Interestingly, I think there's related work in DragonFly - the DragonFly jail changes were about a year ago, and Jeff Hsu's work on the DragonFly network stack seems similar. I doubt there's many people on the planet with the brainpower and time for this, but it would be interesting to have a large-scare compare/contrast of the different BSD styles for solving problems in code.
Matthias Schmidt has updated pkg_search with a '-s' option, which provides the long description of the item(s) found in the search.
Dru Lavigne's latest blog post has a pile of good links in it; I'm just going to point at it and tell you to make with the clicking.