The Google Summer of Code is upon us once more, and this year two projects dear to my heart are involved as mentoring groups. The first and perhaps most obvious is Debian but a less well known but equally important project to me is NetSurf which just announced that it is participating this year.

If you fancy working on a really cool small embedded browser project this summer, you could do worse than to look at NetSurf.

…or “How much does it cost to fly to Argentina? Fuff that!”

The Ubuntu developer summit (UDS-Intrepid) is in Prague this year. The Debian Developer conference (Debconf) is in Argentina (at Mar del Plata) this year.

Flights to Prague are ca. £100 for two people, return tickets, from Manchester, at convenient times. Flights to Argentina are ca. £700 – £800 per adult, return tickets, from Manchester, not particularly convenient timewise. Or around £1700 for two people, return tickets, from Manchester, at convenient times.

So, basically I have to spend less than £1500 on the accomodation and the Ubuntu conference becomes cheaper than the Debian one to attend. As such, I’ve sent an email to the Ubuntu guys travel agents and we’ll see what they say. I doubt Debian can offer me £650 each for myself and my partner in order to bring the costs thus-far into alignment. Pity really since I love Debian conferences.

(Oh yeah, and not to forget the Lua workshop this year, Washington DC, mid July. Best flights I could find for that were around £600 each also, so no Lua conference for me :-( Not that I’d fly to America right now anyway given the supposed issues with taking any form of electronic medium through customs. At will, they supposedly can take copies of any media you have with you, including USB sticks. So even though my laptop and USB stick can individually be stolen and not compromise my key, moving through US customs might force me to revoke my digital identity. So not happening.)