After a long weekend at SCaLE 8x with some of my favorite people, Linux Journal's Kyle Rankin, Bill Childers and Shawn Powers, I have officially become a huge fan of the annual Southern California Linux Expo. Shawn, Kyle and I had the opportunity to give talks at the conference, and were able to talk with many readers and meet lots of fellow open source enthusiasts. It is always gratifying to hear positive feedback from so many readers in person, and it is fun to see people all over the conference kicking back with a Linux Journal in hand.

I was particularly grateful for the positive reception I received at my talk, and look forward to giving more, as I enjoy any opportunity to have a dialogue with so many like-minded and smart people about what I do behind the scenes here at Linux Journal. My slides are below.

Kyle Rankin's talk on Forensics was actually based on Introduction to Forensics, an article he wrote for the January 2008 issue of Linux Journal. He delivered his presentation to a packed theater with standing room only, and received rave reviews. Slides from this session are available here: http://greenfly.net/talks/security/forensics.html. Slides from his second talk, Network Troubleshooting, are available here: http://greenfly.net/talks/misc/troubleshooting2.html.

Shawn Powers's highly entertaining Linux is for Smart People slides are below.

We also had the opportunity to talk with people from some of our favorite open source projects and companies. Shawn posed for a photo with the guys from the XBMC Media Center project, and I was predictably excited to see some Los Angeles Drupalers representing the Drupal project with a booth as well.

I enjoyed speaking with folks from Aberdeen, who were at the expo demoing some impressive hardware, as well as the Splunk team, the open source delegation from HP and the lovely folks with the Ubuntu-based Qimo children's operating system.

The breadth and quality of the sessions combined with an incredibly low registration fee, as well as the opportunity to hang out with some pretty fantastic people, make this a no-miss event. I am already looking forward to next year!