Agylen

I’m writing this while sitting at the Austin airport terminal, waiting to board my plane to Detroit and from there back home via Schiphol. Weather conditions are: overcast with slight rain. As the plane is quite small (Canadair Regional Jet) it might be a bumpy ride.

I was reflecting on the ApacheCon US 2006 that ended Friday. Overall impression was rather good: I got to meet and hang around with a whole lot of people, some of which I had the occasion of seeing face to face for the first time, like Dave Johnson, who says he’s been reading my blog since the beginning. Hi Dave!.

Quality of the talks was uniformly good, with no letdowns, at least as the sessions I attended are concerned. What left me a bit disappointed was the level of the keynotes. Keynotes should be entertaining and provocative, while still being relevant to the conference’s main theme, in my opinion. That was not the case here, I think, so I suggested, on the feedback form, that ApacheCon should try to find better keynote speaker. When I was at OSCON, the quality of keynotes was awesome, with some exceptions. People like Damian Conway, Kathy Sierra, Robert Lefkovitz are really able to captivate and cheer the audience.

Maybe they are too expensive for ApacheCon, I don’t know. But if we can find some company to sponsor them, we could maybe recapture some of the audience that, according to the people I spoke to, has been dwindling with respect to previous editions.

As far as my own talks are concerned, I think they went rather well. I was a bit nervous on the first one, since it was the first time I was presenting it, and the audience was small, a fact the tends to put me down and even more nervous.

The second one went really smooth, instead. Having presented it already twice makes me much more confident and pleasant, I think. Audience was bigger, and asked a number of fairly relevant questions in the end.

One last note: Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil”, but Fitz is totally evil when playing foosball, especially when coupled with Geir.

Cliff Stoll is one heckuva bizarre guy. Judging from the pictures, he looks like the quintessential mad scientist, but you had to be there to hear and watch him perform live to realize how really mad he is.

It was nice, for once, to attend a keynote that wasn’t about computers at all—apart from the expected disparaging remark about the damages caused by the adoption of computers in education. I honestly have no idea what measuring the speed of light has to do with Open Source, but seeing oscilloscopes, wave generators, lasers and mirross brought back memories of simpler times.

Now, if someone knows what was the glaring error in his talk and whether anyone won the cool glass Klein bottle by finding it, I’d be glad to know.

Update: I just realized that my post could be interpreted as painting a negative picture of Cliff. Actually that’s not the case. He’s mad, but in a good way. If you haven’t, you should definitely read The Cuckoo’s Egg and Silicon Snake Oil. Food for thought.

Technorati Tags: apachecon, austin, cliff stoll, klein bottles.

Henri started it, Paul and Garrett followed suit, then Brian chimed in. So, without further ado, here’s my TODO list for ApacheCon US 2006:

• Meet people.
• Maybe do a photography walkabout with Ted.
• Buy boots (I need a good address in Austin for that).
• Drink beer.
• Do a couple of talks.
• Not attend Leo’s talk (Nothing personal, Leo, it’s just that your talk is at the same time as mine. I would have loved being there, but maybe you’ll be able to present it again to your colleagues on your new super secret job, so that I might hear it).

As you can see, I’m a lazy butt compared to the other fine fellows quoted above. But considering that I’m only arriving on tuesday night, the jet lag, the two talks I have to prepare, the number of job-related calls and emails I’ll have to answer, the boots, the photography, and the beers, I don’t think I’ll have much time left.

Technorati Tags: apachecon us 2006.