Conferences, Conferences...
The second day of the Desktop Developers' Conference was definitely more lively than the first. In particular, CodeWeavers was very whiney, while TransGaming had a fantastic speaker; one of those people who can keep a presentation fast-paced and exciting. The Mozilla guys put on a good show as well. There was much bashing regarding the latest SVG spec, which for some unknown reason goes far beyond the bounds of vector drawings.

OLS started yesterday. It's amazing how much is packed into each and every day.

First, there was the speech about where 2.7 is going.

Next, I attended the presentation by Keith Packard about where X.org is heading. It's really nice to see how quickly that's moving now that it's an open project.

There was a presentation by Tim Bird of Sony about how they've managed to reduce Linux bootup time to 1.2 seconds on their embedded devices. These are the people who get excited whenever they cut off 20ms of execution time. They succeeded very nicely. It was amazing to watch.

Finally, Len Brown, the maintainer of ACPI, did a fantastic summary of the ACPI spec, where it is at, and where it is going. Len was nice enough to spend an hour after his talk to show me the ropes of debugging ACPI. The situation has been getting worse and worse on my Dell, and hopefully we can clean it up a little. I intend to meet with him again, this time with a serial cable for debugging.

The evening entertainment was provided by Jim Munroe. I didn't hear much of it, but what I did hear was very interesting. Extremely unique.

The real evening entertainment was launching about thirty water ballons from a large surgical-tube slingshot from the sixteenth floor of the hotel everyone is staying at.

An interesting observation someone mentioned is that the presentations, as great as they are, are just an excuse to have the event so that everyone can get together. The presentations are needed to get corporate funding, but the real meat is in the conversations with others.

I was rather dismayed by an eMail I got telling me I have to come to work today.