Connectivity withdrawal was an issue on the first day of LinuxWorld, where I was trying to do some posting from the event. Doing batch uploads at the end of the day just aren't as exciting. So, here's a quick rundown of Day One, I'll have more when I have more than a few minutes before I need to go to sleep for three hours before heading back.
First sessions of first days at events are always amusing, as the various people charged with providing information for the participants learn that very information for themselves. But, I think for the most part, this has been one of the least painful starts for a "industry" conference I've been to. Brainshare last year perhaps painless.
Mark Shuttleworth opened the conference, which was the right choice for so many reasons. Firstly, everyone knows Mark in the local industry. He's an industry icon despite being a geek, because he identified by intuition something which initially probably got a few laughs directed his way, but eventually that laughter was silenced.
Mark's speaking, while having a few ums and ahs, was confident and relaxed. The talk wasn't strictly topicced, but the main focus was on change and opportunity, with specific attention on future desktop environments and human-computer interaction. It was geeky in some parts - diff and patch could perhaps been explained to the non-geeks - but the remainder was high-level without losing value. Overall, a great opening choice, and a good presentation.
And now the first of a few swaps and changes in the conference occurred, with Oracle changing their presenter. Oracle , as expected, focused on Linux the platform, which had little value to me, but pushed the "enterprise-ready" message to some new people. Oracle's got the name to deliver that message, even if I personally question the lack of interest in Open Source that I feel from them in general. Oracle guys are welcome to try convince me otherwise, of course.
Then, a minor venue confusion issue (first session, first day chaos) for the first on the "workshop" track, but Ross Addis from Impi fired up his presentation on contributing to Open Source software, with specific interest to South African Open Source projects. Constructive criticism on the talk - great topic, but an introduction should lead into the meat of the talk, and one should avoid asking questions of the audience when you don't really allow them to answer. Other aspects of audience participation worked, but a more structured approach might have had more value. (While I'm being a bit down on this particular talk, Ross gave an incredible keynote presentation at a previous conference, but I don't seem to have written about it.)
The second swap and change: due to some issue, the Microsoft talk was moved from being at the same time as Ross's talk, and another presentation was on which I was interesting in attending. We chose the right group, as the speaker was not able to make it.
Lunch was served, which was rather decent. Definite conference circuit material.
Paul Furber then did a Python presentation, mixing code, interpreter usage, and background. A good talk overall - confidence was there, as well as the ability to admit a mistake in the interpreter work (demos are always fraught with danger). Lots of interested people attending, lots of good Python vibe in general at the conference this year, great questions, and me being put on the spot explaining Zope and Plone without any slides or preparation. But hey, it seemed to work reasonably well.
I skipped the rest for the most part to explore the Expo. I'll cover that in more detail at another time.
I returned.to catch the tail end of the Microsoft presentation - the third swap and change was that the speaker from Microsoft was changed. It was a pretty middle-of-the-road also-ran sort of talk, which didn't draw much attention from the conference-goers. No questions were asked - I was somewhat tempted to probe various comments Microsoft has made over the years (and certainly have continued to make recently) about Open Source, in terms of understanding the different messages from Microsoft on the issue. But people seemed quite keen to get out onto the expo floor at that point, or head home.
I was hanging out with the Rhodes Geeks At LinuxWorld, and they had their plastic arms twisted into going drinking and entertaining Jon maddog Hall, and I was invited to tag along. I'd met maddog at LinuxAfrica in 2001 (I think), and I enjoyed meeting him then, and was not disappointed. Great discussions on micro-brewery and various beers around the world, old-school Unix and Linux tools, and many other things.
Looking forward to today's events - I'll be learning to proctor LPI exams, and proctoring one or two exams. This will hopefully fulfill proctoring requirements for other events, without necessarily having to grab guys from LPI in Canada to come down here. Maddog's presentation is the only one of interest to me during the time the LPI stuff is on, and Lisa Retief (former colleague, and founder of Open Source development company, Sadalbari should be great after the LPI stuff.