This weekend I was at EuroFoo in Enschede, NL. This was a small invite-only opensource-type workshop organised by O'Reilly folks. It was a great deal of fun. There were quite a few Perl people, but the most important thing is that most people weren't Perl people. Don't get this wrong, I do like Perl people, but I always see them at conferences, so it's nice to see different people doing different things with different ideas ;-) And boy were there lots of ideas. The fun thing about EuroFoo was that there was no schedule. We made up the schedule on the first night.
So first off, we'll have some shiny lights. A couple of Fotango employes had thrown together a terabyte of storage. So that's five 250G drives RAID5-ed over FireWire. The glowing lights were just a bonus. We had it slurping/serving HTTP / iChat / DPAP. Oh, and we gave a little storage talk early on. Fotango needs lots of storage, and wants to do it with commodity components. The discussion turned more towards syncing later on.
Some of the interesting talks were discussions about a European OSCON (London too expensive, maybe Amsterdam or other, Europe already has lots of big cheap tech conferences though), Blinkenlights, the BBC creative archive (no DRM, by the end of the year, and I hate licensing), opening up BBC programme info (although we really want the content), and Perl on your mobile.
But more importantly we had lots and lots of discussions outside the sessions, or the beer track as I like to call it. Lots of crazy ideas. The great thing is that everyone there was a "thinker" and a "do-er". Practical open source hacking.
It was a great experience. Many thanks to everyone there. However now I must colllllaaappppsssseeeee....
