After a lovely sunny lunch planning crazy auction ideas, Mark Overmeer talked about Terabytes of Satellite Images with Perl. Only recently can off-the-shelf computers store, process and display hires satellite images (and hence Google Maps and Google Earth). He explained various schemes he had to use to get high performance, such as gziping to save disk IO. One front-end webserver and a bunch of scene processing boxes with largish storage (with as much as possible precalculated). He noticed that ImageMagick is slow (but I knew that) and he wrote a few forking daemons to help him. The message is that machines are now powerful enough to do things we didn't imagine a few years ago, and we can do it in Perl ;-)
