This morning the first keynote was by Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute, who explained in computing terms how biology, cells, DNA, RNA, and proteins all fit together. He explained that he gets to play with lots of data with C, Perl, and Java open source programs and that there was no point in giving out the data if you didn't also give out the processing tools.
After that I attended the Apache lightning talks, which wasn't very organised but turned out to be quite interesting. In a short break I got up and asked people to put up their hands if they were using Apache (all), Apache 2 (five), mod_php (five), mod_ssl (15), mod_perl (20). I like quick surveys like that.
A short photo-shoot of everyone with Apple laptops later, I talk part in "Ask Slashdot", which was a little rambling but Rob explained a little bit behind the way he made it easier for slashdot to scale, in a social way.
Stas' talk on mod_perl 2.0 was wonderful. He explained everything in the new Apache from APR all the way to bucket brigades. I think it's time to start using mod_perl 2...
I wanted to go to Tagmemics, but ended up in NetTopBox, which was more a "we want to do something in two years" talk. No code or ideas. Boring!
A quick #perl photo later and now as I write I'm in the Python lightning talks. It's quite interesting as the talks range from writing games to threading. Much like the Perl lightning talks used to be before the cabal took over ;-) I think I'll skip out half way and go to Perrin's "Efficient Shared Data for mod_perl".
A great day!
--Nat
