Breaking with the weekend tradition of hacking Handel on the laptop in front of the tv, I actually [gasp] went out into the world to attend my first geek-type gathering: Ohio LinuxFest 2005 in Columbus, Ohio.
While the official register count was 726, it sure felt like there were more poeple than that there. Maybe they were trying to stay off The Grid. :-)
Among the days talks and speakers, there were 3 that stood out in my mind.
First, Aaron Seigo from KDE gave a presentation of KDE, including the upcoming 3.5 release. I must say, everytime I walk away from Linix/KDE and see the next release, I'm more impressed than ever. 3.5 looks like it goind to be a hit. Clean. Refined. Polished. He als mentions some highlights in KDE4, the biggest of which is native cross-platform support for the app code ala Windows/OSX. Everyone cheared. I'm not sure how it compared to using the existing Qt libs on Windows.
The second presentation I really dug was Scott Courtney from Sine Nomine Associates. He managed to cram in some very good intro information about the new classes of mainframes using harware VM and Linux, and what it's capable of. I'd heard about VM/Virtualization before on mainframes, by he managed to provide more technical hardware details than the usual IBM marketing speak.
OF course, I had to attend Rich Bowen from Apache Software Foundation talking about mod_rewrite and Jorge Castro talking about Ubuntu.
As much as I personally sway away from Linux (vs. FreeBSD) and Gnome (vs. KDE), Ubunbtu is a damn clean and friendly OS out of the box. Their wireless management app is killer.
All in all, it was a good Saturday.
