The JPUG conference yesterday here in Tokyo went really well, I think. As I've come to expect, a well arranged conference, and a lot of interested people there to listen.
For me the day started when I realized I had not finished my slides(!) The slides themselves were finished, but I had some highlighting to do (on the screen shot slides), and I had to polish a few minor things. So the time after breakfast was well spent on that. Around 11:30, Ishikawa-san came to pick me up at the hotel and we went to the SGI conference room where the talks were.
The conference itself started with Hiroshi-san doing a presentation on npgsql. He also showed a video of Francisco giving a welcome speak (originally Fransisco was supposed to be at the conference, but he was unfortunately not able to make it). Some minor technical issues, such as the video playback hanging and repeating one word over and over again, but still nice... Can't say much for Hiroshis talk, given that I didn't understand a word (other than the code slides), but as usual he was very persuasive...
After that, it was my turn. It was a pretty big crowd, about 100 people according to the numbers I heard (see picture, as seen from where I was standing). I think the talk went pretty well, and people did seem interested. I had a translator who translated everything I said into Japanese. I'm was quite impressed by her - she knew nothing about PostgreSQL (or really about technology in general), just the language. But the way she was able to remember a set of three to four sentences and then translate it all, with just a few very quick notes, was very impressive. And from what I heard, the translation was good - can't verify that myself, of course. Last time I spoke here (with Dave and Andreas) we were talking from transcripts that were translated beforehand. This time, the translation was live.
Once my talk was over, I had an interview with a reporter from Nikkei Business Publications about PostgreSQL on Windows in particular and some general things about PostgreSQL. Hopefully, it will turn into a nice article.
The rest of the day was spent with talks by Enomoto Atsushi (from Ximian/Novell) about ADO.NET in Mono, and by Jun Kuwamura about using PostgreSQL for LDAP on Windows. (picture as seen from my position in the back of the room, during the LDAP talk. I confess to checking my email during the talk) Again, I can't really speak for the contents of the talk, as I didn't understand much. But there were pretty screen shots...
Once we packed up after the conference, we went for a JPUG dinner at a place called something-or-other Beer Station. In English! I understood what it said on the door. And given that it said Beer station, what could I do but approve... We had a nice dinner, and many interesting people from JPUG to talk to. It's very interesting to hear about PostgreSQL usage here in Japan - in some ways, it's way ahead of Europe. Also had the chance to do some more specific troubleshooting with a couple of guys who had specific problems. After that we were off to a sake-bar in the evening for some further drink and food. Good times were had by all...
Finally, no post about this conference and the surrounding activities would be complete without a picture of the guys who made it happen, so here it goes. There were a lot of people involved in making this a great conference for the people visiting, and a great trip in general for me, but these were AFAIK the main guys arranging it - Hiroshi Saito and Toshiyuki Ishikawa. So to you, and to all the others who helped out with it, a very big thank you! I've had a great time so far, and I'd certainly love to come back another time
With that, i have a meetup with Michael Glaesemann tonight, and then it's off to the airport tomorrow for one of those lovely way-too-long flights back home. I hope there are no unnecessary delays this time...
So I'm at SolutionsLinux in Paris with Devrim and Jean-Paul and the other guys from PostgreSQLFR. Turns out that Jean-Paul had scheduled me for a talk. We had talked about it loosely, but I didn't really realize it was actually going to happen. Seems it is.
So if you're here, there's going to be a pg talk at 11:30 tomorrow (wednesday). AFAIK there is only one room for talks in them, and it's right next to the postgresqlfr booth. I'm going to do a repeat of my "The PostgreSQL Advantage" talk from last years linuxforum, since I really haven't prepared anything. Hopefully it'll work even without preparation, otherwise I'll just blame the language barrier...
And if you're around and not interested in the talk, just pop over to the postgresqlfr booth (we're at E44) and have a chat. And try the little elephant-cakes, they're great!
As for the show itself, there are a lot of people here. Very interesting. As often, much more people in the non-profit area than around the companies. Of the open source databases, mysql and ingres are both represented here (by their respective companies, not by community people from what I can tell), but no sign of firebird.
Network connection is pretty crap (only wired, very slow, and only http+ssh (we negotiated ourselves to get https as well), no vpn, no imap and such things). But then we're not here to surf the net either, we're here to talk to people about PostgreSQL.
I read somewhere that real bloggers would always blog during a conference, preferrably getting at least one post in for each talk. Well, I'm not going to do that, but hey, here's at least one.
Very good day so far. Intro by Bruce talking about how things started. The PL/pgsql debugger presented by Korry (EnterpriseDB) looks really good. Plenty of interesting lightning-talks. And right now in the longest talk of the whole conference - "Introduction to Hacking PostgreSQL Workshop" with Neil Conway and Gavin Sherry (see picture). Given that I need to actually listen to that in order to understand it, this post took a while to write, so I'm just going to focus on listening now..
(apologies for bad quality image. That's what you get for forgetting your CF reader leading to the usage of a bad cellphone camera instead.. Better ones later, hopefully.)
The conference has pretty much kicked off, with the EnterpriseDB dinner cruise. Loads of interesting people to talk to... So far, this is shaping up to be a very good conference. Now let's see how it is tomorrow when the actual talks start - but my hopes are high, and I fully expect them to be fulfilled...
Better late than never, almost a week since it was over, a quick summary of this years Linuxforum Denmark.
I have to say I'm very impressed. With an organisation of volounteers and at a very low cost compared to other conferences (such as OSCON which is definitly a lot higher budget), I think they managed to arrange a fantastic conference.
As a visitor, there were plenty of interesting talk, and this year the english language ones were nicely spread out so there was almost always one available. I don't really do Danish. Reading is fine, but listening to a technical talk - well, it's a bit too much of a challenge. I think the split of a business-oriented day (friday) and a tech day (saturday) is a smart thing to do. So I'll definitly recommend people who are around go go to this conference next year.
As a speaker the arrangement was very nice - not just "here's your room, be done", but all the things around it. I certainly felt very welcome, and I don't think there was a single point not being taken care of.
As for my own talk, I think it got to be a little bit too much in too little time - I should've cut a few more points out of it and been a bit more detailed about the ones left in. But hopefully it wasn't too bad.
So, big thanks to the organisers. And to all the interesting people I got to chat with - hosts and other speakers. A very interesting couple of days.
Oh, and yes, I got stopped in airport security. Not for the powerdrill they gave us (speakers) at the conference (very handy, btw!), but for the speakers badge. And yes, they were in the same bag...
Seems I completely forgot to post about this, but better late than never...
This year I'll be delivering a talk at Linuxforum Copenhagen. I'll be talking about some of the unique features in PostgreSQL, which means a lot about extensibility and such things. If you're around, come over and say hi!
(There's also plenty of other interesting talks there, and several speakers that are bound to be more interesting than me :-))
The first thing to notice is that I certainly didn't have time to write any blog posts during the event :-) I didn't have internet access from my hotel, just from the convention area, which also contributed to that.
In general, OSCON Europe was good. A few sessions were of "a bit lesser quality", but in most were very good. Most sessions were technically oriented, which is what I was looking for, but a couple were a bit more on the marketing side. And it's hard to get into deep technical stuff if you only have a 50 minute slot.
From a PostgreSQL perspective, it was very good. I got the definite feel that PostgreSQL was a lot better represented than MySQL when you looked at what people were interested in. We had a BOF, which they didn't. It wasn't a huge number of people, but there were some 10-12 of us at least, and some interesting discussions.
In general there were a whole lot of interesting people to talk to. Bruce and Simon from the PostgreSQL project of course, but a lot of others as well - both PostgreSQL users and people doing completely other things.
The most asked question from db users: What will happen with MySQL after the Innobase thing?
The most made-fun-of-in-talks-incident: Oracle buys Innobase.
Nobody really knows what will happen, and the MySQL guys didn't answer any questions about it. At least not in public. The MySQL guy (David) also managed to insult their community pretty good in his talk. I don't think it was intentional, but this was actually the second time I hear things along that line from them. The quote was basically "we get contributions from the community, but they are never good enough. We may take the idea and rewrite it from scratch". Ironically, his collegue Kaj had a talk the next day titled "taking the community to the next level"...
Finally, about my own talk delivered together with Simon Riggs. I think it went reasonably well. If you were there and want to let me know what you thought, please do so. I'll put the presentation slides up in a couple of days.
So I got here, so some quick first impressions:
No PostgreSQL talks scheduled until wednesday, but there's at least Bruce to chat about pg stuff with. And if there are others around, do show yourselves if you can figure out where we are :-)
/mha/uploads/oscon-dead-languages.jpg alt="" align="right" Now for the mandatory first day picture. Daiman Conway delivering his talk on dead languages, and actually showing LISP code (and that wasn't the worst!) I thought I'd never have to live through watching a presentation about LISP again... (pardon the layout - the wireless connection here (hotel) is very flaky, so I have to click things quickly before it goes offline)