Back from LinuxWorld
I’m back from LinuxWorld. Slides from my talk (well, similar slides, I modified them slightly) are available.
I have to say, I haven’t loved going to LinuxWorld for the past 2 or 3 times, but today was the first time I was able to tell why. At first, I thought it was the presence of all the large vendors (IBM, Novell, CA, Intel). Actually, those booths are more funny than annoying. (See the CA dancing penguin from January, 2004.)
It’s actually the hardware/IT nature of the show. I’m a software guy. I’m not interested in your network monitoring applications or your license deployment systems. I guess they’re necessary in large IT setups, but I don’t want to hear people screaming at me about them over their loudspeakers.
Still, it’s good to see my friends working the show. Even unexpectedly ran into Rick from Zend hanging out at the Intel booth. Talked to a couple people at the MySQL showcase, including the SugarCRM folks.
Did a little bit of eBay evangelism with the Zimbra folks. They make an Exchange server replacement, but they also have an AJAX mail client interface that will scan messages and hyperlink phrases (similar to the Google Toolbar). Seems only natural that they’d link to eBay items, don’t you think?
In the end, I ditched the O’Reilly and MySQL parties., as I couldn’t bare to stay at LinuxWorld until 7 pm. Too much work and chaos.