Kevin's Weblog

Unsurprisingly, I got up a bit late and missed all the keynotes, and half of the first session, which didn’t really have anything that was tempting me strongly anyway. Chatting with people in the hallway did yield the quote of the day. Overhearing us griping about the prices of some technical books, Nat Torkington piped up with: “It’s very rare that [O’Reilly] would make a book that fails so miserably that we have to charge $80 for it”. (Most technical books are expensive because no one buys them. Take that, Econ 101!)

For the last non-keynote session of the conference, I went to MJD’s talk You Can't Get There From Here. It was a little disorganized. He said that his daughter was sick and up most of the night, which I can definitely sympathize with. By popular demand, he jumped to the end of the talk first to explain how you flip a coin over the phone, and how you can use NP-complete problems as a method of proving your identity. An interesting point here is that we actually understand a lot about how hard problems like the traveling salesman are. However, we don’t really know how hard prime factorization is. After that digression, which actually took most of the scheduled time, he jumped back to the start to explain just what NP-complete means, and started to discuss the halting problem and why it isn’t NP-complete, but something completely different. At this point, we were way over time and the closing keynote was starting. Some people stuck around for more of the talk, but I switched rooms.

I’m not really sure why I did. The closing keynote didn’t actually catch my interest and I ended up spending most of the time catching up on websites and blogging about Thursday. The main thrust of the talk seemed to be that open source can produce all the eye candy that the Mac has, which is nice and all, but I really don’t need the jabs about people using Macs not believing in open source. Until Novell open sources all their products, that’s just hypocrisy.

There’s always a ton of people I want to say good-bye to at these conferences, and I almost always end up disappointed. In this case, I needed to hurry to get on the road to Ashland in time to catch a play, so I had to cut things particularly short. It was a little disappointing, but to compensate, the Shakespeare was outstanding.