OSCON Tutorial Day 2

Day two at OSCON and I'm in the O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing watching Bill Hilf from Microsoft being interrogated by Danese Cooper. She's asking difficult questions about Microsoft's intentions, actions, and internal politics and Bill is dealing with them with aplomb. My favourite was the quote from Steve Ballmer about Vista being more locked-in than earlier versions.

Yesterday's tutorials went swimmingly, though sometimes in ways we hadn't expected. Portland is in the end of a heat wave and the convention center's power became overloaded attempting to cool all the rooms, run the A/V gear, and the networking. We ended up having to make difficult choices about comfort vs connectivity, unplugging network gear to ensure that the rooms didn't turn into ovens. That was the power failure I alluded to in yesterday's post. The disappointment on the networking staff was huge: we bought lots of new hardware to ensure we could keep everyone connected--and couldn't plug it in! Today, thankfully, is cooler and we haven't had any of the problems of yesterday.

Feedback overhead on irc from Damian's vim tutorial: hardwarehank: ahhh the vim tut is friggin aawesome. Damian said someone leapt up after the third vim technique and testified: "WOO! This was worth the tutorial cost alone!". I love it when I follow my gut and the instinct pays off: who would have thought that he'd have about a hundred people in a tutorial room for a tutorial on vi?!

Coming up this afternoon: Tim talks about asymmetric competition in open source, Mark Lucovsky talks about Google's Ajax web services interface, and Doc Searls gives the tutorial I begged him to create. And then tonight it's Larry Wall, Kathy Sierra, and Damian Conway in an evening of thought-provoking entertainment (or entertaining thought-provokation, depending on how you look at it).