conference

Haiku booth ready for the showThis past weekend Bruno G. Albuquerque, Joe Bushong and myself represented Haiku at the sixth Southern California Linux Expo conference, best known as SCaLE 6x, held on February 9 and 10 in the city of Los Angeles. This was the second year in a row that we organized a presence for Haiku at this event, and since we had so much fun last year (here are two reports and photos from 2007), we were all looking forward to doing it again this time around.

I picked up Bruno from San Francisco airport on Wednesday February 6 at around midnight; he was supposed to arrive a few hours earlier, but he missed his connection flight in New York. The next day, Bruno and I prepared everything for the booth, including setting up our own demo machines (he had Haiku running in VMWare on a MacBook Pro, I had it running natively on my HP Pavilion zv5000 laptop), testing the projector with my (oldish) small cube computer running an AMD XP 1.7G CPU with 1GB RAM, and finishing up and printing the Haiku flyers to handout at the booth. We also could not resist the temptation, and ended up buying a projector screen (we split the cost) so that we could show Haiku running on the backwall of the booth. My wife also did her part, and volunteered to iron and nicely fold about 15 Haiku t-shirts to sell at the booth. By dinner time, we had almost everything ready.

Demo machine at KOF Haiku boothNot surprisingly, it took me much longer than originally planned to find the time to write about the second day at the Kansai Open Source Forum conference (KOF). But no worries: memories are still quite fresh, as it's usually the case when things go well and you have fun. The second KOF day started earlier, especially for me. The exhibits were scheduled to open at 10:00AM, so with Momoziro we decided to meet at the hotel lobby at around 9:00AM. But I was up way before that, at around 5:30AM (compliments of my very jet-lagged old body). So I sat in front of my laptop to write some emails and then went through my Haiku presentation slides again, making little changes here and there, changing the order of a few slides and even adding a couple of slides based on some of the questions that I had received during the first day at KOF.

This past Friday and Saturday I attended the Kansai Open Source Forum (KOF) conference in Osaka, Japan, to represent the Haiku project together with my Japanese friend and BeOS/Haiku developers Momoziro-san. Here are my impressions from the first day at KOF.

ATC complex in Osaka, where the KOF conference was held.

KOF was held at the Asian Trade Center (ATC), located in the waterfront area known as the Osaka Bay Area. ATC is a huge complex of which the KOF exhibit area was only a very small part; the complex has a lot of stores and space for various types of events that are held on a regular basis. Ironically, the KOF exhibit floor was on an area of ATC called the MARE Gallery; I say ironically, because as some may know, Mare is my last name. That and the fact that Japan is like my second home (I lived there for about 23 years) kind of made me feel welcome. ;)