conference

In May this year, I wrote to the Haiku Mailing List, proposing that the Australian Haiku Users and Developers hook up with an existing Open Source event to generate some Haiku interest in our Country. It was decided that the cost of heading to a central event, would be too costly and as we are spread out all over Australia, I then started thinking about plans of doing something online - a Virtual Conference, so to speak.

As Haiku's Anniversary is coming up on the 18th August -- I figured, we'd try and have an annual event centred around this date. Due to the short notice, I thought it would be best to keep it as simple as possible, and as this is the first event, it can then be used to generate more interest and discussions around Haiku.

Back to the Moscone Center

Haiku and ReactOS at LW2008

Today, Scott McCreary was nice enough to swing by and pick me up on his way to the conference. We cruised by my company's corporate headquarters to pick up a package I was expecting, and then went directly to the Moscone Center from there.

Before the conference was under way, we re-arranged the layout in the booth a little bit, putting Art and the ReactOS machine up in front next to ours a bit more. We felt this might increase the ReactOS-related questions and demos a bit, and I believe it did help. I should note that without Art Yerkes and ReactOS, the event wouldn't have been possible for us this year.

Interest still strong

Today was similar to the first day, but the clumps of visitors were less, and we had more focused and genuinely interested visitors. We did get the usual: "Is this another Linux distro?" questions, but we also got several: "Wow, you re-created BeOS? That is awesome!"

Matt flew 5.5 hours to see us

Later in the day, we were visited by Matt Martz who flew 5.5 hours across the U.S. to see us. At least, this is what we'd like to believe, but perhaps he actually did want to visit a few other booths as well. In any case, he posed for a picture in front of the booth, and laughed when we told him it would probably show up on the website. (I don't think he believed we were serious)

Into the belly of the beast

With the addition of Scott, I was given a chance to finally walk through the floor and see what the other exhibits looked like. There was a Linux "InstallFest" sponsored by Untangle. I briefly considered taking a USB stick loaded with Haiku over there and installing it on a couple machines, but due to lack of time (and courage), I didn't get a chance to do this. Perhaps tomorrow ;) There was an abundance of server and hardware products using Linux on the exhibit floor, and it was clear that Linux on desktops was not a major focus for the event at this point.

All in all, the day was pretty solid. I have begun to lose my voice, unfortunately - mostly due to a recent cold I have been fighting I suspect, but also due to the massive amount of talking I have been doing over the last couple of days. Hopefully it will improve overnight and I will sustain another day.

Day 3 report will likely be delayed as I will not have the opportunity to write anything up tomorrow night.

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.