EuroOscon : Conference Day one

We started of the day with the Welcome presentation by Nathan Torkington, and what better way to feel more welcome than to appear on the big screen, nice :D . Some nice keynotes, nothing too new, but we got to see Gnome's new special User-view Glasses that show exactly how a common user looks at pop-up warning messages :D , anyway, the rest of the day was not 100% great, I'm seriously regreting both the Drupal API presentation and the Mozilla as a Development Platform .. maybe tomorrow my choices will be better :) .

On the bright side, the PHP 5: The Year After was nice to clear the air (the Perl lobby is strong here ;) ) , and I'm getting more and more convinced that what PHP needs is to "network" like Perl does, I still don't find it inferior to Perl in power (or Python, or whatever) so that's one side of the formally eternal question that I don't accept, what I do see, and this explains somethings :) is that the Perl people are more of a group, they take pride in it, Larry Wall, Damian Conway, Nathan Torkington (and the rest of the Perlers that I have been talking too) ooze that community building sense, and I don't think PHP has the same, and that, for me, drives a lot of things .. but hey :D , each to it's own, this is no about PHPSource, PerlSource or even HaskellSource :D it's about OpenSource and about learning, and I'm certainly doing that :D

The Phillip Torrone presentation on DIY was amazingly fun and I got a free copy of Make Magazine so I got something to show for it :D also, and back to the PerlQuestion, José Castro's lightning talks were also brilliant, on a side node, come on Lisbon.pm, London.Pm can't stay ahead for ever :D ). To finish the conferences, we watched a Zimbra presentation and again I was impressed :D , we'll see how it evolves, but I might actually scrape a Linux Box just to substitute my companies email system one of these days :D

Now, it's a bit of resting time, and then ... we'll see :D