Today I attended the OpenLayers Seminar, the Building Rich Web Applications with PHP5 by Rasmus Lerdorf himself and the Google BOF session.
OpenLayers looks cool but isn’t quite up to the level where it will challenge the maps API’s offered by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! Speaking of Yahoo! Maps, Rasmus Lerdorf talked about using Yahoo! Maps API with PHP which gave some really cool results.
The Google BOF session was also cool with Google staff explaining the setup of hardware inside Google. They said that they no-longer leave hardware dead in the racks – its cheaper to fix or replace dead hardware than leaving it using up space and power. They also mentioned that Python is used pretty extensively inside Google – I’d never really though of Python as a full general purpose language… Maybe I should look into that! The Google guys were also giving out notepads, pens and flashing badges. Again, anything free from Google is cool – yes, I’m aware that most their services and API’s are free…
The conference catering is certainly good. Between breakfast at Unicol, morning and afternoon teas I’m only needing light meals! No sitting in seminars thinking “damn I should have eaten lunch!” This morning the chinese food boxes full of chocolates, toffees and lollies were great – perfect for those little sugar fixes over the next few days.
More information about the conference as I can be bothered to post it!
This morning at the Linux TCP Developments and Kernel Developer Social Interactions keynote, Intel were handing out 64MB USB sticks to those in attendance. Unfortunately for me, I don’t really know or care about TCP/IP and the Kernel…
Going in search of dinner though, the Poppa’s Pizzeria had ‘run out of pizza…’ Instead of going to any one of Dunedins wide range of cafe’s and take-aways with good food for some reason I ended up at Dominos (it was almost 9:00PM so most places weren’t taking orders anymore). But as usual, fast-food tasted better here – not that I’m extensively eating fast food (since it’s crap). But the pizza base was crispy and light, the toppings tasted good and the cheese was stretchy. Most importantly, it was nowhere near as greasy as it would have been at home. Come on Aussies! Let’s not put up with crap fast food anymore!
I’ve got some photos up on Flickr of the conference and Dunedin for your browsing pleasure.