I’m not quite sure why, but the network – both wired and wireless – here at the Quality Inn in Mountain View seems to be one of the few that discriminates against Linux. Or more accurately, the madwifi wireless drivers that are available on Linux. The vast majority of the time, when I can’t connect to a network on Linux I can’t connect to it on Windows either; indicating a hardware problem rather than a software problem. No idea what the issue is here, but while the madwifi will grab the network and be issued an IP under Ubuntu, it’s not connecting for me.
The problem there is that Linux has all of my notes from today’s sessions, and Windows has no ability to access ext3 partitions so I’m pretty much out of luck for writing my Day 2 summary until I can get back online under Linux.
Tim’s got some high level thoughts on the show here. Off the top of my head, I’d say that Day 2 was more compelling than Day 1. [1] I was in and out of the morning keynotes delivered by Anant b/c we had a bit of long delayed RedMonk business to attend to, but managed to catch a session on PHP4/5 from SugarCRM’s Jacob Taylor, Tony Bibbs (is there a feed in there somewhere that I’m missing) excellent talk on moving the State of Iowa to PHP (fascinating, as I’ve been telling people all afternoon), Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (more coming on EC2 etc), David Berlind’s great keynote on the Mashup Economy, Mike Potter’s session on PHP and RIA (this was borderline offensive), and lastly a wide ranging presentation on open source innovation within the French Government delivered by Alexis Monville (included some good ODF chat) and an explanation of Paris’ efforts to become an open source hub from Alexandre Zapolsky. I much appreciate Mark De Visser’s efforts to introduce me to the latter two folks, whom I’ll be following up w/ shortly.
It’s unfortunate that I had to miss dinner there, because it would have been great to hear more, but it was great to connect with old friend Joe Keller for dinner. Over at the Tied House Brewery, I got the scoop on his new gig; interesting, and the website explains clearly why they desperately need someone like Joe.
So that’s the 30 second (or so) spiel; I’ll have more (hopefully) if/when I can get the madwifi drivers to play nicely w/ the hotel network and I can work from my notes. In the meantime, however, I’m really looking forward to Startup Camp. I spoke to David briefly before his keynote today, and apparently the interest in this new unconference has been through the roof – like exceeding-fire-capacity good. That’s not surprising given that I’ve spoken with maybe half a dozen folks today that were very upset they couldn’t attend. More from there tomorrow.
On that note, if any of the folks attending are reading this, I’ll be here all day tomorrow and will be hopefully meeting up w/ my colleague at some point in the evening, so if any of you would like to join us for beers or maybe a whole meal of food post-conference, come find me (I’ll be the one in the Red Sox hat).
[1] Of course it would be, given that I was one of the Day 1 speakers, though I thank the Microsoft and Zend employees who had nice things to say about my talk yesterday 😉
