EclipseCon 2006 Day 1

My first tutorial started at 8:30 and I was hoping to be there bright and early. I woke up at 8:15! Oops! I had set my alarm to 21:00. Had a super fast shower, threw my stuff in my backpack and flew out the door. Fortunately the hotel has a shuttle to the convention center and I was there at 8:30. Unfortunately the line for registration was huge! At 8:50 I had acquired my Eclipse gear and was at my first tutorial.

Just Enough Intellectual Property Law to Manage an Open Source Project

I took this tutorial presented by Cliff Schmidt so I could fill a large gap in my knowledge base. I've always had a problem learning about licenses and intellectual property, and especially given that I am a GeoTools PMC, I thought this would be an excellent choice.

Cliff did an excellent job of presenting the material and covered almost all of it in the time allotted. He covered many of the different terms used, and gave a brief over-view of some of the more popular open source licenses. It surprised me to learn that the term Open Source is trademarked!

Lunch

Each table had a placard with a topic on it so that people interested in that topic would sit together. I browsed the tables looking for an interesting topic. I was about to pick GNOME when I noticed that they actually gave uDig a table! I was surprised at this, but I was even more surprised to see that someone was already sitting at the table! Turns out it was David Heath, from Transform Software and Services, who had seen uDig in its infancy. I hope to give him a demo tomorrow.

Next, Andre Oosthuizen joined us. The other day Jody had recommended that he come and see uDig. We chatted a bit about South Africa, flights, and briefly on GIS and Business Intelligence (something I don't quite understand).

I also was thoroughly unimpressed by the quality of the meal itself. They apparently did not prepare enough vegetarian dishes, and I had to wait until everyone at my table had finished eating their desserts before my plate arrived. It was lukewarm and very bland, but I was hungry so it didn't really matter.

David and I made our way to the OSGi tutorial, where he quickly demoed his project's very impressive CRS chooser. You can view and rotate a globe or a flat map of the world, and mouse over an area and choose a CRS that is relevant to that area. Much better than our simple filtered list in uDig.

Component Programming with OSGi

I took this tutorial with the intention of gaining deeper insight into how the technology that uDig uses really works. Unfortunately the tutorial proceeded at a slower pace and had some technical difficulties, so I only made it through about half of the material before I headed to the Eclipse Community Awards presentation.

Presented by Thomas Watson and Peter Kriens, I found the material to be too high-level, and was confused by some of the terminology at times. Later I will review the notes and work through the examples that were missed and perhaps a lot of the information will have sunk in by then.

Eclipse Community Awards

Afterwards I made my way to the Eclipse Community Awards and Gameshow. They were presented by Ian Skerret and Bjorn Freeman-Benson. uDig was nominated in the best open-source RCP category, but the winner went to Gumtree, used for running scientific experiments. And my congratulations to Andre who won the award for best deployment in an enterprise. Ian announces the rest of the winners.

Tomorrow is the Open Source Pavilion! I'm sure I will meet lots of interesting people, but I bet it will be tiring.