Skycon ‘09 follow-up
Didn’t get to the first talks as I was at a Jason Byrne gig but Skycon was worth the early-morning drive.
The first talk I attended was by Ciarán Maher of daft.ie who explained the evolution of the site and the supporting architecture. Interesting use of Amazon S3 services and now there is a API – check out http://api.daft.ie
Christian van den Bosch then presented OpenStreetMap which I’d heard a lot of before but I’ll be sure to ask him about issues I’ve had editing maps.
Got caught up talking with friends and missed a lot of AIB’s presentation on their corporate desktop system but it looks like Java is being used a lot, all the desktops have software pushed to them in a tree-type structure, everything is run from a browser window and even though the programmers might like everything done with forms, the staff demand office productivity software like OpenOffice to manually edit letters etc.
Evert Bopp gave a talk on wireless one of my fields of expertise but the history of WiFi didn’t exactly set my world on fire, sorry Evert. I was also expecting a more passionate case for WiMax which didn’t materialise.
The star speaker was of course, Randall Munroe (xkcd). The crowd was giddy at his mere presence and anything he said resulted in laughter. There were plenty of questions, a few live sketches (loved those btw) and a few nervous silences. Look below for a custom cartoon for Skycon ‘09
Dinner in the Kilmurray Lodge was nice. I got to bore Tommy of TrustTommy fame for a while over soup and an RF engineer from Analog in the bar afterwards. Also caught up with Jeff Gough who had given a talk on Formica robots (pictured). I had intended on getting to Kerry that night but before I knew it, people were heading downstairs to the nightclub. The Lodge a.k.a. the Slodge is a favourite haunt of UL students with a fairly easy-going dresscode and that night there was a freaks and geeks party so we fitted right in. Ended up a house party then and a couch in Kilmurray Village. Those couches are getting harder and harder every time they are replaced.
The next day we even had a very sociable lunch in O’Mahony’s on Thomas St. and over then to Aubar’s for the last of the Ireland V Italy match.
Some other people’s views on Skycon:
tyrion, master of skycon, says thanks
froodie – responsible for the yummy X-Cake-CD
Terran looking after the guests
TrustTommy’s summary
Alexia has videos of Randall’s talk and the giggling crowd
Martha Rotter’s recap
Randall also mentioned that he was coming
PS: this was a victory for the can-do thinkers as summarized by spluge’s comment on Randall’s blog :
the nicest part was afterwards when a guy from Dublin was pwned. I’ll paraphrase the conversation:
Dublinguy “how come you didn’t come to Dublin?”
Randall “Because you fuckers didn’t invite me”
Marvelous. Well done to UL Skynet, and burn every other Irish person in the comments section whinging about Randall not coming to Dublin/Cork/Ballygobackwards.
March 9th, 2009 at 12:31 am
Joe,
My talk wasn’t aimed at people like yourself that have studied the field of wireless but rather those who haven’t hence the talk was a brief introduction rather than an (failed) attempt at settign your world on fire. I shall dedicate a portion of my next talk just to you
Evert.
March 21st, 2009 at 10:49 pm
Nice to see another joe johnson interested in radio communications.
I worked at Federal Communications Commission for 30+ years
and helped set up several radio services, including Low Power FM,
Cellular Telephones and Direct Broadcast Satellites (i.e. DirectTV
and DishNet)
Cheers,
Joe