This is a day-by-day account of the 1999 Alternative Linux conference, held in Montréal, Québec. Originally this was a set of entries in my diary for November 1999.
Mon Nov 1 1999: Day 1 in Montréal. After checking into my hotel at 8AM and dumping my luggage, I walked over to the Bonaventure Hilton, and then remembered that the tutorials were at CRIM, which is up on Sherbrooke Street in the same office building as McGill's music library. The DB/2 installation tutorial was cancelled, so I wound up in the Oracle tutorial. It was pleasant to hear French again (the tutorial was given in French), and it was amusing to hear how often the instructors had to drop into English, for terms like tablespace, RDBMS, etc. It's obvious to me that the rise of computers is rendering Québec's language laws irrelevant; if you want a career in computing, you simply must know English. Oracle seems much less of a bear to install than I thought it would be, so perhaps I shouldn't rule it out.
During the hour-and-a-half lunch break, I caught the Metro out to Atwater and visited Double Hook and Nebula. Nebula had just moved into their new location and was busy unpacking the stock. The new location is on the second floor of the building and a bit smaller than the previous location, so the store will be more crowded again. (This is good. Bookstores are supposed to be crowded.)
Cristian Tibirna's KDE 2.0 tutorial was a disappointment; from the title I thought it was going to be a very developer-oriented look at the new CORBA and Qt 2.0 stuff currently in the KDE 2.0 CVS tree, but it wound up being a lower-level introduction to installing KDE, the available programs, and a final 40-minute session on development that, judging from the outline, wasn't going to be very detailed. I skipped out at the first break, and went to drop off MEMS Exchange job announcements at McGill and Concordia.
In the evening, I went and saw "Teaching Mrs. Tingle" at the Palace, because I missed it when it was in first-run theatres (and also because I want to marry Helen Mirren). It begins promisingly but slowly, and Mirren's evil teacher is an icily manipulative presence, but the ending winds up being rushed and unsatisfying; there's no justification for the final happy outcome, and I would have preferred a downbeat, Shallow Grave-like ending.
Tue Nov 2 1999: Day 1 of the conference. I only attended two talks, a rather sales-heavy and content-light talk by someone from Sybase, and Raymond Luk's talk on open-source business models.
Luk is CEO of HBE Software, who are the people behind opendesk.com and the SmartWorker Web development system. An interesting talk, and one complementary to Paul Everitt's "Funding the Perfect Beast" talk. HBE is surprisingly large, around 40 people with offices in Ottawa and Montreal, and planning to expand into the US in 2000.
The major database vendors -- Oracle, Informix, IBM, and Sybase -- were represented in the exposition room, so I had a chance to talk to them all about our database needs, and got lots of interesting pointers. Surprisingly, Sybase, which I'd never given much consideration to, is now looking like an excellent choice because of their support for mobile databases on PalmPilots.
Overall the conference was a bit disappointing, because it lacked a very strong technical component; most of the technical talks were also given at the Ottawa Linux Symposium. It's impossible to be definite until next year's schedule is announced, but I think next year I'll probably attend OLS and skip the Montreal conference.
While waiting in the airport, I started coding the C translation
of re.py; at least for a little while, the nitpicking
attention required to write C code is fun. Hacking continued after
I got on the plane; MatchObjects are mostly implemented, and
RegexObjects only support a single method, match(),
but the code can do a simple match.