This was my first attendance to OSD (the former linuxforums I believe). The event is held on a yearly basis (almost) in the beautiful city of Copenhagen. Other events of the same kind I've attended previously include Apache Con Europe and Fosdem.
I've enjoyed the opening keynote and loved the closing one by Dan Klein, who I think made a really nice point about starting things from scratch instead of always patching everything we build - and he compared software with one town in Ohio, who's name I forgot. Funny and making a very interesting point. The other talk I attended on the Saturday was the one on the peek at google's infrastructure - didn't learn much at that one - but the earth/map demo at the end about image recognition was just awesome. The announced but not organized GPG/PGP keysigning party and CACert signing went pretty well (I think I got around 10 new signatures).
On Friday I followed a talk in danish on the evolution of computing over the years, I stayed in that room just because I loved the name of the talk Sarfarissoq - the slides where a mixed of english and danish which help to follow and understand the talk. One other talk was about using google wave as a replacement for email to manage scrums and computer related projects in general. I must say I disagreed with the talker even though I think that having a few specific widgets in your wave might help to make it easier to use. But the two or three times I've tried to use wave myself it was a complete disaster.
The two Other talks I followed in the afternoon were email related. One was a presentation of a product developed in the Netherlands called Zarafa and which acts as an alternative to Exchange. It mimics perfectly the web UI of Outlook , works with outlook if you deploy a special mapi dll before using it. Of course if works with Thunderbird even if the screenshots were from the 2.x era. The second talk was way more interesting and was given by Ralf Hildebrandt & Patrick Koetter - who have been mail admins for mail.python.org. They explain the various techniques they developed and put in place in order for that server to have a good reputation. The higher the reputation the better deliverability. The interesting point in the talk was how some users would interact with their webmail ui. Some just use the spam button to remove the email from their inbox - but by doing so they also damage the reputation of the server sending the emails, solution found was to unsubscribe the user from the mailing list so he wouldn't mark messages from the mailing list as being spam. Same thing for people who can't unsubscribe to mailing lists - but a new standard is being worked on to make management of subscription to mailing list easy for users.
On top of that I got a two nice new T-shirts, one from the event the other from the OpenSolaris enthusiasts. Overall I had fun and managed to learn a few things at the same time. So I would qualify the event as being informative.
Pictures I took of the event :
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