Underwhelming day 1. My thoughts for each talk under the cut.

“Nobody” is annoying beyond belief.

Mukhang patok naman sa mga bata, kaya pagbigyan na nga.

Open: The Journey Continues
Mr. Naveen Asrani (Keynote Speaker)

The kids (practically 99% of the audience) had a hard time understanding his Indian accent. Many even found it funny.

Quite ironic since these kids should get used to foreign accents if they’re planning to work abroad. Even more ironic is that most of them aren’t that good in English too.

As for the talk, it’s your run of the mill “What is Sun doing for the world and you can be part of it” talk. Nothing fancy, but too short for my tastes.

FX with JFX
Mr. Chuk Munn Lee

Chinese accent this time, something I’ve been used to for some years now.

The demo’s a by-the-book run through of the basics of JavaFx. I’m familiar with RIAs so I didn’t see anything new.

Open Solaris
Mr. Peter Karlsson

English(? which specific?) accent this time.

Was interested in the talk because Open Solaris looks like Linux on drugs… okay, “stimulants”. ZFS and Crossbow (holy crap, virtual networks!) looks fun to use in enterprise environments. Might consider creating a virtual machine running Open Solaris for kicks.

Too bad none of the audience are familiar with enterprise concerns.

Took my lunch at the fishball stand at DMST just as planned. The fishballs and fish nuggets taste as good as I remember them, but the final bill was twice compared to my original expenses 7 years ago (Fishball/fish nuggets had a 25% price increase, Mountain Dew grew from 10 peso 12 oz bottles to 27 peso 500ml PET bottles).

Taking Charge of Your IT Career
Mr. Winston Damarillo (Keynote Speaker)

On its own, the talk was ok. He did make the grave presentation sin of putting a ton of text in each slide, but I’ll let that slide because the statements were sound.

What was wrong about the talk was that the audience’s focus was on the iPod Touch (please don’t call it iTouch) contest.

The contestant’s answers were proof that they were not listening: the speaker didn’t talk about studying hard to do well in school (his college degree isn’t even related to IT!), and yet they all answered that that was the best way of taking charge of your IT career. Maybe they misinterpreted “studying open source (outside of school work)” with “studying what’s given to you by your curriculum.”

Sayang yung iPod Touch.

Developing Web Toys
Mr. Luis Buenaventura II

Heto talaga si Luis, by the book way of catching the audience’s attention and holding on to it long enough to send the (simple) message across.

The only problem I saw with the talk was that Luis’s English was too intimidating i.e. much better than previous speakers from Ateneo and La Salle (as if he wasn’t an Iskolar ng Bayan… lol). Tuloy, nahirapan silang sumagot in English. :D

Asked the obvious question about monetizing because no one seemed to dare ask a question.

Web 2.0 Demos with DB2
Mr. Raul Chong

I don’t know why Mr. J. Angelo Racoma was missing and why they proceeded with the DB2 talk.

Talk started off with the usual “IBM DB2 is the bestest DB evar!!!”

Like everyone else (Oracle, MS SQL Server), finally DB2 has a free version.

The Web 2.0 part above? It’s just a way of saying that DB2 now has an XML data type and that you could use XPath selectors in your where clause. That just means you could put unstructured data in the form of XML as a field, then just data mine it on demand.

Talk ended with the revelation of their master plan in invading campuses.

I was really tempted to ask these questions, but somehow I was able to stop myself:

  • Are you aware of the P100+ million lawsuit against IBM from our government’s Social Services department regarding a “faulty” critical DB2 installation that crashed multiple times? What is currently the official statement of IBM on this?
  • The XPath implementation might have been optimized, but it still doesn’t change the fact that you will still perform a full table search when filtering based on unstructured data.

    Why should we use this approach when document-oriented databases like CouchDB can do the same thing faster (at the expense of cheap hard drive space) through map-reduce?

Mini-DevCon – emphasis on “Mini”

It was basically just

  1. Talk on what is PSIA and DevCon
  2. DevCon peeps talking about stuff for about an hour
  3. Linux vs Windows vs Mac debate

And that’s it. No developer interactions, no survey and sharing of skills. It was like the purpose of the DevCon wasn’t really realized.

My volunteering to talk in behalf of the non-G2IX peeps in the audience apparently slipped the minds of the organizers.

The free pizza was ok, I guess. Meeting Mikong and Luis in person was also good.

Looking back, it was more of a teaser than a “mini” thing. I hope they push through with making a full 2-day DevCon + BarCamp in the future.

Tomorrow I’ll keep my expectations really low. Will probably ask a question to the speakers only once or twice.

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5 Responses to Y4iT 2009 day 1

  1. Rystraum says:

    You should have spoken at the (mini)-DevCon. The talks were all from the G2IX people and everything was choreographed. It hardly felt like a DevCon at all. Probably because of the lack of developers’ interaction and the skills sharing.

  2. Rystraum says:

    You should have spoken at the (mini)-DevCon. The talks were all from the G2IX people and everything was choreographed. It hardly felt like a DevCon at all. Probably because of the lack of developers’ interaction and the skills sharing.

  3. Bry says:

    Mr. Damarillo forgot about me after the break. It’s no big deal, I think they didn’t have time for another talk anyway.

  4. Bry says:

    Mr. Damarillo forgot about me after the break. It’s no big deal, I think they didn’t have time for another talk anyway.

  5. […] much of a background here. Ida just invited me to talk, and since I knew what the audience was like, I felt like talking about preparing for the real […]

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