Posscon 2011 was definitely worth the travel time involved and I must admit that I really didn’t know what to expect when I arrived. I actually got there around 7 on Friday morning and was shocked that they actually signed me in that early. While walking around and checking out the booths, I was surprised to see several of the speakers already there. Little did I know that being early really worked in my favor…while walking around I noticed Jim McCracken lurking around his and Neil Underwood’s booth from Thursday. Jim told me that he was missing 2 very important bearings for his “Thing-O-Matic,” to which I quipped that he should simply replicate them. He laughed and explained to me that this was not possible, “YET” and this led to a great conversation with him. I volunteered to help get a table for his “Thing-O-Matic” display while getting the inside scoop on what the presentation was about…along with what specific parts were used for. The bearings that he was missing were an important part of the unit that he had planned to have the attendees put together during the presentation—thus he had to change plans and brought in a working unit to show in action. I am still baffled at how it works (with a single input of plastic wire “extruded” into the machine) but after seeing the Android holder the unit produced for John “Maddog” Hall I can’t dispute what I saw.
It was almost an hour of helping and asking questions of Jim, that Neil Underwood began setting up his display in the same room. He overheard some of my conversation with Jim and before I knew it I was having a similar conversation with Neil as he was setting up his RepRap unit. One thing was obvious from the beginning; Neil was extremely passionate about this technology. He began telling me about speaking engagements, workshops, demonstrations, blogs/forums, etc…. that he engages in for the express purpose of getting the word about the RepRap (his is names Mendel). To be honest, when I “googled” the Thing-O-Matic the other week, I never noticed anything about Neil’s passion—the RepRap. Neil lamented the fact that there will never be any advisements on it because he said that “…it is the worst business model ever made.” The reason for this is that if you buy (and assemble) this machine you’ll have no need to ever buy another one—and your friends can buy your replicated version from YOU and not the manufacturer. While Neil freely admits that there is no money to be made in selling the RepRap, he is so passionate about it is because of the imagination it can unleash upon its owner. He said that just seeing the kid’s (and adult’s) eyes as they realize what they can do with this machine is payment enough. Before I knew it, it was already 9:30ish and I had missed the “Welcome and Overview,” but felt that I had learned more being around these two guys than I would have during the 9am session.
I attended the OpenOffice Challenge for my first session with David Both. I did glean some information during the workshop that I thought was helpful. For example, I didn’t realize the reason for “LibreOffice.” David explained that this was a “fork” in the project that occurred because of some concerns over the direction that Oracle was taking OpenOffice.org (after they bought Sun Microsystems—the owner of OpenOffice.org). The name OpenOffice.org” was also a big point in the workshop—that it is important to use the “OpenOffice.org” instead of just OpenOffice. This is because a Japanese company has the copyright to the phrase “OpenOffice.” We kind of left the OpenOffice.org for the majority of the workshop as other participants began asking questions about converting their office staff from Windows to Linux. While the discussion was interesting, I was a little more interested in OpenOffice.org specifically and had hoped to learn more about the suite than the direction of the discussion took us. David did explain to me that there is an open source equivalent of Microsoft Outlook and that is Evolution. It is in not an OpenOffice.org package and he had no idea why they haven’t integrated on in their suite other than the fact that Evolution is already out there as open source. I haven’t installed Evolution on my ubuntu box YET, but have looked at screenshots and it seems like something that I could make use of...so that’ll be on my “to-do” list after the semester when I actually have time to experiment with it. As for things on the horizon, the best answer was the new transitions to be added to impress and what is happening with “LibreOffice.”
During the break I happened upon David Duggan and struck up a conversation with him. After a few minutes at the lunch table I realized that we had several friends and acquaintances in common. We both attended Midlands Technical College (different years), are friends with Dr. Chan and have “fond” memories of having Joe Greer for our two semesters of COBOL there. He told me about GNU Cash and that it was an alternative to Microsoft Money…although I must admit my first impressions of GNU Cash is not too promising. I may play around with it during the summer, but looks like I’ll be sticking with MS Money for a while yet. Much of what David stressed as the advantages of open source over bought software was the “free” cost of the product, but more importantly is the support that is provided. At lunch he recounted an experience that he had where his network was doing something extremely strange and that the organization spent several hours with him over the phone—the day after Christmas—to help him resolve his problem. His workshop was interesting as well…he showed several open source products that appear to be great equivalents to Window’s platform software (most notable to me was Evolution and Gimp).
Overall it was a great event…well worth attending (especially at the college’s price!) and as I’ll still be here next year—God willing, the last 2 classes—I’ll look forward to attending again!
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