Haiku @ oscon kyoto 2010

A few words about our effort at kansai open source conference in Kyoto 9-10.7.2010

I had no idea what to expect from an open source event here in kansai (osaka,kyoto,kobe,nara area of japan). Everything software in japan is very much focused to Tokyo so I was keen to see whats going on here at the boons so to speak.

After a few weeks of exchanging emails with jorge and eguchi-san, both which i’ve never met, we had trouble getting together to think about how we will present haiku and just decided to play by ear once we got to the event. Thursday night i got a fever and felt quite bad but off I went anyway. Kyoto is about 1.2 hours train ride away from where I live, luckily Kyoto computer gakuin, where the event was held was really close to Kyoto station (and incidentally, only a stone throw away from Nintendo kyoto).

We got a tiny little slot in front of an ancient enivac and set up our stuff there. Eguchi had prepared an old laptop but the gfx driver didn’t support full color so we decided to demo with my MacBook under VirtualBox. Eguchi kept the old laptop on the table and explained the intricacies of be file system, I demoed the MediaKit. The network at the venue was constantly down so we had no chance to show WebPositive which in a way was a good thing because it doesn’t support Japanese characters yet.

I showed a stress test of MediaPlayer and let people launch as many mediafiles as they could be bothered. Tracker stayed responsive like a champ (i had the mp4 files specially prepared so that there was no audio tracks so MediaKit wouldn’t crash). Instead of closing the MediaPlayer windows one by one, we demoed how much easier it is to just boot haiku and start all over again.

One guy who was pitching his high availability linux cluster was shaking his head when he saw the boot time. He said “man, this is what we need”.

Overall very positive comments from everyone who came over to our booth, many cd’s were passed, we felt we had done a good job.

Saturday morning I had a high fever and had to stay in, Eguchi presented and mailed me that he had had a good time on Saturday as well.

All in all Oscon was great fun, met many people who had used BeOS in the past. Here’s hoping we got a few new developers joining in, helping with Japanese translations and so such.

in behalf of haiku team Kyoto,

Samui