Day Three
Damn my head hurt this morning. I managed to crawl out of bed, avoiding Helen's knocking on the door and ringing the bell. Had a loong shower and battled with Natwest Card Services (international call on a mobile, lots of pressing # and 1 and 4) to find out that my credit card has been locked. Arse. I can't get money out of the machines, but at least I can get a cash advance in person. Going two days with 30 euros is hard...
I met up with Thom in the hacker room, and we read email and tried to hack. Tried being the operative word. Bastien joined us and around mid-day we just had to eat -- the copious Guinness the night before was making itself known far too much. Bastien claimed to know a place which does an all-day breakfast, which was the best idea. Temple Bar is cool, its Dublin's version of Leicester Square or Soho, depending on where you are. In a way, its better than London, as its more compact, and appears to be of a higher quality -- plenty of bars, restaurants and small music shops. Oh, and the best all day Irish breakfast I've ever had.
Suitably recharged, we wandered around the corporate exhibits. The HP pens are sucky, they are nice looking but feel cheap, and just nothing can come close to the joy of the Sun pens, which rule. HP however do have mints in little Tux cases, which is better. However, Sun totally kicked arse with the Sun Ray demo, two thin clients (one embedded into the display, á la the old iMac, and one seperate box and a TFT). You "login" by inserting a smartcard (JavaCard of course), which actually just connects the display to your session on the server. Removing the card instantly locks your session and the display goes back to the login prompt. The magic trick is when you put your smartcard in another thin client, and get your session back instantly. All of this is continually running on the server, so nothing has to load -- the Rays don't even have hard disks -- and its very fast. Apparently they are even working on server switching, so a user in the States can connect from a Europe office, and get all of their applications transfered to the local server to avoid X across the Atlantic. The only problem is the theme... it's better than Metal, but still a little clunky for my liking.
Back to the hacking room to try and work on Sound Juicer for a bit. Bastien is playing with the new Helix (aka Real) SDK, there are plans to get Totem as the front end for the new Real player. And I finally met Murray Cumming of GTKMM fame, who is very softly spoken. Doesn't seem to fit with his irc/email image, which can be... forward.
