Barcamp Galway roundup

Very enjoyable day at Barcamp Galway yesterday. Got a taxi home after lights out at the Westwood. Every barcamp I've been to could launch a million posts but here's a quick summary of my day.

Life is sometimes hard and I ended up having to give the talk without slides. The upside of this was I some great audience participation and feedback. Stephen Dolan, a recent silver medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics got some oohs from the group with a demo of some cool compiz features on his Debian laptop. Walter Higgins said he's still happy with Slackware Linux Project, one of the first distributions and it's still using tarball-based package management. A lot of people said they are new or retrying Linux on the desktop at the moment. Andrew is restarting the Galway Linux Users' Group so you can add you name if you're interested on Andrew's wiki. Lots of stuff to follow up. Many thanks to you all.

I was on Ed Curry's panel on "If I’m so smart, why am I being paid so little? – What it means to be a computer researcher" with Stefan Decker, Bill McDaniel and Conor Hayes. It was streamed live by Edgecast Media. Lots of good questions from the floor and good answers from the panel. There was even some agreement on how an institution like DERI could work with research budgets of Irish SMEs by helping out on technology selection.

Once again I missed a lot of talks but I did get to

• Aidan Finn, A gentle introduction to machine learning and data mining for recommender systems.
• Kevin Noonan Calbane, "Developing Web-Applications with Django".
• John Sturdy, "Building high-level editing onto Emacs, including driving it from a gamepad controller"
• Tom Raftery Tom Raftery's Social Media and Cork Internet eXchange: "Reducing IT's carbon footprint"

Very good talks. Writing code in Emacs using a game controller has to be something I would never have thought of implementing. CIX published their eco-friendly datacenter design without restrictions so there's no excuse not to learn from their proven innovations. Martha Rotter is giving her talk on "Ruby and Python with Silverlight -- O RLY? YA RLY!" at the Galway Area Microsoft Technology Users Group on Tuesday night so I hope to catch that one there.

Lots to look at on the BarcampGalway blog and you can get some of the content on the EdgecastMedia ustream channel.

Congrats to John Breslin, Conor Hayes and Aidan Finn and for everyone who turned up for a great day. Don't know where BarcampIreland5 is going to be but Limerick must feel a BarcampIreland coming on.