ESUG was a blast, totally. One of the best conferences i've ever been to. There was a lot of community, a lot of life blood and excitement and many many interesting talks.

I got to introduce WebVelocity 1.0 to the world there, officially, for the first time - we even had printed CDs for it which disappeared fast. I'm not sure we had many left over afterward. Stephane who was incredibly busy sat down with me for 10 minutes the day after and we went through WebVelocity as well. I got a positive review from him as well.

The innovation awards were great. WebVelocity was in it, but really those awards are for the young guys. It's hard to convince people to vote for the biggest sponsor of the event when the prize is cash. However, despite that, we actually came in with a decent percentage of votes.

The first place winner was the project that I thought was the coolest, a C64 and NES emulator written in VisualWorks. The second place was also very cool - Phidget Lab which uses etoys to control robots and electronic toys. Very fun stuff.

As I said above, the presentations were very good - only a couple really flopped. James Robertson's talk was perhaps the most tragic - within the first few seconds of him speaking his mac threw up a kernel panic. This threw his talk completely and he found himself giving my talk a 5 minute advertisement while his computer rebooted.

I had an interesting hiccup right before my presentation. My home network is 10.0.1.xxx and my store configuration was set to connect to my local network IP of 10.0.1.2. I do this so that i can copy my repositories.xml between computers. However, that network address for whatever reason sent the wifi network in to a tail spin at ESUG and refused to resolve, even after several minutes. I finally tracked it down and changed the address to localhost -right- before my presentation was due to begin. The unseen drama.

Arden gave a talk about multicore programming and demonstrated how for the most part, many problems simply don't need multicore. He showed off the little framework Martin Kobetic and I prototyped to allow intra-image communication through pipes. It can be useful for some class of problem, but not for the problem he had on hand.

Dirk showed off the new capabilities of ObjectStudio 8, which is to say, a pretty cool modeling tool that generates Smalltalk code for you, as well as GLORP database mappings. We're sharing a bunch of tech between WebVelocity and OS8 these days too.

I struggled with my diabetes the entire trip, constantly having hypos. This was a surprise to me, but I believe I have narrowed down the cause - i need to experiment a bit more to confirm it but it looks like my correction sensitivity has been set too high. Every time I would under-dose for the food, I'd correct, which would overdose me so I'd go from high to low, to high to low, in a vicious cycle. By the end of the trip I had it in hand.

One of the delights of the conference was to meet all those people that i've talked to over the internet for many years but never actually met. Putting faces to names/avatars is always fun. What was amusing to me was how many people recognized me not by my accent, but specifically by my voice - from the podcast. I thought that was a blast.

James and I went around during Camp Smalltalk and interviewed everybody we could find. I'm sure we missed one or two projects - sorry to those people, we weren't screening you, we simply ended up with almost two hours of audio and were exhausted. Part two of that has just become available in iTunes, so take a listen and squint a little when the background noise is too high to hear the interviewee's response.

We have some good podcasts coming up with people we met there and we'll be doing a podcast on all the talks that we didn't talk about while we were at ESUG due to very late dinners. In France, it seems it's typical to end up dining at 9pm (that would be considered early), 10pm-12pm and later. Needless to say, I had a bit of trouble being awake early in the morning for the conference while also staying up so late. On a couple of occasions some of my colleagues had to crash out of an event or bail early. I know I bailed early on a few late night nattering sessions just to get a tiny bit more sleep.

All in all, the whole trip was great. This was a triumph, I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS!.