Went to the Linux Expo at Olympia today. Meet up with the usual Lonix and GLLUG crew, caught some interesting talks as well. On the whole there was nothing special, though it has to be said that this show gets moderately better every year. The audience for it seem to be right, however it is quite hard to gauge if it is anything more that a place for people to pitch their wares. HP had a talk about MySQL, now the MySQL reps was pretty good, however the HP guy was terrible. He was trying to hard to be funny, and if the people on the booth sitting down to the talk weren’t really interesting in hearing the MySQL piece they would have probably left.
Quite a few hosing companies and kit vendors were present, most notably Qube and Nexsan. The guys from Dedipower were also around though they did not have a stand that I could find. It seems that rackspace prices are on the up for many reasons, increased utility costs and shortage of space. However no one seems to want to start building a dedicated facility out of London. Or in London for that matter, I guess the costs would be quite high, though my thinking is that they would be bound to turn a profit in the end. Was not compelled to buy another Debian t-shirt this year, however I did pick up a few live installer cds which I will play with at some time. Since the Oracle announcement that was mad a yesterday is seems that Oracle’s UK people don’t quite know what is what yet. I could tell that yesterday it was news to them as well, though I’m sure some of them might have heard of rumblings internally, but disregarded them.
I didn’t hang around after the show finished for the day because I had other engagements. Perhaps I will pop a long to the next Lonix event next month, pending on scheduling conflicts etc.
