I arrived half an hour late because I was looking for my wallet. The first keynote of the day is sort-of interesting. He says many obviously true things, so the interesting nuggets per minute count isn’t too great, which is why I pulled out my laptop to write this. ;)
The speaker is Stewart Nickolas. He’s talking about web widgets. He wants to enable widespread mashups on the widget level – secure communication between widgets on a single page, coexistence of unrelated widgets on a page. But he has a demo! That’s pretty cool. Widgets “broadcast” events such as their selection.
One interesting site he shows is Programmable Web: “keep-up with what’s new and interesting with mashups, Web 2.0 APIs, and the new Web as Platform.”
An interesting API is OpenSearch which allows you to publish how your site is to be searched, apparently. Other people can read that specification and build a search form for your site, for example.
Random website mentioned at the end: Newstin. I wonder what this was about.
Later, not much happened. I started playing Go on TedErnst’s board: He had a full 19 × 19 board, he played with some people on a 9 × 9 section and I played with some people on a different 9 × 9 section. The funny thing is that Ted himself learnt how to play Go at WikiSym 2006! Hopefully we’ll have spread the meme and even more people will be playing Go at the next meeting.
After lunch it was time to go. I faintly remembered the last day not being too great at other conferences, so I was chagrined to learn that there was an interesting program in the afternoon and an actual walk (!) scheduled for the morning after the last day. Next time I’ll contact other people earlier in order to sort out those issues.
I took the metro back to the airport together with Andreas Gohr. I was very tired having averaged 6h of sleep every night.
My plane is 40 min late, but the airport offers “free access” via wireless. Great, I think to myself. It turns out that you get free access to local content only and need to pick an ISP to reach the outside world. Sucks. But then I discover that one of these providers is the same provider that they used in my hotel. I stayed at the Pestana Porto Hotel which I liked – excellent breakfast, excellent location. Internet connectivity was bad, probably because my room was on the top floor. But being able to keep using my account is great, of course.
Looking back I think the coolest discussion I had was talking with Andreas Gohr and Christoph Sauer on the various namespace implementations we have, including an excursion into access control lists. The coolest moment I had was other people being interested in the running code I had to show for multilingual wikis.
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