Tim Henry and I went to the Central PA Open Source Conference in Harrisburg, PA a few weeks ago (16OCT).  We had a pretty awesome time!

We got to HBurg kind of late (around 10ish, I think), but we still managed to make it in time for lunch and to see a few talks.  I think the most interesting one that I saw was about lessfs and ZFS.  I'm definitely tempted to use lessfs for a backup volume or something of the sort.  Most people have head of ZFS, but for those of you who haven't heard of lessfs:  it's a file system that does de-duplication on-the-fly.  It can even do on-the-fly compression if you have the processor to handle that kind of load.  The thing that impressed me the most was the demonstration.  For the demo, the presenter took several Ubuntu ISOs (such as Ubuntu 10.04, Kubuntu 10.04, Xubuntu 10.04, Mythbuntu 10.04, etc) and placed them all in the same folder.  Because the ISOs all share several of the same packages, some of the ISOs occupied no space on the volume.  Pretty awesome!

I spoke towards the end of the day (I was on the next-to-last track).  I thought I did kind of 'eh,' but in the words of another presenter, "No one threw tomatoes at me, so I guess I did ok."  I touched on several things, including PostGIS, QuantumGIS, GeoServer, and OpenLayers.  A few people approached me after the conference and told me that they attended my talk because of potential ideas that they had (I wish they said that during my talk when I was taking questions :p).  Some of them seemed pretty cool.  I'm hoping that a few of them reach out and contact me with their progress...I'm interested in hearing how my talk has helped them.

Afterwards, a group of us went over to the Appalachian Brewing Company for dinner and a few drinks.  Note to self:  never try the sampler pack again!  I'm not sure what it was about their beer, but it hit me funny.  It didn't make me drunk -- just incapacitated.  Other than the after effects, ABC and the gang was pretty awesome.

I definitely plan on doing CPOSC again next year.  Maybe by then, I'll have another talk (perhaps one that doesn't suck? :p).  We'll see!

PS -- slides were posted.

- bstempi