May Geekdinner

So I went to the Geek Dinner at the Wild Pig last night. Not bad, all things considered. The complimentary wine from GETWINE.co.za was quite pleasant, the food was good, and at around R115 with tip, reasonably priced.

The venue did suffer from poor acoustics, making it hard to talk to people ore than a chair or two away, which limited the ability to get to know people a bit.

The talks were fairly varied:

• The "Python vs PHP" talk didn't really say anything new (although it was entertaining)
• The "Project Management in 5 minutes" suffered from being overly short, and so not able to address the major issue with software project management, namely that by the time the problem is sufficiently defined that most classical project management concepts can be applied, the problem has been largely solved.
• The "Ruby on Rails" talk didn't convert me, but since I don't work with web frameworks, that is not such a surprise.
  
• The OLPC talk, while not saying anything new, did have novelty value since it was silent.
• I don't follow AI closely enough any more to really be that interested in the mind games talk, although I should read up on AI Go systems sometime
  
• The unscheduled talk about ripple was interesting, and the whole distributed credit idea is something I'm going to have to read up on carefully. On the face of it, there are several interesting abuses possible from having both distributed authentication and distributed trust, so I'm curious as to how these have been addressed.

Still, worth attending, and I may make the effort to attend the next one.

My photos are up at at my usual photos page.