Technical Ramblings

I presented at FOSS4G 2008 in Tokyo today, thanks to Orkney, OSGeo.jp, and MetaCarta. Gave a talk on OpenLayers: Past, Present, and Future. Hard to gauge success of the talk: many people seemed somewhat bored, but my typical attempts at keeping interest are not so effective in a room where most people don’t speak the same language as I do.

Went over history of OpenLayers — a bit of the pre-“Mark IV” that most people think of as being “OpenLayers”, then into why MetaCarta initially started the project — plus present status/features/developments, then into future (2.x and 3.x), and gave some demos of functionality.

Got a couple good questions — so at least a couple people were interested, which is more than I can actually say about many presentations where people *do* speak the same language. 🙂 Questions are notoriously hard to get out of people at conferences.

Had shrimp tempura for lunch, which should help me keep my energy up for the workshop I have to give in a bit more than an hour. I’ll be presenting using a trimmed down version of Tim/Seb/OpenGeo’s OpenLayers workshop: http://workshops.opengeo.org/openlayers/intro/doc/ to about 10 people, as I understand it. Should be interesting to see how far we can get in 1.5 hours.

Staying awake is going to be tough. The 13 (soon to be 14) hour time difference is quite significant in a way I hadn’t realized.