LinuxFest 2008 wrapup

Oh, so many pale guys in black tshirts (myself included) - It was like a ThinkGeek store fashion show. Also, an excellent couple of days. What other group would think to hold its conference party at the Museum of Electricity and Radio - and then invite a live band to play at the radio museum?
There were several excellent presentations:

• Sean Boisen from Logos Bible Software presented an excellent talk on using Python's NLTK for linguistic analysis, to a room so full that people were sitting on the counters. It's well worth going through the presentation slides (in a neat browser-based format!) if you're at all interested in computational linguistics or Python hacking, go through these.
• Ted Haeger from Bungee Labs had quite a bit to say about the GPL, LGPL and AGPL, and an imagined LAGPLorsomething. Not something I had given much thought to, but he certainly makes a slick and persusaive case as to why pretty every programmer will be bitten by this eventually. Interesting cloud-based development platform Bungee Labs is working on as well.
  
• Dirk Morris from Untangle.com gave a very cool talk about software development riffing from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. An absolute must-read: it puts the whole 'programming is an art or science' debate into an appropriate frame. And he did it while dealing with one of the more annoying human beings I've ever been in the same room with. Dirk's blog entry that covers this material is a must-read. Also, his presentation sold me on using Untangle at work.
  

It would be nice if there were more exhibitors: hopefully the large turnout this year will entice more local and national companies next time around. Maybe I can do a Hadoop presentation next year?