As I was occupied with Linuxworld, there’s not much to post, so I’m combining two days.
I gave my presentation in the afternoon; it went over well. People really liked the section where I showed a CD that was locked to a bike cable. I said, “This is your data with proprietary software. You have to pay someone else for a program to unlock access to your data.”
I started to struggle with the key, since it was a cheap lock and the key didn’t fit well. “You see, they really want to make it hard for you to get your data,” I said, “although this appears to be a hardware problem.”
Once I got the key in and unlocked it, the cable sprang out and the disk flew off. “You see? Your data really wants to be free.” The rest of the presentation was me demonstrating with actual files. It was a good change from all the let-me-read-the-next-slide-to-you presentations that other people had done.
While I was eating my breakfast (Sukbong Toast again), I saw a photographer posing a model, and decided to take a picture of it.
The last day of the conference was pretty much the same as the other two; lots of PowerPoint presentations. The first keynote speech in the morning was from a guy from LG Computing Services, talking about ubiquitous computing–when there will be sensors and small chips pretty much everywhere. It’s an interesting topic. He talked about the T-Money card as an example of companies working together to provide a useful service.
Both he and the keynote speaker showed the difference between bigshots and us peons–neither one of them set up his own laptop; they had someone do it for them. The second keynote was another session of buzzword bingo.
Two of the speakers talked about OpenDocument and OpenOffice.org-related issues, so I went to those two. Otherwise, I went down to the mall and did some shopping.
After coming back to the hotel, I decided to look for where I could catch the bus back to the airport. It took longer than I thought, because one of the stops listed on the web site doesn’t seem to exist, and I got turned around several times. I tried to cross a street via a subway underpass, but there was no way to do it–I would have had to enter the subway, pay, and exit via another line. I eventually found the bus stop and now know which exit to take when I get to that station.
There’s a very clever system of electronic signs on the #5 line. In the photo below, you see a little train at the lower right. It’s an animated train that moves along to tell you how far the next train is from your stop. Once I noticed that the train was moving, I figured out its purpose almost immediately. That’s good design.
