Math is Pretty

This was my second time to Portland and I still find myself wanting to move there every time that I visit. Portland has a great culture, an amazing public transportation system downtown, and of course Powell’s.

Powell’s is like Amazon in the flesh. It’s the size of an entire city block and four stories tall. Laid out like an amusement park for book lovers, I could get lost in Powell’s for hours.

I was not able to attend many sessions at OSCON this year, but I did manage to see the State of the Onion in person which I have wanted to see for years.

I bumped in to Larry Wall later at a party and he’s as nice and quirky as he seems on stage. It was fun picking his brain on language design, since he brings such a different perspective to programming.

Aside from the State of the Onion and practicing our presentation, we spent most of our time at our booth, answering questions about LINA, putting our booth’s sticker on the contest sheet, and raffling off our LINA mugs.

We met developers who wanted to run their Open Source applications on Windows, businesses that wanted to reach the Windows market, and dozens of people who just wanted a sticker for the contest.

Saill and I also gave a presentation on LINA – Cross-platform Linux Binaries on Thursday. Saill shined as she explained what LINA was and how we had implemented its internals.

I focused on the future of LINA. As the first cross-platform Virtual Operating System, LINA opens up many possibilities in programming. We’ll post the updated presentation sometime later this week for those who were unable to attend.