Right now I’m sitting at the airport in San Francisco. EclipseCon 2006 is over. It was my first EclipseCon but it was the best ever. 🙂 After being in the Eclipse community since 2001 it was so awesome to finally meet all the faces behind the email addresses.

The EclipseCon could not have a better ending than Ed’s party. I joined it till around 10:30pm. I had to catch a shuttle to the airport at 4:45am. Thus, I couldn’t stay longer. However, it was fantastic.

Ok, they are now starting boarding. Time to get my laptop back into its case. Have a good day!

Hey, it’s me again. 🙂 OK, stupid, who else should be blogging on my blog. 😉

It has been another great day at EclipseCon today. I can’t believe that tomorrow will be the last one. It’s so great talking to all the people I usually only exchanging mails and bug comments with. I feel like being part of a big family. We definitely had and still have a lot fun here.

Right now I’m blogging from room 204 where we’ll have the IRC BOF in a couple of minutes. Denis and Chris are having fun taking pictures of me while I’m blogging. As everyday I started with my daily Skype video home call to my wife. It’s great to have this technology available.

I didn’t join any talks after Greg Stein keynote because I went to the registration room and sit down together with Ralph, Wayne and Ward talking about what we can do for connecting universities in Europe. It’s good to have such discussions because it brings up some interesting insights into the Eclipse Ecosystem in Europe. There are a lot activities ongoing in Europe and in Germany but they are not as visible as in America.

After the discussion I actually went to some tasks and met later with Wayne and Denis for lunch. We ambled through the exhibition hall afterwards to grab some free giveaways and sign up for some drawings. As usual I didn’t win anything. But probably I’ve got subscribed to some new newsletters. 😐

There was the second session of short talks I had to chair this afternoon and again it was in the theatre and again we had some issues with one notebook not liking one of the projectors. But because of Bjorn’s interesting setup we were able to switch between them dynamically. 🙂

At the posters reception Wayne and I decided to have a real dinner this time. So we went to the Hyatt’s Lobby Bar and I had a half pound hamburger which was really good compared to the food at the receptions.

I’m really tired today and I think I won’t stay up as long as last night. Although … the evenings have turned out to be really great here. You’re meeting a lot people and really everbody is listening to you. It’s a great place to exchange ideas and experiences and to talk about issues and their solutions.

Wow. This day turned out to be a really great kickoff day for the talks. I never thought that a keynote could be soooooo great, informative and enjoyable all together. You might have read about this in Ed’s blog already. I’m talking about Joel Spolsky.

He combined Brad & Angelina, songs, videos, screenshots and a Windows Logon session in his slides and he is so damn right! There are many things all over the world. But only a few do really succeed and obviously they do have disadvantages (i.e. missing features) compared to other products but they made it because they make people happy.

After the keynote I went to Kim’s and Denis’s talk to watch the roundtrip of an Eclipse build from CVS till it appears on the mirrors. It was really interesting. There was one question related to the support for other repositories in PDE Build. I tried to jump into to answer this question but I was too late. Denis already queried the next question. Anyway, here is the link to my posting related to this.

Right now I’m blogging from the registration hall and taking a rest to get my batteries up again. 🙂 I woke up very early today (around 5:30am). Seems like I’m already used to the Toronto time zone. 😉 It wasn’t that late yesterday evening after the game show, the awards and a really great Eclipse reception. After the reception we had a few beers at the Hyatt Lobby Bar.

OK, I gotta run now to the Netx Generation Client Platforms panel. In the afternoon (at 4:15pm) I’ll moderate the short talks in the theater and there are two more interesting events I don’t wanna miss today. It’s the Exhibit Hall reception and the JAZZ BOF by John Wiegand and Erich Gamma. JAZZ must be some secret new technology. It’s really hard to get any information. I heard some rumors and – well it’s only guessing – but it may be related to collaborative development.

So this is my first day at EclipseCon 2006. It’s really great so far. I enjoyed meeting a lot people already. The morning was really easy for me. I  joined the JumpStart meeting for new members. Well, I’m not a new member but I didn’t sign up for any tutorial. Thus, I thought it might be a good place to talk to some new members.

Right now I’m sitting in the Eclipse Members’ Meeting. We are a little bit late because a lot people are still at lunch. However, we are starting now to finish on time at 5pm.