Gaiaware has just announced the Gaia Programming Contest. A contest "... about creating an Ajax Application that will serve as a meeting place for people dedicated to solving environmental issues...".

Very good but there's more: "... no Close Source dependencies can be used which means that the end product must be compilable on Mono ...". Great!

Of course people using boo and db4o have a huge headstart. So what are you waiting for?

Dennis Kucinich for emperor!

It's reuseable as whole and any individual piece you look at it's just as reuseable.

Yeah, I'm enjoying the Criptonomicom so far.

As I went through the conference memories I recovered this one conversation I had with Jim Purbrick after the boo presentation.

His idea would be to have boo as the language for building languages in Second Life.

Niiiiice.

What a great experience.

A chance to interact live with a dear friend. Free Software, Hacking, Women, Futurama, McDonalds, love spreading, Militant Atheism, Monty Python, Douglas Adams and the French Way.

Had lots of interesting exchange of ideas with Massi, ranging from "extensible parsing through composeable PEGs with  optimal performance" to Carlos Castañeda, Jesus Christ, meta-physics, religion and Pink Floyd. The Cryptonomicon really got me.

Got to put a face on Joachim and see how really cool Unity is.

Jeroen IKVM Frijters is a funny guy!

On Thursday I got to talk about db4o which led me to meet a few db4o users hanging around the conference.

Pedro Santos had an interesting question, how to monitor and control the usage of computational resources in a managed client/server application? In other words, how a sysadmin can make sure a specific client won't DOS the application?

For .NET servers running on Windows there are performance counters, what about Mono servers running on Linux?

I've also got to spread the gospel about boo for which I got a hugely positive response.

Thomas "Gaia" Hansen seemed to really get it and so we had lots of interesting discussions on how to take over the world boo style.

Jackson wants to hack on better nullable type support for boo!

Mark wants an extensible language where NullReferenceExceptions are impossible.

Miguel reassured me once again mcs won't be rewritten on top of the boo compiler infrastructure :)

The presentation material is here.

Looking forward to the next one.