For the record, my last day working at Texas Instruments was Tuesday. (more on that later).
But I’m now at a session about python programming for Nokia cellphones. (Nokia was Texas Instruments biggest customer). Curiously, in this room, I bumped into about 5 different owners of Nokia 770 PDAs, a device which I own also. This device has lots of mindshare in the geek community, presumably more than the subject of the talk I’m attending. The neighbor next to me writes medical records applications for portable devices; the company he works for sees the advantage of writing something in an opensource environment.
I’m agnostic about the companies I used to work for; I don’t make it a point to say great things or bad things about Dell or TI, but it’s great that Nokia has embraced the open source community so wholeheartedly. A few years ago people were predicting that linux would become the OS of choice of portable/embedded devices, and lo and behind, a European country was the one to figure that out.
Conference note: although Wifi provided by the conference hotel is adequate, the big limiting factor is power strips. About a third of the rows don’t have any access to power as we know it. In today’s keynote, I noticed about 200 developers all in one room, everybody with their own laptop (and presumably checking email or their feedreaders during slow moments). If I had a gun, and demanded that everybody hand over their laptop to me, I could become a wealthy man.