Ohio LinuxFest

I had a great time at Ohio LinuxFest. Highlights, in my book, were

• Jorge Castro's Ubuntu talk. He pointed us to a lot of great stuff to try out, and his enthusiasm was infectuous.
• Rich Bowen's mod_rewrite talk. I've never encountered Apache documentation that I was truly happy with, but Rich was wonderfully clear. I want his book.
• Ram Rao's virtualization talk. Xen sounds like it has jumped straight to #1 in my List of Reasons My Management Would Let Me Use Linux For The Database Server If They Had A Clue. Moving entire virtual machines easily between production and development servers, with almost no performance impact... wow, that would be incredible.
• The reception. Hey, the only thing better than dancing is dancing with geeks. Too bad I had to leave early, but somebody foolishly located Dayton too far from Columbus.

I heard that the attendance had more than doubled from the last year, and indeed, many of the people I talked to were quite new to Linux. That's the one improvement I'd suggest for the event. There were good talks for newbies, but not enough of them, nor did the schedule provide clear enough guidance to help newbies steer themselves that way.