POSSCON

The POSSCON event was interesting. I was using my phone to connect to WiFi and then a speaker talked about not trusting public WiFi so I disconnected.

I was surprised to hear from John Diamond that currently only 5 developers work on the Alien Arena game. The game looks very polished and comparable to some commercial games. He explained how he makes money with the game; they package other companies' programs with the game, and also offer to include in-game billboards. He showed the evolution of the appearance of the alien character over the years. I learned that the emergence of Direct X and OpenGL was largely responsible for the advancement of gaming technology. I enjoyed the John Diamond session, but I probably would have enjoyed the Friday workshop more. I would have liked to dig into the code and have a hands on experience.

UPDATE:
After hearing from the people that went Friday, I'm glad that I didn't go to the workshop. Supposedly the workshops were not going as planned due to technical difficulties.

I thought that Walter Bender was a great speaker. He showed us an image of a board of shapes that could be hanging on a wall. He mentioned that kids try to reproduce the shapes on their own paper; I was surprised to see a swastika on it! I wouldn't want kids to be going around drawing swastikas. I was also surprised to see him suddenly and purposefully drop a sugar laptop. After he was finished speaking, all the sugar groups rushed him. He showed us an activity that he made during his flight; I thought it was amazing he could put something together so quickly. I hope I get to be that proficient someday. He also showed us different sensors to plug into the sugar laptop. One of them sensed temperature and another sensed moisture if I remember correctly. He was being rushed to leave the room due to it being time for the next speaker; it was nice of him to stick around and chat with us.

One speaker was from Digium. The Hawkes Learning Systems interns quickly realized that this is the company that creates the Switchvox phone system software we use at work. I had no idea that it was based on an open source framework; the framework is called Asterisk. He showed us the scripting language for the phone system which was unlike any other language I've seen before.

The 3-d printer was amazing to see up close; it was "printing" android phone holders.

I will be on the lookout for other events like this one and will try to attend one here and there.