As usual, once the conference starts in earnest, I have fallen behind on blogging about it. So here’s a summary of some of the high points.

Wednesday morning, there were a variety of interesting keynotes, but the one that was the most interesting was Kim Polese talking about the transition from geekdom as a diy (do it yourself) to dit (do it together) culture. Very interesting observations.

The interview with Jon Schwartz was also very interesting.

I attended John Coggeshalls talk on php5, which was somewhat helpful. I knew many of the things he talked about, but I was curious as to whether there were new features in php5 that I wasn’t yet aware of.

I also attended Rasmus’ talk about the state of PHP. Unfortunately, he covered almost exactly the same material that John covered.

Somewhere in there I attended Damian Conway’s talk, which was, as always, entertaining, although the contents likely won’t be immediately useful to me.

The evening event was “70 Proof” – a 70’s band who played absurdly loudly. At one point, the lights went out briefly, and the singer, at the end of the song, observed “when the lights went out there, it was almost like a real rock concert!” Yeah. Almost. 😉

After being up too late, it was pretty hard to get up this morning to get to the keynotes, but I’m glad I did.

Dick Hardt’s talk about Identity2.0 was fascinating. We need a “universal id card” for the web.

But the winner of the morning was Robert Lang, speaking about computational origami. He showed how an arbitrary shape can be computationally turned into a piece of origami. It was *amazing* the things that he had made out of a single piece of paper without any cuts.

I gave my “Why I Hate Apache” lightning talk again. It was received less exuberantly than in Stuttgart, but it was still well received, and a lot of fun to give.

And this afternoon I gave my mod_rewrite talk. I ran a little long, but there were good questions, and I fell like it went well. There are some things that I need to tweak if I give this again. Unfortunately, the talks here are 45 minutes, rather than the 50 or 55 that I usually expect, and I was just about that close to the limit. But this left no time for questions at the end.