Miguel de Icaza with Nat Friedman: Beyond .NET: The Mono Project This was the Miguel and Nat show, and a good show it was. Miguel explained briefly what Mono is, and gave a status report on the various parts. One particularly useful diagram showed the relationship of the ECMA RAND-0 (patents licensed for free) CLI, the .Net classes and the Mono/Gtk classes. Last night I asked Miguel to clarify the "what happens if Microsoft sues you" issue. He said that even if they got sued over the .NET portion, they could not be sued over the ECMA portion, which is key. That's enough to get us an open source Java like language for the future of Linux -- more on that in the section on Nat. Miguel also talked about IKVM which is the JVM => CLR bytecode JIT for Mono. This allows Mono to run an unmodified Eclipse drop on Linux. The only way to run Eclipse on a completely open source Java stack is to use Mono. I repeat, Sun, are you paying attention?!

Miguel then turned it over to Nat Friedman who demonstrated the super cool dashboard project. I've explained dashboard in this blog before, so you can use the search function on the blog or visit Nat's site. Cool as predicted. Take away #1: There's no way that Microsoft can do what these guys have done, because they don't control every app that runs on windows, so they can be instrumented the way Gnome is getting instrumented. Take away #2: This is good for the Chandler project because now they have something that people can see and play with which can be compared and contrasted with Chandler. I hope this will make it easier to explain the Chandler vision.

Miguel is as high energy a speaker as he is a person. It was also cool to see the working relationship that he has with Nat show up in the course of the presentation. I felt (and I was) that I was watch two old friends hacking the world. I love that part of open source. More on that below.

Milton Ngan: Tales from the Two Towers Before this keynote, they showed a movie that the perlies did during the conference. It was really cool and funny, and again, you got that sense of watching a bunch of friends goofing around.

After that, Milton Ngan came up. His entire presentation was a series of Quicktime(?) I think movies. And I don't just mean the The Two Towers outtakes and stuff. Milton's talk was more like a TV documentary with a live narrator. I know how much work it is to give a good slide talk. I can't imagine how much work it is to make a movie for a talk, and then to pace your speaking to keep in time with the video. That by itself was cool. We were treated to a tour of the new WETA data centers and hardware. Then he took us through some of the effects in The Two Towers including Gollum, the Ents, Legolas' swing up onto a horse (forget exactly which battle this is in), and of course, Helm's Deep. Unlike last year, he didn't show a trailer for the next movie.