About LATA 12. november conference [updated]
I know, that I’m a little bit too late with my blog post, but I was really busy these days. And of course, if I can write blog post in Latvian for about 30-40min, then in English takes me ~3-4 hours. I have got some photos from this trip, and uploaded them to flickr. You can see them clicking on photo.
Trip to Riga
I woke up at 05:00. Washed my face. Cleaned tooth and went to train station. My trip to Riga started at 6:12am. And of course express train had monitor and dvd player for film watching. For about 30 minutes video was lagging, but then we could watch film: “The house of D“. I was angy that day before conference I didn’t have Internet connection – because I wanted to download screencasts/podcasts, and watch/listen them in train. After ~4 hours we were in Riga and moved to Reval Hotel Latvija.
About presentations which I liked
Presentation by Mathias Bauer (Manager Software Engineering, Sun Microsystems, project lead of the Writer projects, OpenOffice.Org) was so cool that after it I sad to myself: “From this day I’ll use only OpenOffice.Org software for my needs, it’s over with M$ Office!”. I was using M$ Office only because almost all University lectures are saved in M$ Office formats. Also I have used iWork (Keynote, Pages). It is cool peace of software which came with MacBook for free. As it costs too much for me, I’ll not buy a new version if it will be releaset. OpenOffice.Org advantages:
- Open Source;
- Cross-platform;
- Plug-in for doc formats;
- Now runs on OS X too.
Presentation by Marat Guriev (Governmental Programs Senior Professional, IBM East Europe/Asia) was about open source in Russia. After presentation we asked him some questions about open source introduction into studies. “For students it is better to show more ways at the begining, like Windows, Linux, OS X. And then let them choose the way.”, says Marat Guriev. In my experience University show 99% Windows and 1% Linux without OS X. He also sad that OS X is far ahead of Windows and I belive him, because I’m OS X user too and see it with my own eyes 
Presentation by Kaj Arnö (MySQL vice-president) was really funny. He started his presentation by speaking in Latvian. His presentation was about MySQL database, licences and etc. Download (.mov audio file) here (open link & click on button – “Lejupielādēt”) or here (Sorry for bad quality – headset recommended). And don’t forget to visit Kaj Arnö blog. He also has blog post about conference in Latvian – here.
After main presentations we went to “Technology session” in Beta 1 room. Room was so full with people, that we sat on floor. After two more presentations we moved to Beta 2 room “Community session”. Maksims Berjoza and his wife Aija were speaking about BarCamp – what it is, and for whom it is. We also met great people from Lithuania.They were talking about Linux community in Lithuani (Tomas Žeimys) and Baltix Linux distribution (Mantas Kriaučiūnas). Lithuanian Linux communit you can find in: www.ubuntu.lt. Baltix distribution is for Baltic region and is based on Ubuntu. For more information visit: www.baltix.lt.
Moving back to home
As we missed our last train, we went to bus station. I had really big backache from siting, that I laid down at the end of bus. And that was my trip to Riga.
This was my first conference and I really liked it! I’m waiting for next one.
Updated: For those who wasn’t on presentations. Now you can download the presentations from the conference in pdf format from here.
