A Week in Wellington

For the past six days or so I've been in Wellington for Multicore World which, as usual, is a small but very high-quality pointy-end-of-the-technology conference. Actually, it's almost a truism of technology conferences - the smaller the conference and the higher the proportion of international guests, the higher the quality. There were many good presentations, but one which really caught my attention was "Preparing for Extreme Heterogeneity in High Performance Computing" by Jeffrey Vetter, of Oak Ridge National Laboratories and Scaling! by Richard O'Keefe. My own presentation was Complex Problems Actually Have Complex Solutions which argued against some unfortunate management trends (and interestingly correlated with the emergent theme of heterogeneity) with plenty of New Zealand related references.

As would be quite well-known, February 18 was Bramble Cay Melomys Day, which was quite a success. The Animal Justice Party MP Andy Meddick gave a speech in parliament, several memorial events were held around the country (as can be seen on the Facebook group), the petition for a national memorial and museum for extinct and endangered animals is up and running, and I stood in the morning drizzle in Wellington to initiate proceedings for Australia (because I enjoy starting Australian things in New Zealand). This is, of course, not the end of events but rather the beginning,

Convention organiser Nicolás Erdödy has once again delivered a superb event at a great location and with amazing catering. I think I'll live on dry bread and water for a few days after this. After each day of the conference, I made by back to the delightfully scarred deco beauty that is Hotel Waterloo, which is brilliantly good-value for those who like this sort of style, and have worked on my MSc dissertation which has the title, Is the Future of Business Software Proprietary or Free and Open-Source?. Having completed the trend data collection and conducted interviews my conclusion is heading to the proposition that this is a race condition between engineering requirements and a natural marginal cost of reproduction versus the use of the cloud to achieve subscription-based vendor lock-in. On client-servers, I think the latter is winning. Anyway, all this said it means I haven't had the opportunity to really engage in the Wellington I know and love. No visits to the museums, or galleries, or even the observatory. The best I have managed is a catch-up lunch with mr_orgue, which was frankly great, as we hadn't seen each other for a couple of years. Anyway, following a rather awful sleep (or lack thereof), I'm about to board the big silver bird and cross The Ditch back to Australia.