By James Cooley - January 21 2007 tags: barcampirelandsoutheast

Congratulations to Tom and Kieth for organizing the event. Everyone got juggling balls when they arrived and a free lesson to get them started.

There were three sessions running in parallel. I was on first with an Eclipse talk so I missed Damien Mulley's: "Pissing People Off: Experiences from running a lobby group" and Aidan Finn's : "Idiots guide to Ruby on Rails, Django, Turbogears and other assorted newfangled frameworks". All the talks were recorded so there may be a way of watching them later.

TJ McIntyre of DRI gave a talk on Who owns software? that highlighted, among other things, some differences between rights to software in Ireland and places like the US and UK. In Ireland, since 2002, we have a moral right to object to software being used for certain purposes (e.g gambling and pornography) even when we have transferred copyright. This moral right to software doesn't exist in the US or UK. A search on Google would seem to confirm that sites in Ireland want you to transfer moral rights too - moral rights software transfer. There hasn't been a case in Ireland yet over moral use of software. The ideal of moral rights of a creator of a work is well established France where, for example, there has been a case against colorization of a black and white Hitchcock film as it was argued it defaced the work of the creator.

Justin Mason gave a talk about using Amazon’s EC2 and S3 web services. EC2 uses the Xen virtual machine monitor. EC2 is seen as a good method to handle peak-time load overspill (instead of using EC2 as your main server). I picked up that S3 has a rudimentary API instead of a standard a standard posix-type filesystem interface and EC2 wipes your data when rebooted.

The guy giving the juggling lessons said there's little more satisfying than being part of a club-passing juggling duo so there's something to aim for the the next barcamp.