T-Dose in The Netherlands and Perl

T-Dose is just 2 weeks away and there is going to be a Perl booth at the event. As usual before every event, I get a bit tense, even though we are not the focus of the event I'd like to make sure that we use the opportunity wisely.

Luckily the Perl Mongers in The Netherlands seem to be enthusiastic about the idea of promoting Perl and their own Perl Mongers group and several of them indicated that they will come to the event and are ready to be at the booth.

T-Dose is a relatively small event. Only 200 people. So it is smaller than a YAPC but a lot bigger than any of the Perl Workshops.

Looking at their web site I find it interesting that besides a mailing list they also have a LinkedIn group and a Facebook group where they make announcements. Different people will prefer different methods to follow what's going on. Surprisingly, they don't have a Twitter feed.

Content

There are going to be a number of interesting things going on at T-Dose. First of all there is going to be an Arduino workshop. I was never really involved in the hardware level but always wanted to. So I might use this opportunity to learn about it. It must be a lot more interesting to create things that can actually interact with the physical world rather than just blinking sadly on your monitor. We'll see.

There are also going to a number of interesting talks. To point out a few there is going to be Open GIS: technical maturity and commercial introduction with Marc Vloemans and Milo van der Linden and Remember the Spartans! Or, introducing open source against overwhelming odds by Jan Stedehouder. These both seem to be rather "business oriented" and less technical.

Then there is a talk about Arduino, an open source electronics prototyping platform by Machtelt Garrels. As I understand she is also a prominent Open Document and Open Source advocate.

Attack vectors on mobile devices by Tam Hanna sounds also interesting even though phone-wise I am still in the dark ages.

I never liked SELinux, mostly as I never understood it. SELinux, increasing security one compartment at a time by Bharvani Toshaan might help in that.

I am not a real freedom fighter but the talk Are we loosing freedom on the Internet? by Sebastian Wilhelm Graf sounds like something that might be worth listening to.

We have been talking about games lately, especially with SDL so the 18 months The Butterfly Effect - what can an open source game achieve? by Klaas van Gend and Peter van Ginneken might give me some more idea.

Perl

As far as I can see there is going to be only one Perl related talk, Processing XML with Perl by Mark Overmeer but actually there are going to be two Perl related tables. One of OTRS and the other mostly made up by people from NL.pm and myself.

See you there?

I don't have a plane ticket or a hotel room yet but I guess I'll have to arrange those soon. Are you also coming? Will you be able to help out at the Perl table? If so please let me know.