Yesterday (the 12th of May) was the NLUUG Spring conference 2011. The theme was "Open is Efficient" -- a theme which can be explained any number of ways. Keynotes were along the theme of the social contract and cooperation, and the technical talks were mostly about cost- and time-savings.

I followed three technical talks (the most I've had in years, since usually I'm too busy running around checking on the vendor stands and doing last-minute organizational and board stuff) and quite enjoyed them, although 45 minutes is too short to dive in deep when the speaker starts off unsure of the technical level of the audience. At NLUUG conferences, the range of attendees is pretty big, so it can be difficult to judge where to start.

Mayur Nande talked about systemd, its design and philosophy, compared to other init varieties like SysV init, upstart and launchd. I had the please of sharing a train with Mayur after the conference (all of 12 minutes to Arnhem), so I could ask a few more technical things of him. I don't mess with init systems very often (limited mostly to scratching my head at what SMF is doing on OpenSolaris) so this was a good introduction so I know what my Linuxes are doing.

I missed Jos van den Oever and his talk on WebODF. Drat.

Micha Kersloot dove into the details of migrating (partially) away from Exchange with the Zimbra suite. This is a talk I went to for work-work purposes, since getting away from Exchange is on the list-of-wishes for work-work. Being able to dump Outlook in the process is just a bonus. Interestingly, Micha said that he preferred Zimbra's webmail client for ease-of-use of KMail. Inconceivable! I'll have to look into it.

Magnus Hagander gave a whirlwind talk about Postgres 9.1 beta. I've been partial to Postgres forever (over other available Free Software databases) but the last time I installed it was version 8.2 and I've never done anything big with it. This overview of cool new features -- hot streaming replication, weird-ass subqueries -- made me repeatedly scratch my head and go "hey, postgres can do that?" Much appreciated. I'll probably attend the Postgres Conference in Amsterdam to learn more. I though Magnus's talk was great: well delivered and technical.

Then bought a book on DTrace, begged a Google Women T-shirt for the MomC, and ran off into the sunset.

This NLUUG conference marks the end of my involvement with the NLUUG as part of its board. I joined the board 4 years ago, and as my term expired I found I just didn't have the time -- what with working a regular job outside of the Free Software world and being involved with KDE and other things -- to participate properly in this particular association. Pieter-Paul Spiertz and Marcel Nijenhof have joined the board (come to think of it, I should update the board webpage) so it's at full strength.