I have been having some problems with my upgraded laptop and my upgraded OS. Been fighting them all day.

The network at the PDC is horrible. Getting an address from the DHCP server can take up to a 30 seconds if you are lucky.

Then they have some kind of proxy server that crashes all the time, because now is the second time that a guy shows up and tells us `Dont worry, we are rebooting the proxy server, it will be ready in a few minutes'.

When the server comes up, I can visit many web sites, but many others just never resolve to an IP address. Randomly. Wild guess of the day: the Proxy Server is MS Proxy Server.

Linux at the PDC

I have not heard a single mention of Linux so far. But I ran into Ben Adida (from OpenACS) and Eric of AbiSource fame (which is not doing much AbiSource these days).

All the talks are pretty focused on the new .NET stuff, which made me realize that we should ship and distribute a library to make propper use of Jabber on Linux. I am not sure if Gabber is enough, or if Gabber can act as the multiplexor it is supposed to be, but we should look into that.

Ben is having a love/hate relationship with the various .NET technologies.

Project-7

Met Luis Daniel Soto in between breaks finally. He was kind enough to sponsor my trip to the PDC. Talked about Mexico, .NET, Passport and found out that he got married last year.

I went to the Project-7 talk at the end of the day. The presentation on Fortran for .NET was pretty fun. Bertrand Meyer also tried to convince the audience that Eiffel was the way to go.

Bertrand made a good point that is not mentioned very often. .NET will give people a chance to choose the best language for a particular application instead of choose a language because of the libraries provided by it.

He also discussed how the Eiffel compiler for .NET supports multiple inheritance. It is a pretty cool trick: for each class created an interface is also created. So multiple inheritance is implemented by having the derived class implement both interfaces from the parents.

Dinner with the ECMA guys Thanks to Sam Ruby, I had a chance to join the ECMA committee members that attended the PDC. A bunch of us got Mojitos at the restaurant.

Bertrand poses with other ECMA members (here you can see Jim, the man in charge of the MS CLR). Bertrand made very compeling points on why people should use and buy Eiffel ;-)