Joachim Breitner's Homepage

The first day of GNUnify’11 has passed. My talk on Haskell went, as far as I can tell, well. Attendance was good (rough estimate: just above 50), although it was not as packed as later talks, and there some questions being asked. There were some technical problems with the microphone, I’m not sure how that affected the people sitting in the rear rows. Also, I fear that the video recording of the talk might have suffered – we will see.  Later throughout the afternoon and evening I would repeatedly find myself cornered by five to ten students of SICSR who would question me about Haskell (Why should I learn it, where is it used, how is different from Java?) – mostly volunteers who were busy and thus unable to attend the session. I think I got some of them at least curious about Haskell.

I did attend a talk on virtualization and a short demo of GNOME 3 and otherwise just talked to people or sat in the speakers corner. The pampering by the organizers continued – if I would stand for half a second with a slightest, even false, hint of help-needing on my face, they would ask me if I need any thing. When I pass they would step back to free the path. It made me feel a bit uneasy, but I figured that normal behavior in the Indian culture and they, being hosts to me, would not feel comfortable any other way.

We had dinner at the side of the pool of the Symbiosis university, and more interesting talk happened. So far, nobody seemed to be interested in GPG keysigning, maybe I should give a talk about GPG and the web of trust next time.