I’m at ETech, yay!
This is day two of the O’rielly Emerging Technology Conference. Maybe I’ll spew my general thoughts about the conference at some point but right now I want to mention a couple nifty things I have seen so far.
I was just down in the exhibition hall talking to some guys at the Sun booth. I’ve always thought Sun was going to disappear into the ether. I know what they did in the past but not now and they’ve never really had a foothold in any particular area. I still don’t think they do but at least they have a couple of interesting things going on. I’ll gab about one of them -
Project Blackbox
This is easily the most interesting Sun project I’ve seen. It’s basically a portable server room that lives inside a freight container. Now that I’ve said that, I’m sure your mind is spiraling with all kinds ways to utilize that. If you want details and installation examples, check out the site (I’m not going to repeat their info).
The guy at the booth was the dude that designed the cooling system for the containers. He was pretty fun to chat with, not being a salesman and all. Fucking salesmen. The one use that I thought was interesting (that I will repeat) was an implementation involving data transfer. Apparently, it’s faster to load up the servers in a container with 3 Petrabytes of data and ship it across the ocean than it is to transfer that amount over the wire.
Stamen and visualizations
This company has presented a couple times this week. They are here showing off their fancy data visualizations and they are pretty fuckin’ neat. Their work is plainly listed on the home page of their site so go check them out. My two favorites are both from Digg Labs. I like seeing how things are connected, so I find Arc and Swarm the most compelling.
Food Hacking
This was pretty out of character for ETech but it was definitely entertaining. Almost like watching street performers. It was an excellent reprieve for my brain which was already overloaded by noon on the first day 
These guys simply want to understand the science of food, taste, etc and then manipulate it for fun. Making something eatable is sort of a secondary concern. “Avocado oil? Well let’s turn that into powder because we know how.” It didn’t taste very good. “Nitro glycerin? I know, let’s spoon crème in to it and then put it in our mouths! Because we can! Neeeaaaatooooo!”
Being programmers as well, they have spread their passion to the interwebz. I got an excellent shot of this while they were demoing the site.
There you go. That’s a little taste of ETech 2008. More to come 
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I was more interested in swinging around the blobs by their tethers than using it for useless news bits.
Just answer your phone, stop waiting for a text message. Fucking twitter.