CUSEC Day 1 ended with a blast. Everyone headed out to the pub and, as far as I could tell, had a great time. I know I did. One of the highlights though were teaching Jeff Atwood and his wife to play bunnies. They are now officially apprentices, hopefully on their way to spreading word of the league through the world.

The other highlight was this amazing coding horror sticker he gave me.

He signed it for me too!

Isn't that so cool?

His keychain mastery came in handy as well when I dropped it under the table and found it thanks to his flashlight.

I only got home at 4 am but it wasn't that big of a deal since I knew that Julian had canceled his morning talk and the other didn't interest me all that much. I slept in (well, if you can call 5 hours of sleep sleeping in) and showed up for Dr. Grogono's presentation.

Dr. Grogono spoke about Erasmus, a language he is writing to help deal with concurrency issues. Trying to keep it simple, the language seems to be based around 2 concepts only: cells and protocols.

If I understood right, cells are a little like classes, in that they encapsulate their own state and behaviour. They also define protocols for communication, stating what they expect to receive (types) and what they'll provide in return. Other cells implement these protocols and this allows for message passing between cells. Since cells are independent from each other, the generated code can be executed in parallel. Dr. Grogono said he already has a prototype compiler (it compiles Erasmus code to C++) but it needs to be rewritten. I'm going to keep a lookout for when it's available and when it is I'll probably try playing around with it a little. It seems pretty inspired by Erlang (the cells being kind of like processes and having nothing but messages being passed between each other) and could probably work just as well while being simpler to use.

The other talk of the day was by Dr. Ullman and, honestly, I didn't get much out of it. By then I was dead tired and slept through most of it. I noticed he talked about minhashing and Google's pagerank but that's all I remember.

The last talk of the day that I attended was a presentation on building a software startup by Idee. The starting a startup talk was like many I'd heard before, what was interesting about this talk was the software that they develop. They showed a demo of their image recognition software and it was just plain amazing. They have the demo available on their website and I highly recommend you check it out. I haven't been that impressed since I saw the video of smart image resizing algorithm.

At the end of the day we had the banquet which was ridiculously long (from the time I sat at my table around 7 it took over 2 hours for my meal to show up) and when my steak finally showed up it was raw. Not rare, raw. About 2cm of meat of the outside was seared but it was thick and the inside wasn't cooked at all. Since I like my steaks well done I didn't even finish it. Oh well, time to go party again.

Or not.

There was nothing officially planned for saturday night which might have been a mistake. People just kind of scattered all over. Since Skrud is ridiculously popular, when we said we were planning on going to distillerie a lot of people showed up there. It's already a fairly popular place and it's not very big so by the time I showed up it was so packed they weren't letting anyone else in. We went to another bar and too many people showed up there so we tried moving again. After we couldn't fit everyone into a third bar we gave up and split up. Skrud, Alex, Harley and I went back to Skrud's place where we found out that Jackie was at Brutopia so we headed for a pint there. By the time we got to sleep we had to be up a little over 3 hours later for Zed's factor tutorial the next day. The talks of day 3 had better be engaging or there was no way any of us would be staying awake....