Sun Tech day in Cagliari

The event had an ominous start. Apparently, nobody among the geeks who organized it had paid any close attention to the date to see if it had any significance, and nobody noticed that it was one of the dates when Italian football team was playing a game in the European championship!
I was reminded of a similar case, during FrOSCon 2006, which was held during the World cup. Lenz gave a speech in front of 5 people, all friends and colleagues! So we were afraid that we could face a similar debacle.
Our fears were swept away when the event started, and the room was filled in to capacity by a very dedicated audience, welcomed by professor Giulio Concas, our generous host, who also introduced a project on software quality metrics.

Domenico Minchella, a passionate Solaris ambassador, made a convincing demonstration of ZFS crash recovery. He is never afraid of picking a fight with the audience, and he turns every flamebait into advocacy.

Stefano Sanna presented what he called "the pitiful case of a grown up man who has to use Sun SPOT to justify with his wife why he is still playing with Lego toys!".

The toy performed as expected, and Stefano has more excuses to continue promoting the Sun SPOT.

Also Fabrizio Gianneschi had a toy to play with. In addition to the news of Java technology advancement, he played with a Java powered pen that speaks and replays what you write.

After the last session, where I had to warn the impatient audience that the dolphins from the desk would be distributed only at the very end, Massimiliano Dessì and yours truly performed the by now celebrated "throw them the dolphins" stunt, which was greatly appreciated. With our delight, most of the audience stayed after the session, to enjoy technical chatting and refreshments.