I had a great time presenting at LinuxFest Northwest 2008 this past weekend. I arrived a bit early at my designated room, to find the previous presenter sitting at a table with a laptop and an audience of two huddled around: that didn’t fill me with confidence!

But as the appointed time arrived, people streamed in, and i wound up with an enthusiastic sitting-room-only audience of about 30 people (after all the chairs were filled, a few latecomers sat on the floor). Since these were mostly programmers and i only had an hour, we didn’t go too deep into Natural Language Processing. But judging from the questions and comments afterwards, i believe i attained my main goal of introducing people to the Natural Language Processing Toolkit (NLTK) (see these previous posts) and encouraging them to try it out for themselves.
The presentation slides are up on SemanticBible so you can take a look: they should be largely self-explanatory (though of course lacking the witty side-comments and my winning smile).

That was all the time i had for the first day of the conference, but i went back for more on Sunday. Attendance was quite a bit lighter, but i had a chance to talk with some others folks about the XO laptop (other previous posts). I finally got mine a couple of weeks ago, and it’s really an amazing machine. Since it’s an open platform, i’m actively considering what it might take to develop a simple Bible reader application for it.

I also picked up a couple of the latest Linux distributions, and now have Ubuntu 8.04 (”Hardy Heron“: why do they use these goofy names!) installed and running happily on an older Pentium 4 with 512Mb RAM that i recently scored. It’s really amazing how much functionality the open source community provides (though i have to repeat a snarky comment from one of my colleagues this morning: “The only sense in which Linux is free is if your time is worth nothing”). That said, it didn’t take much time at all to get things running, though of course it’s always the maintenance tail that bites you, no matter who provides your OS.