CNSL07@aLANtejo.uevora.pt

Just arrived home after attending the Open Delta aLANtejo 07, an event ran by the Computer Science Students Association of the University of Évora, over the last three days (and for some, nights too:). The event had two parts: one fun part, a LANparty and the other a knowledge-oriented part, conferences specially and entirely dedicated to Open Source, with several luminaries on the schedule and, last but not least, also the final of the 1st Portuguese Zend Free Software Contest, the main reason this blog entry is being issued ;)

Yes, I was there with my own Qtractor presentation which was delivered on day 2 and, surprise, surprise, was awarded the 2nd prize as announced on the final day 3 of the event. Yes, second place, again :) But this time I had the pleasure and the privilege to meet the winners in person, even before the final announcement, and I must tell that the big one went to a promising and well deserved young couple. Yep, I'm getting old for this things :)

The 1st prize, again very well deserved as I shall stress again, went to jKiwi, from the lovely couple Dan Mihai Ile and Maria João Leal (pictured on the right). In their own words, jKiwi is a easy to use virtual makeover and hair styler application mainly for the Linux desktop. The aim of the project is to instantly find out how you would look in hundreds of haircuts, try different lip colors or eye contact lenses and shadows.

Third prize went to the Quinoa Framework, a flexible and scalable rapid application development framework written on PHP5, presented by Marcello Duarte, for whom I was also pleased to meet and have a nice chat. Of all the contestants this one was the best documented and professional and surely deserved more.

Anyway, I believe that all three (four) of us were in deed flattered by being head to head in the contest, and I sincerely send my congratulations and wishes of the best and brightest to both of you. Hope to see you all again, maybe in the next year.

Cheers.

P.S. The project submission and presentation slides are here attached. They're just an updated version of the same ones originally publicised for LAC2007@TU-Berlin attendace, March 2007 (as posted here, here and here).