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I’m now back home again from this year’s The Gathering event, which lasted from Wednesday this week until yesterday, Sunday. The Gathering is, for those of you who haven’t heard about it before, an annual computer party held in Vikingskipet, Hamar, Norway, and is with its 5200 participants regarded as the world’s second largest computer party.

As during last year’s event, I attended several of the seminars/lectures held:

• Opera

  Opera Software, represented by its CTO Håkon Wium Lie, demonstrated the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), also known as the $100 laptop. Håkon had with him one of the early prototypes, and showed us amongst other things the Opera web browser running on it. And, I got to touch the machine after the seminar.

• The Pirate Bay

  The Pirate Bay held a seminar about the beginnings, the growth and the future of Piratbyrån and The Pirate Bay. The seminar was held by one of the co-founders of The Pirate Bay, Marcin de Kaminski.

• EFN (Elektronisk Forpost Norge)

  EFN held a seminar about DRM and net neutrality, and EFN’s opinions about these topics. They also talked about the music industry, and how the Internet is changing the way music is delivered.

• IBM

  IBM held a seminar where they demonstrated the Sony PlayStation 3, particularly Linux running on it. They also talked in detail about the Cell processor and its advantages over other computer architectures.

• The TG crew

  The TG crew, represented by crew ombudsman Frode Sandholtbråten, talked about the composition of the crew at The Gathering, how to apply for it and why.

• Microsoft

  Microsoft held three seminars at The Gathering this year; one about Microsoft XNA, one about Microsoft Robotics Studio, and one about new gaming technologies in Windows Vista, plus summaries of the two previous seminars. At the last one they also drew a Xbox 360 and Windows Vista Ultimate for one of the attendants. I attended all but the one about Microsoft XNA.

  Microsoft Robotics Studio is a new framework from Microsoft, which integrates robotics hardware such as LEGO Mindstorms NXT, the Xbox 360 controller, Phidgets, etc. in a drag-and-drop IDE for creating robots. The runtime is based on .NET, and a version for the .NET Compact Framework is in the making. This means that, in the future, you’ll be able to run the robot logics on your cell phone. Microsoft Robotics Studio is some of the coolest technology I’ve seen in a while, so make sure you check it out.

  The seminars were held by Rune Zakariassen from Microsoft Norway and Microsoft Regional Director Sondre Bjellås. After the last seminar, I asked Rune about Microsoft’s plans for Norwegian handwriting recognition in tablet PCs (recall that I asked him the same question last year), and he said that they were still working on it. He also told that it wouldn’t make the first Service Pack for Windows Vista, but probably the next one after that. Good to hear that it’s being worked on.

  He also shared with me that Microsoft is working on releasing Norwegian speech recognition for Windows, and that it will be released as a free download for both Windows XP and Windows Vista this autumn.

I didn’t only attend seminars, however. There were several stands there this year as well, amongst other KANDU’s chillout zone and Hyperion’s stand. At the chillout zone they had board games, Xbox games, Atari games, a pinball machine, etc. They also arranged several for-fun competitions once in a while, for example a hard drive throwing competition, which I participated in (I didn’t win though ).

At Hyperion’s stand (Hyperion is, by the way, the association LillehammerLAN is part of) they held a Duck Hunt competition on a NES machine they had, and I placed second, with 501.400 points.

I have uploaded almost 500 pictures from the party to the gallery, so make sure you check those out.

This year’s The Gathering was really great, and I had a lot of fun.