Memoirs of a CPUNERD

I went to three sessions this time, instead of the usual five. All three were on OpenGL, and they were some what informative. The last session not so much, it just talked about how there is a fast track through the driver code down to the hardware, and that you should always program your applications to hit that fast track. The speakers were okay, the last one was extremely nervous, which made for an interesting talk. About the first presentation: It was primarily on new features in OpenGL for Mac OS X (which means three year old features for Windows and Linux). Alex Eddy, my usual contact at Apple made two really freaking cool demos, each supposedly in a day and a half.

We had a two hour break for lunch, so Ray and I went to one of the labs and just screwed around on some new macs. I got to mess around with FBOs, and then we ran out of time. After the third session, I went back to the labs to talk with some of the graphics guys, but they were really slammed with questions from developers, so I just split. I went back to NVIDIA, collected as many other badges as I could (we now had five) for the campus bash, then Sean, Ray, Carl, Chris, and I headed off to Cupertino for the Apple headquarters.

The bash was a blast. There was cool techno from a DJ with a nifty lights show, tons of free beer, and an insane amount of nerds wandering the Apple quad. I got to meet a few new people, including two interns from Florida A&M and UT, and the guy who wrote the O’Reilly firewalls book. After we finished up at the bash, we went to Murphy’s Ave. for a drink or two and some darts. I called it a night at 12:45AM, and took everyone back to NVIDIA.

I can say this, getting up at 6:30 AM was a good idea, even though it meant only five and a half hours of sleep. I took the 280 up to SF instead of the 101, and then went to Daly City. I took the BART to the Moscone center, and took my (not quite) rightful place among the Apple nerds.

Apparently I’m not allowed to divulge anything that I saw at WWDC. It’s all “trade secrets,” blah blah blah. I did go to the UI presentation (boring), the OS X Scientific Computing presentation (interesting, but not useful), the Core Animation presentation (pretty cool), the Objective-C 2.0 presentation (so-so), and the Core Data presentation (first half was good, second half not so much). The food wasn’t that great there either, perhaps Thursday will be a better day.

I originally thought there would be a student awards presentation on Tuesday, turns out it was the Apple Design Awards, and they gave out a single student award. I wanted to find some more students, maybe meet some new people, but being as that wasn’t going to happen, Ray and I just headed home after dinner.