Final CEC Reflections: The Wynn, ZFS Under the Hood, Messaging wrap-up

I'm now back home, sorting through emails and cleaning up some stuff before a regular week of work begins. Here are some highlights from Tuesday and Wednesday during the Sun CEC 2007 conference in Las Vegas:

The Wynn: After visiting the CEC Party, Barton, Yan, Henning and I decided to have dinner at the Wynn. It's one of the newest hotels in town and a must-see. This place sure has style! We went to the Daniel Boulud Brasserie which is located inside the hotel at the Lake of Dreams. This is one of the few restaurants in Las Vegas where you can actually eat outside the ever present air-conditioning and enjoy a great view. The lake features a gigantic rectangular waterfall surrounded by a forest. The lake and the waterfall are part of several mini-shows that occur at regular intervals in the afternoon, featuring impressive animatronics such as a head coming out of the water (with projected animated faces) or a gigantic frog leaning over the waterfall back which also serves as a huge video screen. Music, light and animation are perfectly synchronized so that for instance the head emerging from the water perfectly matches its projected upon face or the light ripples running over the lake perfectly match the animation on screen.
This is definitely my favourite Vegas hotel now, I wonder where our stock price needs to be to afford having our nect CEC at their convention center :).
ZFS Under the Hood: This was a great session done by Jason Bantham and Jarod Nash. They went through the ZFS Source Tour diagram and explained the little boxes one by one while describing the basic processes, mechanisms and data flow that ZFS uses to write and read data. And they were fun speakers too! Plus each attendee that asked a question got a piece of chocolate thrown at as an extra incentive to participate :).
Podcasting: After the closing session, Franz, Matthias, Brian, Dave and I recorded episode 3 of the CEC 2007 Podcast. We reflected on our impressions of the conference and on our project to aggregate and display audience messages during the main sessions. Actually, I'm cleaning up and commenting the JavaFX code as we speak to publish it in the next post for your code-reading pleasure :).