Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Conference, VMware

Obviously I'm back from the Citrix iForum conference (about 3 weeks ago in fact). I had a great time, and it was worthwhile from a business perspective as well - I got to see all of the new Citrix product features first hand, talk directly to Citrix engineers and developers about specific problems, and listen to Kevin Mitnick give a fascinating talk about social engineering. The party with free drinks on the second night didn't go amiss either ;) After the conference was over I did a few touristy things in Sydney as well. Once I sort out web hosting that will actually let me install a gallery, I'll see about putting up some pictures.

Citrix had an expo running during the conference, mostly for the benefit of their partners. Most interesting to me was the presence of VMware. VMware Workstation is a product I knew about previously, but had never used, mainly because it was too expensive for me to even consider. However, at the stand they were giving away free copies of VMware Workstation in exchange for filling out a form, which I did. I finally got around to installing it last weekend, and I must say I'm very impressed. It's fast, stable, and it's one of the most polished commercial Linux applications I have used so far. The best thing about it though is it lets me do Windows development without having to reboot, which is a big help as all of my other important stuff (emails, CD burning software etc.) is in Linux. I'd certainly recommend checking it out if you need something that works well for doing testing or cross-platform development.