Managed to chat briefly with David Gilbert of JFreeChart fame last night at the meetup. JFreeChart is one of those open source components that stirred my interest in the scene almost four years ago. David is a really nice guy, and his hard work and dedication to JFreeChart shines through in a very easy to use charting package. I was intrigued to hear that around 70% of JFreeChart's users were incorporating the charting into web applications, but then it is such an essential part of any serious (open sourced based) developers toolkit, I suppose it's a good measure of java developments. Thanks to David for coming along, it's good to see someone out there making a living direct from open source.

Had an interesting chat with Simon, about how the general population approach computing, and he pointed out that the largest barrier was not understanding the intricate nature of how it all fits together, but that fear of breaking the system was paramount. It seems that too many people in the world, when faced with a computing environment, are scared of what they might do, and often take the Luddite defense. I guess you need to provide an environment that has no social fear of failure (i.e. let them wander all around the system, they are far more likely to accidentally learn something than accidentally break it). Simon also reminded me to have another look at StarLogo

As for the robots, I made the final, but I'm sorry to say my robot was trounced by Sam's amazing gravity-based targeting robot. That sucker was mean, hopefully Sam will do a quick overview on his blog. And I'll put my robot in a future entry.