movie priemiere, lexi.net event

thursday night we went to the premiere screening of a friend's film called "the end". the writer/director jeremy also played a key role in the film due to a dearth of local male talent who come out for auditions for indipendant "zero-budget" films. it was shot on video but the quality was still excellent; amazing how far that technology has come. "the end" is a feature-length psychological thriller and played to a packed house of a few hundred people at a local theatre. hopefully it'll be hitting the upcoming festival circuits and get jeremy the recognition he and his crew deserves for their effort. it may not have been a hollywood blockbuster, but i enjoyed it thoroughly. it was sophisticated, funny, well shot and well acted.

yesterday i spoke at a small invitational conference lexi.net puts on each year for its clientele. i spoke about kde and online identity. a good portion of the presentation was dedicated to kwallet, though we also looked at encryption support in email, instant messaging and the web; web services integrated into desktop applications; and hardware and kernel level identity solutions. the presentation was kept fairly non-technical due to the mix of people attending though we did go into more technical details in a few places. a pdf of the slides i used can be found here.

the attendees seemed engaged and impressed, particularly by kwallet. the idea of a fully auditable code base for storing passwords and sensitive data really struck home for a lot of people. one person who deals with securities noted that it would be great for their work since they have a lot of online accounts they need to deal with on a daily basis which contain sensitive information. a privacy professional was nodding along the whole time as well. kwallet could certainly be improved, and i pointed out some of those improvement points such as being extending into a single sign on system, improved identification of applications on the bus, access control on information in the wallet, etc. george staikos has been the sole author of this stuff and it's really compelling. the code base isn't very large either so would make a great entry point for someone interested in these sorts of things to get involved with kde.

this morning an email arrived in my inbox from one of the attendees letting me know they had downloaded kubuntu to give it a try. they had a quick question about qemu as well. always great to see such quick results.

if you have a chance to promote kde and the free software desktop locally i totally recommend it. it's very energizing and rewarding. if you don't have a chance to do so, think about making one. universities usually have interest groups for computing and most cities have various technology and business social groups that are often looking for speakers and interesting topics.