I had only 35 minutes for my presentation (even shorter than I had planned), so I just barely got to the part where I alter the WACounter class to divide by 0 to show fixing things that break. But the questions were very good, and everyone stayed to the end.  Afterward, I continued the discussion with a smaller group for another 20 minutes in the hallway, and have had a half dozen people stop me in the hallways in the following two hours, so the interest is high and the news spreading.

But the biggest news is that based on the preliminary interest in Seaside because of my talk, the FISL conference organizers offered an entire room for next years conference (the full three days with 12 hours per day), as well as four or five main-track hour talks, if I could help organize the subconference details!  This is quite a gift, because it will mean that we can expose the 7000 conference attendees to a variety of Smalltalk programs, without paying for rooms or badging or promotion.  The conference asked if I could get some corporate sponsors on board, and I immediately fired off email to James at Cincom and Monty at GemStone, and thank goodness they read email on Saturday, because they offered their support quickly. Of course, we have many details to work out, but everyone agrees that we will move forward!

We also have a great opportunity to overlap a bit with the OLPC folks. They also have a room for the entire conference, and I can see some "Squeak on the XO" talks overlapping between the tracks.

So, mark your calendars to be in Porto Alegre Brazil at end of June 2009!  We're gonna be smalltalking!

What Schwartz shows is a typical EToys demo: “driving the car”. The first time most people see this demo they’re amazed, because they’ve never seen software run like this before.