Martin Geisler Online

I’ve been doing much too much lately, but better late than never: here’s a report from my visit at the Orbit-iEX trade fair in Basel two weeks ago.

The fair opened at nine and by taking the train at eight from Aarau I could be there exactly on time. The first thing one sees is the magnificent Messeturm Basel — it’s the tallest building in Switzerland with it’s 105 metres. I’ve been to Basel before, but this was the first time I saw it in daylight.

Since I’m a student I could get in at the fair for only 10 CHF, a nice touch! Inside there were lots to look at, it took me a long time just to explore the two floors for they were so huge! I kept loosing track of where I had been, and where I was heading.

The fair was clearly not aimed at developers like me — it was more aimed at the people who like wearing suits. So I heard some presentations about various pieces of software which should enable your business to ⟨insert favorite buzzword here⟩ by utilizing the fantastic powers coming from ⟨insert favorite technology buzzword here⟩… it was a bit amusing to see what it actually is those people go around and spend their days doing :-)

I also got to meet a talking robot there — I saw it coming towards me so I took at picture of it.

It came closer and asked me if it was a digital camera I had used, and if it could see the photo? I was totally surprised to hear it talking to me, and at first I thought that it was just some standard greeting. But it insisted and it was only after I showed it the photo that it rolled on its way. Very funny incident!

Some other highlights were some guys from a Hong Kong company called RiTech (sorry, they will try and maximize your browser… I have no idea why people think they should control the size of my browser?). They had a cool USB flashdrive with a built in fingerprint reader. So the drive would only activate after having seen the right fingerprint — and when it did so, then it would just act like any other USB storage device, and thus be compatible with anything from Linux to Windows.

I tried to get them to tell me the price of such a thingy, but they were not so terribly good salesmen for they seemed to kind of lose interest in me. Oh well, maybe they could tell that probably wouldn’t have bought one on the spot anyway.

There were also one booth that sported half a Formula 1 racing car. I cannot remember why anymore, but it was a funny “gadget” to show.

Before going home I went to booth L62 in hall 2.1 to get my key signed. I had checked Biglumber beforehand, and had discovered that Andre Dierker would like to exchange key fingerprints. I first had to circle the booth a couple of times, trying to read the name tags on peoples shirts, and finally I found him. We then exchanged key fingerprints on little paper slips — it was good to see that I’m not the only one who carry those things around in my wallet! :-)

I then took the train home, or rather directly to Zürich for my lecture in OOSC.