One interesting thing about the conference schedule is that Monday is basically a tutorials day. Longer sessions, no vendor presence what so ever. Essentially it was almost a ghost town. There was a very strong showing by Smalltalkers, who are not used to this format.

Today should prove to be a much more 'exciting' and energetic day. The formal talks begin, keynotes and Smalltalk keynotes occur, the sponsors will be out in force with their booths, etc.

After Travis's talk, I had lunch with Blaine Buxton and James Savidge at the Armadillo. That was nice and then we headed back over to the conference. I caught the beginning of Avi Bryant's presentation on Seaside and Ajax. Unfortunately, Avi had assumed his audience would be expert at Seaside. Just about no one knew much about Seaside, so he had to go back to the basics before he could talk about Ajax.

Again, unfortunately, I had to leave half way through his presentation to run the Smalltalk Solutions Coding Contest. The coding contest concludes tonight and will take around 30 minutes to run, may be less. I have the entrant's code on my laptop.

While the guys were coding away at the changes I'd made to Pong, I played off their submissions from the Phase 1 weekend in front of those who were watching and were interested. It proved to be an amusing pass time.

The changes I made to Pong for the contestants were these:

• When you hit the ball with the bat, depending on how far from the centre of the bat you are depends on how much of a 'curve' you give to the balls trajectory.
• Balls bounce off balls
• You had a second offensive bat that was wired to move in the opposite direction as you and also to move slightly faster.
• All bats were sped up further
• There are six balls bouncing around
• Scoring is down relatively and the first to reach 30 wins
• I didn't tell the contestants exactly what had been changed, that was part of the contest