ACeDB2000 conference proceedings: Day 1

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> ## ACeDB2000: Day 1

> ### First impressions

> The first day started with a series of talks in a lecture room on the SFU-campus. The conference organizers (Steven Jones and Richard B.) gave short intros, Richard Durbin discussed general Ace-issues and Lincoln Stein talked about the evolution of ACeDB and its symbiosis with the Web. Simon Kelley talked his most recent, passionate endevours into ACeDB GUI-land using the GTK-library and Ed Griffiths described his new socked-client/server.

> It was fun to see, finally, the faces behind all those bionet.software.acedb postings for the past year, or since I joined myself last summer. Too bad Jean-Thierry Mieg could not make it. I was looking forward to meeting the Frenchman.

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> ### Computer facilities

> After lunch the conference was moved to the SFU Halpern centre, where our headquarters would be for the remainder of the conference. There were provided LAN-connections for those of us who had laptops (almost everybody) and a few workstations also. Very nice facilities indeed. Cudos to Steven Ness and Martin Krzywinski. Most of us got those PCMCIA-cards working fast and logged on to the temporary conference server, through which we would get a number of services, including special conference E-mail addresses.

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> ### Task group formations

> Since this conference was intended to be a workshop-oriented gathering, and not just a whole five days of sitting picking our noses while listening to others talk, the conference attendees split themselves up into three main groups, described briefly below. Each group decided on several, topics to concentrate on for the remainder of the week:

> - Programming: focus on things like SMAP display, an XML-dump feature, ZAce (MySQl backbone possibility), the XREF/UNIQUE bug fix and a new MacOS-port. This last issue stirred up quite a discussion at the initial talks this morning.
> - Middleware/AcePerl: my particular group, so don't hold it against me if this is covered better than the others :I. At the top of the list was the 'AcePerl gripes' topic, the wishlist/complaints department. The XML-issue popped up here as well, and some people are interested in a Python interface to Ace (AcePython, PythAce?). But BioPerl integration was also listed, along with database synchronization via AcePerl and CITA (Ace CORBA interface) IDL-speculations
> - Curation: on this front the main areas of interest turned out to be feature requests, presentations and documention projects. There should be more info on this effort tomorrow morning.

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