South by Southwest interactive ended with very strong panels. I went to panels on the future of multi-player online games, secrets of javascript libraries, and scaling web applications. The last panel of the day about scaling was one of the best panels of the entire weekend. Between a couple of the panels, I spent time building and playing with Bloxes (shown in the picture).

Cool ideas from today:

• 2d games have a much higher market penetration because they don't require special hardware to play
• In the "Real World", people complain about buying $1 DRM songs. In Guitar Hero, people are gladly paying $2 for DRM music.
• Browser sniffing in javascript in general is a bad thing. Use Feature sniffing.
• "Drip" that can be used to locate javascript memory leaks.
• Some bands are using bit torrent data to determine which cities have the largest number of fans to help schedule their tours.
• Wikipida publishes all their configuration data and database schema.
• Wordpress still rents all their hardware.
• We need to figure out how to install mogilefs at the chronicle.
• Bottle necks are almost always either Disk IO or database issues.