Using something better than Gobby for session notes at UDS

[Alan Bell]

I was the one who did the demo of our little memory constrained Etherpad 
server at UDS-M and yes, a room full of developers all loading the user 
interface of the same pad all at once did cause it to run out of memory 
pretty quick, however that was purely a function of it not being set up 
to scale like that, there are loads of etherpad servers running out 
there on the internet quite cheerfully with many many users on them. 
Primarypad in particular is a good comparison as loads of schools use 
that and connect a classroom at a time.
There were concerns raised about moving to etherpad and access to that 
with Orca, this reminds me of the last UDS when we did move at the last 
minute to gobby-0.5 which I understand was fully inaccessible to Orca at 
the time. I tested it today on Natty with Orca and the good news there 
is that gobby-0.5 now does work reasonably well with Orca. I tried 
etherpad with orca too. In Firefox it worked OK, reading out text as I 
moved about and echoing text back to me as I typed. It seemed to get a 
bit confused by echoing by word. It isn't perfect, but I think it would 
be great to use Etherpad and use UDS as an opportunity to try it out and 
file bugs where there are rough edges.
Does anyone know whether the "delete a page brings down the whole 
server" issue has actually been fixed on gobby.ubuntu.com? Heh, scrub 
that, just tested it! Someone might like to file an RT to get the server 
turned back on.

I think someone on the UDS team needs to decide whether to stick with 
the tried, tested, and failed gobby or rock on with Etherpad.

Alan.