http://conferences.oreillynet.com/etel2008/

“Who?”, [name redacted] asked.

Bujold.

Whose Vorkosigan books are the best long form speculation on the role and future of reproductive technology disguised as military space sci-fi headed by a coded-female male solider protagonist (with incarnated other) over 9 volumes, with apologies to Austen, ever written.

And even Larry Wall likes her.

http://itp.nyu.edu/itp/object/ITPSpringShow2007.html

In other Web2Expo news, my talk for Ignite Sunday night got accepted. Ack! Um, so I’ll be speaking (for at least 6 minutes) Sunday night on “casual privacy”.

Absolutely fabulous event. Best of San Francisco material. Great audience, fabulous writing, and I got to observe it all while sitting in a (stationary) rickshaw. Other, the nights beneficiary is sort of a literary magazine for San Francisco, which means I passed on their most recent issue (Tron-sex and teledildonics, topics you’re already innudated with in SF) and went straight to the simian issue, which is highly recommended.

I came away with some sort of insight into the fundamental nature of SF, or so I thought, but as I’ve been utterly unable to communicate this insight, I think it might have just been contact buzz from the eloquence, alas.

Lastly, if you ever have a chance to see Kim Stanley Robinson read his poetry, go! My party was divided on whether it is better then his fiction, but its very very good. I might heckle him from the crowd at Etech to read some verse.

I’ll be at next month’s. (which I suppose is another way of saying I won’t be at SxSW after all)

Photo by kirkbrooks

http://www.writerswithdrinks.com/

http://blu.org/cgi-bin/calendar/2006-oct

Morning

Embedded databases in browsers turned out to be a bit more theoretical then I was in the mood for, but the backchannel was buzzing about Justin Erenkrantz’s modproxytalk, so I skipped over there. Jackpot. mod_proxy has done gone and grown up. Elegant, serious, flexible, built in caching (with multiple backends), pluggable protocols. Squid’s days as a reverse proxy are numbered. Now if someone would just hurry up and package Apache 2.3 we could do without Pound. (I’ve misplace the slides link)

Afternoon

Tim’s talk on atompub was good, if basic. I’m still trying to figure out how to push it beyond basic publishing. An interesting challenge, but later Tim pointed out that there are is some intentional wiggle room left in the spec, and one or two holes that you could drive a truck through with enough determination. (don’t think there was a slides link?) Oddest new thought, we need a mime type for Markdown, or maybe a container type for the whole class of human readable markup.

Briefly met Chad and Jeremy, something I’ve failed to do at work.

On The Floor

Wandered the exhibit hall a bit. Blah. Just not feeling the vendor love. No surprise, but its slams home what a commercial conference OSCON is, with very little of the raw delite and innovation of the smaller events. All the good shirts cost $$ this year — wonder what that means for t-shirt driven development, and the t-shirt economic metric. Finally met Jason from Apress. They have a Flickr book out in August.

Too Many Codepoints

Andrei’s PHP6 and Unicode talk was impressive, and overwhelming. ICU is being baked deep into the core string object. An .ini setting to determine default behaviour, with Unicode (UTF-16) and binary string types. Automatic stream oriented encodings from input/output/file/cli etc. Look for a preview release this Fall. (Eclipse gets all the glory, but ICU is another amazing IBM open source contribution, worth checking out in its own right) I’m not sure anyone is thinking about the “How do I make charsets work across the PHP4, PHP5, PHP6 spectrum in an open source library?” Doesn’t seem like that out there a question. Looking forward to catching up with him back in Sunnyvale.

Ruby Rodeo!

FreeGeeK goes on being one of the coolest, most inspiring community projects anywhere. Packing it to gills with hyper excited [Ruby hackers] certainly didn’t detract. Lucas Carson’s talk on dRB/Rinda was cool and inspiring. Not as polished a delivery as some talks, but he coded up a server-client architecture for discovering primes and automatically deployed it to those of us in the audience running irb. In about 20 minutes. The hilight though was finally getting a chance to catch up with Scott after all these years. (Rinda may just be good old Linda retreads, but Ruby is so damn slow that distributed computing is with the effort)

Didn’t Make It

Most disappointed to have missed in retrospect, Kevin Henrikson Ajax Optimization Techniques: Working with Large Ajax Applications. Got rave reviews.

http://upcoming.org/event/88788/

http://www.evite.com/pages/invite/viewInvite.jsp?event=IXZDADMBCGQMORREWHPL&inviteId=EYAFYDHDMQFFMHLWDLWO&showPreview=false&x=610058922

I confess that I was mildly disturbed that I was able to make it two instances of a monthly even in SF given that I love 3000 miles away, but I can’t imagine there is a third topic as close to my heart as community or calendaring.

Vast on April 1st

Apropos, one of the participant, Vast, the “vertical search platform” has the only funny April Fool’s gag I’ve seen. (I’m not a fan of the holiday) They announced their Credit Cards vertical search today, and its a nicely done implementation. (Vast’s trademark low budget web design adds credibility to the whole gag)

Vast is making noise by “giving it all away”, they’re catchy “Steal this Site” link at the bottom of each page captures the imagination. Except they aren’t giving me the one thing that would be most valuable for both of us. I want to build vertical of data I care about, and Vast wants to learn about new segments, talk about an architecture of participation waiting to happen.

My take away was an idea with the same sense of inevitability that Epinions had, and I worried about similar deep conceptual flaws.

Home Rolled Verticals and Blogs

Speaking of which why aren’t any of the blog search engines distinguishing themselves by providing a search platform ala Amazon’s Alexa Web Information Service? While its relatively challenging to figure out how do something cool with Alexa’s raw index (hence the need for DIY interface to Vast), everybody seems to have a story about what they would do if could convincing crawl the blog/conversation space.

The Others

Skobee is a slick and simple as it seems, built by ex-PlumTree’ers (the folks who also built O’Reilly’s Connection. Also presenting Songbird, and Mozes

So does anyone have advice on where to say, where to go, who to meet up with? Anyone looking for a roomie?

I was reminded of it while reading over Amit’s BarCamp NYC — the Nuts and Bolts, which, while shorter, is also excellent, detailed, and insightful. If you’ve been wanting to start your own un-conference (and who doesn’t!), this is your howto.

Registration is open, attendance is free, accomodation is urban camping.

Also if anyone has a suggestion for a talk for me to give, I’m coming up blank, I’ve handed out a number of excellent (IMHO) suggestions to others, but not feeling the inspiration personally.

The big news is the Google Calendar no-show. Also on people’s minds where is Chandler?

Perhaps the most striking feature of When 2.0 at Foocamp was how different the understanding of events each person brought to the table. Some people where talking events as social objects, others time management, perhaps as part of data management sync problem, and Esther was excited about time aspect of search. There was much talking past each other.

Oren’s weblog has the best coverage to date.

But boy do I wish I was going tonight apparently there will be a demo of

Firefly (decision-support application)

Um, you mean like Pattie Maes’ Firefly, that hottest, sexiest, most buzzworthy, proto-dotcom spin off of the Media Lab? (complete with rockstar founder). The one that was bought, and killed by Microsoft?

Of course, now in our wiser, more cynical age, who would be dumb enough to pour their metadata into a closed system? To trust a company to safeguard the gates of their community?

Just kidding.

Also demoing: apap.us, locl.us and movie.us (Apparently .us has arrived. Or at least someone is hoping so.)