http://oscon07.icalico.org/

Not sure it counts as better, but we went with iCalico. (which means I really need to get the ical working properly)

And all props to Evan for getting an instance up for EuroOSCON. (as is Rails’ wont, more complicated to deploy then it was to write, really)

r0ml: “I could make the analogy that open source is like the tomato, and how people used to think it was poisonous…. but I won’t”

Still kicking myself for missing Jo’s talk on OSGeo, even if I spent it having a great talk with Surj, Buffington, and crew.

Pulled the eject cord early on the haXe talk (damn you Surj!) and landed in Microsummaries. Something interesting there, unfortunately nothing I couldn’t learn from the wiki. At least I didn’t come out looking as scrunched up and miserable as the folks who went to Python 3000

Building DSLs in Ruby was one of the talk I was really excited about, and I think Neal is probably a really smart guy. However I think this talk might have served as a “How not to build DSLs”. Domain specific languages ain’t about relying on questionable (and soon to be removed) features of Ruby to get kind of sort of English like languages. Please see NLP if thats what you want. Ugh.

Concurrently Google Code Hosting got launched, and was slashdotted before the end of the presentation.
Google Code: “I’m sorry you can’t create a new project ‘Magpie’, a project with that name exists somewhere else on the Web.”
A bit later, “Hmmm, where is the export feature?”

Software Libre, good community organizing around FOSS (just ignore the implicit Marxist critique).

• Step 1. Appears to be get every MIS certified tech-type person to go on strike in protest of election of Leftist government.
• Step 2. un-install all Microsoft products as you no longer have the password that were reset by striking MIS type people.
• Step 3. take over the world!
  Haven’t quite figured how to apply this model to US

Avi makes my head hurt, but in a good way. Great talk, best one I saw at OSCON. Started off judging crowds interest and skill level. (Or he could have just noticed that most of the room had green “Speaker” badges, or worked for O’Reilly, or had written their own frameworks) “Who knows what Seaside is?” “Good, then I won’t waste time telling you about it.” “I know you’re never going to use Smalltalk, its been out there for 4 years, so I’m not going to try convince you to use it.”

Most effective piece of advocacy I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve had people telling me continuations are the way to do web development for years, but watching it in actions is very different. Add to todo list, “Find good book on Squeak“. If you get a chance to see him speak do it. Also if you’re going to give an interesting talk, aim for the last slot of the day so when you come back for an encore the next session isn’t beating down the door.

Took a break to go watch the Eclectic Bastards. Yay for Summar roof top concerts.

Kind of crashed the 6A party, let me tell you OSCON parties are very different then SxSW parties.

Friday

25 years of IBM PC: “Gates’ legacy is the donkey game.” IBM has proof that the last piece of software Gates wrote was a demo game for the IBM PC in 1981 where you tried to get your car across the road without hitting a donkey or alternately tried to hit as many donkeys as possible. (your choice)

Having extracted promises that I could find Fogel’s slides online, and David would tell me the hilights of his talk over beer some night in SF, Jesse and I set out in search of the fabled Stumptown annex. (no links, whole site is Flash, ugh)

Coffee

Arriving too early for the days cupping we were forced to linger over macchiatos, and Clover (hmmm, sexy) pulled cups of the Panama Esmeralda. More then a little buzzed and with our palette totally saturated, we sniffed, swished, broke, and sipped a Kenya AA Gethumbwini (wild and tangy!), a Rwanda Karaba (hmmmmm, chocolate), Guatemala Finca el Injerto (might have just won CoE, and smells great, but doesn’t really register after a cup of Emerelda), Costa Rica Monte Crisol (hot its really aggressively green, like celery, as it cools very very sweet), and of course more Esmerelda.

Ohhh, my spinning head.

Used OSCAL, got feedback? Lert us know

I’d also hope that getting it out a few days before the conference started would allow people to markup, and comment talks to allow better fits between talks and attendees, “I saw this talk at Etech, it rocks!”, “beginnner-oriented”, “microsoft shill”. You know.

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.

OSCAL is a tool for building a list of talks you’re interested in going to, and discovering what talks others are going to. Its a tag-enabled, all social, calendaring app, written in Rails, in about 6 hours. Take it for a spin, we like it.

Version 2.0 may or may not come out sometime tonight, with search, comments, user submitted events, and SMS notifications.

Version 2.0 or not though, the app worked, I’m much more excited about tomorrows sessions, and as you can see deeply divided about what to attend

Then in Portland all next week at OSCON.

See you there?

p.s. haven’t had a chance to look closely at the OSCON schedule yet, anyone got a list of not to be missed sessions?