Day One Started off much better than my arrival. Up bright and early at 6am PDT, thanks to my non-translated timezone-ness, the morning light was lovely. Wandered down to register for the conference formally, got my materials and acquainted myself more with the facilities and coffee services.
The two morning keynotes were Tim O'Reilly's "O'Reilly Radar" and Robert Lefkowitz' cryptically entitled "The Semiasology of Open Source". O'Reilly's overview of the space was guardedly positive - ORA sees that their book sales are moving nicely, but that conference participation is up markedly over last year (scuttlebutt on the floor was that they had anticipated 1200 participants but that 1500 ended up registering in the end. There are certainly a lot of people here, with crowded rooms being more normal than not). Tim touched on the perils and promises of web-connected services becoming the norm, with the obvious question of who owns the data that makes using a service like Amazon or eBay so valuable. It's the aggregate of the data that builds the corporate value, but it's in turn the individual's ownership of the data that makes it valuable to that user.
Robert Lefowitz had a funny but abbreviated tale of the development over time of the meaning of Open Source - loosely based on his experiences with OSS inside of AT&T. Nat Torkington introduced him as having 130 slides, and truly he didn't make it all the way through. But some interesting asides were had on misunderstandings of what ownership is, the misplaced impacts of generalised accounting rules, how one cannot enslave interns, but one might be able to enslave computer programmers, and so forth. I'll be looking for the slide deck to be posted, though the multimedia inclusions from Princess Bride may make that either a large or an illegal download.
Attended a handful of sessions through the day to more or less benefit. This year sessions are limited to 45 minutes in length as an attempt to get more into the docket. This is proving hard for presenters, as they often really get going in depth by about minute 30. It's a no win situation, of course, unless OSCon bumps to longer days or abbreviates the breaks more.
I had high hopes for the session on Jabber as a System Building Tool. And it was a nice discussion of where Jabber has been used in the wild as more than just collaborative chat. But the meat was missing to a degree - but there were some interesting gems, including the somewhat antithetical (but unchallenged) remark that the DARPA folks had moved from the reference and OSS versions of jabberd to the closed source jabber.com build 'for better support'. I expect the small integIn part the session did serve as a good endorsement for the Jabber Developers Handbook, which I'll have to keep my eyes out for.
The Chandler for Developers session was quite good - they'd pruned and honed their presentation down to fit into the alloted slot nicely. This boiling down was a nice counterpoint to their extensive and useful wiki, where I've languished trying to figure out the stack in a way that my less experienced brain can handle it. They are definitely making progress, and in the BOF they admitted how much they'd rediscovered from earlier OSS development experiences, like Mozilla (it's no mistake that they have on staff Mitchell Baker from the mozilla.org).
Two Lightening Talks stand out in my notes. One was the implications of pperl, a dramatic speedup of file-handling and/or string parsing in perl. The other was the NGO in a Box being put out by the Tactical Technology Collective.
Something the Wigle guys may want to look at is integration with Geocoder for address to Log/Lat (and thus AP) mapping....
Had a very quick but interesting hallway coversation with Joe Blaylock, one of the once or twice removed Church of Purple folks. He's doing some interesting work (in Python, which is interesting) to create a generic, XML-RPC accessible purpler. With luck, there'll be running code very soon to play with.
In the evening, attended the Chandler BOF. The OSAF folks have some tough problems ahead of them, but they are getting to the point where they'll have running code soon also, running enough to keep a calendar, at least. I still have some concerns about getting data in and out of their repository (for mobile devices), but I was delighted to see the visceral awareness of how they are doing what they do in public, and how they're adjusting to it. This transferral of internal and external knowledge and weakening boundaries is a topic for continued rumination.
Dinner (I promised AZ some non-technical content!) was a lovely bit of Tuna at Three Degrees, a restaurant focussed on local produce near our hotel. Sitting on the water, I can again grasp why people like the PNW.
Posted by esinclai at July 29, 2004 09:52 AM |