O'Reilly OSCON 2010 announcement

I might attend OSCON 2010, depending on ticket prices and other factors. I’m more interested in Open Source Bridge 2010 — last year’s conference was epic.

I’m doing my small bit to publicize the conference here in Seattle, and did some outreach at PyCon 2009. I’m hoping that John Cook will cover it in TechFlash, at least in an article, or (better) with an article + also covering the conference sessions. [Some of TechFlash's news choices have been very odd lately, but that's a post for another day.]

My interest exists at several levels:

• It’s a conference focused on open-source technologies
• It’s community- and volunteer-driven and organized
• Its accessibility, both from being local, and reasonable fees
• It fills a void left by OSCON’s departure. It also fills voids that existed even when OSCON was here, given OSCON’s straight-ahead technology focus
• It’s new
• Note the correct usage of “its” vs. “it’s”
• I’m unemployed, so what the hell else have I got to do during the day?

Today’s big news is, some talks have been accepted. They are:

RubySpec: What does my Ruby do?, Brian Ford

Drizzle, Rethinking MySQL for the Web, Brian Aker

Advanced Git tutorial: Not your average VCS., Sarah Sharp

Remember Tcl/ Tk? Grandpa might be old, but he can still kick your ass!, Webb Sprague

Open Source Library Software: Empowering Libraries – Creating Opportunities, Lori Ayre

The Linux Kernel Development model, Greg Kroah-Hartman

Configuration Management Panel, Moderated by James Turnbull

My Grand Experiment: A Portland Women-focused Tech Group., Gabrielle Roth

Is the Web Down: a Practical Tutorial on How the Web Works, Michael Schwern, Joshua Keroes

HOWTO earn an open source living without taking on investors or selling your soul, Brian Jamison

A Tour of CodePlex, Sara Ford

Drop ACID and think about data, Bob Ippolito

Organizing a Volunteer-Driven Open Source Community Project, Sarah Beecroft, molly vogt, Joaquin Lippincott, Melissa Anderson

See the announcement blog post for more detail.

If you’re working with/in OSS, this will be an event you won’t want to miss. Sign up today!

As a happy northwestern transplant, I wish O’Reilly lots of luck with infinite growth in this economy. And with San Jose’s higher costs of everything, concrete everywhere, more traffic everywhere, poorer air quality, and general suckitude. Personally, I’d rather have my arms gnawed off by mutant radioactive weasels than be in San Jose.

Well. Into the vacuum comes Open Source Bridge, a result of Portland geek natives taking matters into their own hands and creating an OSS conference to replace OSCON. It’s being held June 17 – 19 at the Oregon Convention Center. They already have 13 talk proposals.

I’m rooting for Open Source Bridge. I’ve signed up to be a volunteer, and I’ve registered this morning. Have you, and will you?

——
Updated 2/26/09: Replaced a very coarse adjective with one less so.

Updated 2/26/09: They just opened registration, and I updated this accordingly.

I lived in San Jose for six months, when I worked for a former employer. (Maybe it was nine months… That job is fortunately a distant fuzzy memory.) Deciding whether to attend a conference involves many tradeoffs; one of which is, of course, its location. My negativity about San Jose is sufficiently strong to move this decision into the “No” column. (If you’ve never been there, I have one word for you: Concrete.)

O’Reilly’s official reasons for moving it to San Jose didn’t sounded very convincing to me. Or to a lot of other people. Allison Randal makes a, “Bigger is better, and OSCON will forever keep growing at 20%/year, so we needed a bigger venue” argument. I don’t buy it, because (a) bigger isn’t better, and (b) growth won’t continue at the same pace. This would be true even without a terrible recession bearing down on us. Growth never continues at the same pace forever; if it did, Microsoft‘s revenue would now be greater than the combined GDP of every country on the planet. Simply extrapolating the past is how Conventional Wisdom fails.

Anyway. Whatever. My opinions are very distant from being interesting to anyone at O’Reilly. I was looking forward to it, but I’ll find other ways to use the time that would have been OSCON 2009.

I got to Portland’s Union Station about 1 1/4 hours before I had to board. Joe said its restaurant was decent, so I opted to allow some time to eat lunch there.

But… The restaurant’s name is Wilf’s Restaurant. Good food, decent prices, nice atmosphere. No complaints. But that has got to be one of the most unfortunate names possible in the modern world. When I saw “Wilf’s,” I thought of, eh, another well-known acronym. My mind started to wander in unexpected directions. “Waitresses I’d like to…?” “Waiters I’d like to…?” “Water glasses I’d like to…?” Focus, John, focus! It’s just a club sandwich with potato salad on the side, dammit!

Have sympathy for the poor owner. That was a fine name for a restaurant — until American Pie came out in 1999.

On a more normal note, my waiter turned out to be a Perl/MySQL hacker, working there between software gigs. Wade Burgett, if you’re reading this, ROCK on!

I have to take a taxi to the train station.  Radio Cab advertises reservations over the web. But their site says that online reservations have to be made 24 hours in advance. Fail.

Dawn Nafus talked about technological challenges. Data sets, context, and social implications thereof. Adding data is seductive but sometimes meaningless. Data does not communicate in and of itself. Sam Ramji of Microsoft walked into the lion’s den and talked about Microsoft’s support of open-source. But if Microsoft really supported open-source, it wouldn’t send Sam here to say that it supports open-source. The IRC comment stream was very, very, very funny. As was the Q&A session’s IRC stream.

Tim Bray gave a great talk about programming language inflection points.  ”We are now emerging from the nuclear winter of language design caused by Java and .NET.” +1.Chris Shiflett talked about Web 2.0 site security issues. XSS vulnerability, just filter your inputs and escape your outputs. (Too much time was spent on this – it should have been just five minutes.) CSRF. Browser hijacking. Pronouns are sometimes used too freely in web security talks. “You,” “they,” and “it” need to be used carefully when discussing how a site can inject something into a request from my browser that attacks a third site. Especially when the talk is aimed at what “you” can do to protect “your” sites.

David Brewer‘s talk about Ubuntu configuration management was aimed a little too low (as in, beginner, simple) for my interests, but it was still a good talk. He likes AutomateIt for server maintenance and updates. But Joe likes Puppet, and Joe’s smart.

The Open Invention Network — great concept. Then, a ”historian” talk, which I found self-indulgent, but which had a hilarious comment stream in the #oscon channel.  It remains to be seen how effective the Open Web Foundation will be — I don’t understand how it will differ from the W3C, but maybe I need more coffee.

Danese Cooper gave an insightful and entertaining talk about whinging, starting with the fabulous Helsinki Whinging Choir video. Her basic proposition: Less complaining && more positive responsible action == a better world. +1.  Nathan Torkington talked about spawning the next generation of open source hackers, i.e., how to get kids interested in computers and geekdom at an early age.  It was a great talk, but I wished he had opined about OLPC.

Microblogging with Identi.ca — I’ve been planning to use Twitter for intra-team communication, but I was ignorant of this project.  We’re going to use Identi.ca instead! I wonder if we can use zc.buildout to distribute internal tools at work.

Lightening talks in the afternoon. Zoobird. A talk by a Bug Labs guy about their suite of snap-together electronic modules. This is a very clever product! 

John Coggeshall talked about scalability mistakes, and made me reconsider the staffing of a project I’m starting at work. Don’t use NFS for production code deployment, local disks are faster and multiple propagations are not a big deal, there are many tools to do this sanely. Large I/O and TCP buffer sizes are a good thing.

Two Mozilla QA gents gave a very detailed talk about some of Mozilla’s QA procedures for Firefox 3. Very good talk, but it was more Firefox-specific than I would have preferred.

Joe Gregorio talked about the alleged lack of design patterns in Python. I’m not a design pattern fan, because I find 99% of them to be obvious. Writers or contractors making a living out of them tend to be pedants, and in Java, design patterns are too often another layer of cruft on an already constipated language. But Python has first-class functions, first-class classes, iterators, and closures, so design patterns (as an explicit concern) disappears.  Good talk.

Now I’m looking for dinner.  Looks like it’s pizza.  The timing might not work out great w.r.t. tonight’s BoF sessions. Damn, I wish there were more eateries close to the Convention Center.

I didn’t a chance to spend a lot of time in the exhibitor hall.  I’ll peruse it a second time when it’s less crowded, to ensure I didn’t miss something good.  I took this opportunity to rejoin the FSF.  I used to be a member, then I let my membership lapse, then I forgot to rejoin…so I corrected that oversight today.

I got a couple more talks (Ubuntu deployments, then software failures), then dinner, then an exhibitor reception, and then multiple Birds of a Feather sessions.  (Arg, how will I attend them all?) Then I’ll crash.

Being around lots of other smart geeks is invigorating.

But the conditions at King Street Station was sub-par.  The check-in procedure was silly: I first went to the ticketing kiosks to pick up my ticket, then I went to the other side of the room to check my baggage, and then I crossed the room again to go to a third location to get my boarding pass. The boarding pass being different than the ticket (and, the process for Business Class boarding passes being different from Coach) was slightly confusing.  The grime and shabbiness of the place didn’t help my mood.

However, the train was A+.  It left on time, was clean, and I didn’t have to go through the idiotic security procedures used at US airports.  This alone made the trip far more enjoyable than a plane.

Portland’s Union Station is beautiful. Now this is what a rail station used to be, and still can be today.

Next time I’m going to Portland, I’m definitely taking Amtrak.  Next time I go to Chicago for PyCon, I just might take the train, too, even though it’s two days each way.

The Red Lion here is…OK.  It’s…clean.  It’s…a hotel.  It…won’t win any awards.  It’ll do.

I’m camped out now in one of the Oregon Convention Center‘s lobbies, using the free wi-fi. Hundreds of geeks at their laptops, all duking it out for bandwidth.  Some griping about how poorly Apple’s MagSafe power adapters plug into conventional power strips.  I bought four books from the O’Reilly Media booth.  The ration of urinals to stalls in the Convention Center’s mens’ restrooms is not optimal, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Tonight’s dinner with Joe and others, and then maybe a Django beer meetup.

I’m attended only the main conference, because none of the tutorials piqued my interest.

One nice aspect of this trip will be that I’m getting there by train.  Joe Heck likes training to OSCON, and I think he’s got the right idea.

Until recently, I’ve flown when traveling far afield, more out of automatic reflex than any serious consideration.  I considered flying a necessary task that could be enjoyed most of the time, provided one entered into it with a reasonable mindset.

I felt that way until about two years ago.  I don’t know exactly why it happened — maybe it was an accumulation of insults.  But, I just got fed up with the security procedures, the reverse-courses in carry-on rules indicating the incompetence of those entrusted with our safety, and the fear-mongering associated with flying in the US.  Take out your laptops, take off your shoes, put your jackets in the bin, has anyone unknown to you given you a package to bring aboard?…Good grief.  And being led around in mazes, like pigs to slaughter, irritated me no end.  I sometimes felt all that was missing was the electric prod…

Now, I avoid flying wherever possible.  If this means it takes longer to visit a distant family member, so be it.

In the matter of OSCON, flying to Portland was always a borderline case anyway.  After considering the time needed for early airport arrival, runway taxiing, occasional flight delays, baggage-claim, and rental car acquisition, flying between Seattle and Portland was barely faster than driving directly by car.  (Although it was cheaper, since a recent model auto costs about $2.00/mile to run.)  However, for training vs. flying between Seattle and Portland: My round-trip Amtrak ticket is $82 for a business class seat, and the train travel time is 3.5 hours.  If we agree that the safety risks are lower, and if the train’s condition is no worse than that of a typical commercial jet, training to Portalnd should beat flying in terms of cost, hassle, and time.  I’ll find out in July.