Tag Archives: OSCON08

Two memorable postscripts to OSCON 2008.

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!

The day starts off with a Windows blue screen of death on the system that drives the main hall’s projection screens. Hmm. But, relax, it was just a visual prop for the first keynote address. Yay!

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. Continue reading →

The first keynote started with an REM music video.  Bang!, wake up!

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. Continue reading →

The keynotes were mostly good.  Thinking about cloud computing as a centralization movement that’s counter to recent computing trends was thought-provoking.  ”We should always have full control.” Chris Peterson had extremely perceptive observations on trends in security and privacy.  The database normalization talk was very good, but I wish it had been a little deeper. A great talk on database security by Josh Berkus; I wonder if I could hire him to audit our postgres installation.  Subversion practices talk was decent but a little fluffy.  DTrace, for “full stack” introspection, looks like a great tool.  I can see us using it at work, once the Linux port is available. Continue reading →

Taking Amtrak to Portland was great! Business Class, at $82 round-trip, was a total win.

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. Continue reading →

I’ll be at OSCON Tuesday – Friday of this week.  I’ve reviewed the program and tentatively selected the formal sessions I want to attend.  I’m especially looking forward to the talks about PostgreSQL, SCM, and Python.  I’m also looking forward to hooking up with Joe, and attending the Django drinkup at Jax Bar.

I’m going to OSCON in July.  My company agreed to fund half the cost, which was gracious of them considering I’d been there only one month when I submitted my request.

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

It just opened up today…