This year CodeCon convened at Club NV, which is better suited to the task than last years venue. Club NV was little brighter, less cramped, and sported a better podium setup for the speakers. Also improved was the projection system, but the speakers still need to work out some better methods for displaying source code on the projection screen. Then again, reading code off a projection screen is not exactly what projection screens were designed for -- call it an oxymoron of CodeCon. The informal introduction of speakers and the AV glitches we loved from the first CodeCon are in full force again this year.
Compared to the first year, CodeCon 2003 seems to have about the same attendance, which I think is a good thing. Too many times good conferences get overrun by idiots after a while -- Comdex is probably the prime example here. And one last general observation -- the number of female geeks present at CodeCon is once again grossly out of proportion to the male geeks. What is it going to take to get more female geeks involved with computer science?
The first presentation was by Paul Lambert on Cryptopy his Python crypto APIs -- its quite amazing to see that many of the scripting languages are going through the pains of creating native APIs for their languages in order to avoid being dependent on C/C++ based APIs. The amount of duplicated effort going into these APIs is staggering, but duplicated effort is something that is common and accepted in Open Source world.
OpenRatings, presented by J. Paul Reed and Brian Morris (both of my alma mater of Cal Poly), is a good example of an open source project with the usual engineering challenges, combined with interesting legal and political aspects. OpenRatings is an open source web application where college students can rate and review their professors. However, some professors don't take well to critcism, and thus feel that the site should be shut down. However, OpenRatings systems typically don't run on campus resources, and thus university officials have no recourse to take down or censor the sites. The technical issues with the software are the typical run of the mill issues that need to be addressed in any tech application, but the political aspects of the project make it unique. The human aspects of users interacting with the system bring out the need for acceptable use policies and other social hacking aspects that address political issues of the project as the project matures. A lot of open source software projects are typically not exposed to these types of problems. However, the Open Ratings project has a getting started guide that packages up all the social learning from the past to give new instances of the project at other universities a head start on avoiding the political problems.
GNU Radio by Eric Blossom & Matt Ettus, provides a software kit for building and deploying software radios and fosters learning about DSP and communications systems. The kit uses software and hardware to build generic receivers for that can decode radio and television signals in software. This high tech, high horsepower approach to listening to the radio enables a host of new features that traditional receivers cannot do. These high tech radios can to broad spectrum monitoring, listening/decoding multiple radio/TV channels at the same time. Using generalized data capture devices and custom DSP software setups, GNU Radio can capture and decode radio, TV, HDTV, public safety communications and cell phone conversations. GNU Radio can work with the input from the receivers to decode just about anything on the public airwaves. Furthermore, GNU radio aims to use this technology to create cognitive radio systems that could analyze the public airwaves and optimize utilization of the spectrum. All of this cool and fun, but none of the mentioned applications have any real impact until Eric started talking about the MPAA's Broadcast Flag. What good is a broadcast flag that is supposed to prevent devices from copying the broadcast content when it can be decided by generalized hardware?
Sam Joseph presented NeuroGrid, his decentralized fuzzy metadata search system. His approach to searching for documents on the net uses RDF to present metadata as a graph comprised of subject, predicate and object triples. Unlike other search systems, NeuroGrid relies on users to provide metadata for inclusion in the search system and employs user feedback to establish and strengthen search pathways in the NeuroGrid. And to top it all off, the system is decentralized with multiple NeuroGrid nodes working together to execute the search queries. It sounds like Sam still has a fair amount of testing to do to ensure the system will scale, but NeuroGrid sounds like one of the most advanced decentralized search systems out there.
And to close the first day of CodeCon, a panel comprised of Larry McVoy (BitKeeper), Jonathan Shapiro (OpenCM) and Greg Stein (Subversion) discussed current developments in version control. I am an avid user of CVS and have been quite satisfied with it for the last four years I've used it, so I was surprised to see three passionate people talking about how CVS is broken and that new approaches to version control are required. Greg Stein even went on to say that: "CVS is highly resistant to being fixed.", which drew a round of laughter from the crowd. In turn each person described the efforts of their groups/companies to fix the flaws in CVS and each of the three panelists had a unique perspective on the future of version control. Larry McVoy from BitKeeper, which provides version control software for the Linux kernel development team, outlined the ability to commit to a local repository and then synchronizing the local repository with a central server later on, and advanced features that do automatic merging features. OpenCM focuses on secure and consistent source code repositories that can accurately reproduce past snapshots (which apparently CVS has issues with) and Subversion aims to be a drop in replacement for CVS that has support for simpler branching and tagging by using duplicate copies of the files in question. The message overall was that if CVS works for you, don't sweat it and keep using it. But, for some development teams (most of them are apparently commercial dev teams) the limitations of CVS are not acceptable and these dev teams should look towards BitKeeper, OpenCM and Subversion as alternatives to CVS.
The overall format and execution of CodeCon has matured quite a bit since last year. Big kudos to Len Sassaman and Brahm Cohen for going though the pain and effort of putting on a true geek conference. Thank you!
Robert Kaye is the Mayhem & Chaos Coordinator and creator of MusicBrainz, the music metadata commons.
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