LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco next week is going to be huge!

As Editor-in-Chief of LinuxWorld Magazine, I’ll be conducting interviews all week of executives, developers and authors at the show. The interviews will be streamed out live from the show floor all week.

One of the interviews I’ve got scheduled is with Bruce Perens. I’ll be discussing with him his keynote address on the “State of Open Source”. I’ll blog a summary of this Wednesday or Thursday next week.

I’ve got too many executives and industry people signing up! I want to talk to more Linux authors and developers! If you’re a Linux author or developer in the San Fran area or if you’re going to be at LinuxWorld, drop me an e-mail or just sign yourself up at:

http://www.sys-con.com/linux/LinuxWorldExpoRadio.cfm

If you’re interested in just listening in, this link will give you the schedule of who’s on when as well.

One of the major topics at OSCON this year was the notion that software is increasingly becoming a commodity for which the customer is no longer prepared to pay a premium. So, as the market for Open Source software expands and companies rush to define new areas they can create business in - what is there to be learned from other high-premium goods that have since become a commodity?

At OSCON the software market was often compared to the construction industry with people moving to DIY in order to supply themselves as cheaply as possible.

Sitting at Portland airport waiting for my flight back to Germany it hit me that flight (or flying) has also moved from being something that only a few could afford and since become something that is available for (nearly) everybody.

In the airline market there are now many low-cost carriers who are offering cheap tickets to destinations for which other airlines still sell higher-price tickets. Some European low-cost airlines actually give away a certain number of tickets for free (all the customer actually pays is tax and a handling fee). Flying for free - who could have imagined that back in the days of Pan American? So in a way those cheap airlines can be considered the Open Source providers around flying.

So, how have the cheap airlines altered the marketplace?

Reduced vendor lock-in

There were days when you could fly with the national airline or you could walk. As a consumer, you had little choice and so you basically payed the asking price if you wanted to fly. Of course things changed before the low-cost airlines came on to the market - but the surge of cheap airlines now means that you have plenty of choices and prices to choose from when picking your flight. The airline customer has more power - because she can choose.

DIY Flying

At OSCON, Doc Searls talked about the way companies are no longer buying the software from their year-long vendors but moving into a Do-it-yourself market where they can freely pick and choose, combining Open Source components with software they may already have. In addition, languages like Python are being used to glue the bits together and allow a more rapid change of the complete application. Doc compared this to the DIY part of the construction business.

In the flying-market, customers are going to the Web as their way of doing DIY. Instead of taking pre-configured packages from tour-operators they are using the online travel web-sites to put together their own configured and personalized packages. This trend has now forced some German travel-agents to charge a refundable fee if you go into the agency in search of your ideal holiday-package. The fee is to prevent you taking their “consulting” and then using the Web to piece together the same package at a cheaper rate.

In the software business the DIY “trend” is leading to software companies becoming increasingly consulting focussed as the revenue for the actual software dwindles. Software companies will need to make sure that they can turn pre-sales consulting into a form of revenue. They will need to prevent customers from gleaning information in that phase of a project and then “doing it all themselves”. Of course, Open Source actually supports this and so software companies will need to focus a part of their business model on that area.

Flying from regional airports to attract additional customers

Cheap airlines often operate out of regional airports as opposed to national hubs, because this lowers their operational costs and attracts customers who would not normally be inclined to fly because of the distance to the airport.

Open Source businesses need to attract customers from areas that are perhaps reluctant to look at “free” software. Open Source software needs to move into areas that are perhaps as yet not really targeted. There was quite a bit of discussion at OSCON about packaging Linux for specific problem-areas or devices. This is an example.

“Traditional” airlines form their own low-cost airline

At first the more traditional airlines were sceptical about the low-cost airlines. In fact they ridiculed the chances of low-cost (and perhaps low-comfort) flights ever taking off. And yet they did and those “old-world” airlines were forced to react. And many did so by forming their own low-cost carriers. So now, the traditional airlines have discovered the new market-place of low cost flying and are competing fiercely.

I think this point is particularly interesting when we look at the Open Source market. If applied, it would mean that eventually companies like Oracle and Microsoft may be forced to produce Open Source versions of their products. “Low-comfort” versions that you can get and use for free. Oracle could release a low-cost or Open Source version of their database in order to compete in the same market as MySQL. To enter the low-end market and then provide a migration strategy to the higher-cost, supported version seems similar to buying a cheap - no comfort flight - and then being told that the same company also offers deluxe flight on their “other” airline (”and you know the tickets are really not that expensive!”)

Although knowing little about the cheap-flights market, it doesn’t seem difficult to find points that can be compared to the evolving software-market. And, as is the case with comparing the software business to the construction business, there seems to be a lot that can be learned.

Over a week ago I went back-to-back first to the
AlwaysOn Innovation Summit(AO2003) then to the yearly conference of the
World Future Society (Oddly enough, they took
down the conference web page already, which makes it really tough to link to
any particular session).

I would have preferred to have at least a month in between the two, but it
gives me the chance to compare one with the other. I wrote about the Summit
already, therefore this post is mainly about the WFS conference.

The World Future Society was founded in 1966. My guess is they were riding
the wave of the promises of NASA space travel as well as "The
Jetsons" cartoons on TV. These promises of flying cars and towns on
the ocean floor never materialized and that also deflated the field of future
study. People just lost interest.

With the acceleration of change in the last few years, my feeling is that the
interest in the future and what it has in store for us is on the rise. But my
perspective may be a bit biased; after all I am running a Futurist
Salon and am helping to organize the first Accelerating
Change Conference at Stanford in September.

Future Studies is a wide field and that reflects in the World Future Society.
Members reach from the progressives moderns, for them more technology is the
solution to all of our problems, to environmentalists that see doomsday scenarios
just around the corner. The most famous of these is "The
Limits to Growth" report of the Club
of Rome.

Matthew R. Simmons revisited
that report in 2000. His sad conclusion: "As the 20th century came
to an end, wind and solar collectively only created one-tenth of 1% of renewable
electricity in the U.S. What this means, in simple arithmetic, is that the two
"promising new energy techniques," heralded to hold such promise when
The Limits to Growth was first published, still account for only 1000th of 1%
of U.S. electricity generation! To say that no progress was made in this taxing
energy issue since The Limits to Growth first hit the bookstands is a colossal
understatement."

Looking back, I realize, that this is one of the charms of the World Future
Society Conference - the huge spectrum of ideas and viewpoints offered there.
I very much enjoyed the chance to sit in a session called "The Chaplains
of Tomorrow: Universal Quality Enhancers" Not being a native speaker I
didn’t even know what a Chaplain was, Charlie Chaplin is the closest I ever
got to this word before. After 10 minutes I understood that it is not for me
right now and moved on.

It is a big cafeteria system, where you pick and choose from a dozen parallel
sessions. You can go through the event without ever getting your viewpoint challenged
may it be doom or utopia. But I am a firm believer that the real interesting
stuff happens at the fringes, when different fields come together.

This is the strength of the World Future Society Conference and they should
put a stake into the ground and claim: "Here is the one time in the year
where all these disciplines come together". You only have to look at the
column headers of the schedule at a glance to see that this is true: Business,
Economics, Environment, Futures, Globalization, Governance, Health, Learning/Education,
Science/Technology, Society, Values.

With a few well-selected panels (and there were too many of these at the AO2003),
one could very nicely bring the different viewpoints to the forefront and create
a fruitful dialog. It would be great to enhance that dialog with additional
channels, like a conference Wiki or chat. Maybe the organizers should talk to
the Socialtext folks that were running
these things at the AO2003.

These tools would energize and rejuvenate the event. Prerequisite is of course
ubiquitous Wifi; I wasn’t the only one
missing it. Maybe within a year every respectable conference hotel will
have it in their portfolio. In some areas, hotel signs offering "Free Broadband"
are starting to outnumber the "Free HBO" ones, Wifi can’t be too far
behind. Another possibility is to get a sponsor to provide Wifi. World Future
Society conference organizers could really learn from the AO2003
where there were 17 sponsors at the bottom of their web
page. Lots of companies should be eager to show that they are tuned in and
forward-looking by being part of the next World Future Society Conference.

Will post about some of the sessions soon too, if I find the time :-)

Other suggestions on how to rejuvenate the World Future Society Conference?

I’m moving in a few weeks, so I had to ask DirecTV to mount a dish at our new place. I went to directv.com, clicked “Customer Care”, and then “Moving?”. Only two clicks to find what I wanted. Not bad.

Then, I had to dial the phone number: 1-877-616-MOVE. Argh! Why did they have to make it spell something, and only half of something at that? Now it takes two steps for me to dial on my desk phone: 1-877-616, without having to look, and then I have to look at the keypad to find the M, look to find the O, oh crap, wrong key, now start over….

I’m not knocking phone numbers that spell things. They’re useful when you have a phone number that you need to recall at a moment’s notice without looking it up. 1-800-CALL-ATT is a good example. There was a carpet chain in Chicago that was 312-CARPETS. Those make sense. In this case, it doesn’t. I don’t need to call the “move my dish” line more than once. Even if I did, how am I going to remember both the 616 part and the MOVE part?

Here’s a feature that I’ve never seen used in a valid way: That damned “Reset Form” web form button. It’s like the <BLINK> tag: Web designers put it out on forms, but without really thinking why.

How many times have you seen a form like this?

Who is going to intentionally avail himself of that Reset Form button? How long a string does it have to be to make it worth the user’s time to just click the Reset Form and start over? “Whew, saved myself 37 backspaces characters! Good thing that button was there!” (Any time discussions of a GUI turn into sounding like Jerry Seinfeld channeling Jakob Neilsen, something’s wrong with the GUI…)

An even worse place for the Reset button is the very long form. Ever sign up for one of those free computer rags magazines where you truly are just a couple dozen points of demographics?

A mere 7 months after I wrote about last-minute business RSS here, Amazon gets it. Nearly. Amazon now provides RSS feeds embedded inside the HTML pages. To actually subscribe to the RSS you will need to take a look at the source of the page and then find the link to manually add it to your RSS newsreader (at least my version of NetNewsWire can’t “auto-discover” the RSS feed). Here is an example RSS feed.

Related link: http://news.com.com/2010-1071_3-1026988.html

A C|Net article asks the question begged by the recent SCO v. IBM lawsuit: Who should be liable in the event that customers wind up using software that was created from misappropriated intellectual property? Could a non-profit like the FSF or the OSF stand forth as a lightning rod for liability over Free and Open Source licensed software? Or is the indemnification issue going to prove a fundamental limitation on the commercial uptake of Free and Open Source software?

What’s the answer to the intellectual property liability issue with respect to Free and Open Source software?

Related link: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/technology/circuits/24font.html

The winner of a University of Minnesota Design Institute commission is a typeface called “Twin” which can adjust its appearance based on external factors. One demo available on the design.umn.edu site renders text of your choosing with the typeface appearance based on the current weather in the Twin Cities.

The typeface was created by the Dutch company LettError. Aside from being keen in its own right, the typeface gets bonus points since one of its designers is Just van Rossum, brother of Python BDFL Guido van Rossum and programmer in his own right.

Related link: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/07/23/1058853121030.html

It’s about time somebody made SCO face up to the consequences of its grand-standing and howlling, which have gotten immeasurably worse since I wrote my weblog on

Irresponsible SCO. Their lawyers are essentially telling every Linux user that we’re engaging in illegal activities, and that by the way we can save ourselves by buying them off.

How about a similar parry to SCO in the United States? Are we a country that lets powerful forces go on wildly destructive campaigns on the basis of inflated or even untruthful claims?

I’ve been watching more and more people use href="http://www.makeashorterlink.com">make a shorter link — a
web-form service that you cut-and-paste a long link into and then
returns a 38 character URL that is easy to e-mail around. On the back
end, the Pants Collective’s service presumably records the URL in a
database and then returns another URL that can be used to key to the
longer one. While this service seems great for e-mailing URLs around
(even then, I’m not sure — most e-mail clients can handle long URLs
these days), I hesistate embedding these shorter URLs into published
web pages.

Think of this like giving your friend somebody to get more directions
to your friend’s house. What happens when your friend arrives at the
first location, and there are no more instructions there? What does
he do? On the web this is of a bigger problem — which link will web
crawlers index? Does this level of indirection break programs (or
more likely, does it exacerbate stupid web programs that don’t handle
meta refresh tags)?

What I would love to see is this service aquired by href="http://www.google.com">Google or the href="http://www.archive.org">Internet Archive. What they could
provide is a system with more value — this key could key into a
cached copy or an updated URL when it changes, or it could key not
only to the page but its entire history. aAkey for the sake of
shortening to the URL (and not even shortening it to something that
people can remember) seems mostly pointless, but a key that provides
more value might be interesting.

Related link: http://ao2003.com

Just came back from the AlwaysOn Innovation Summit
organized by a team around Tony
Perkins of Red Herring fame. He set the tone in his opening remarks: "Consumers
and businesses have an insatiable need and drive to be always on." (One
commented that the real money will be made in 10 years, once the promise of
AlwaysOn is fulfilled via getting people off, giving them back anonymity :-)

Consistent with the always on theme they used an interesting mix of cutting edge
conference technology:

The whole event got webcasted and all sessions will be archived.
Kudos to AlwaysOn and their sponsors
for offering that service for free to the online world. (Registration required).

Wifi throughout the conference, which after a rocky start enabled the people
on the floor to have an eye on and participate in the webcast chat, as well as
being distracted by their inbox and the Internet. Once in a while the chat was
also projected to one of the big screen on the floor.

Online polls, where the goal is to bring in the opinion of the online users as well
as the audience via the Wifi connection. Not sure whether it was the questions,
but it felt a bit forced and wasn’t really enhancing the panels.

Conference Wiki, (What is a Wiki)
was a bit hidden in the webcast window. I personally love the possibility of
enhancing a conference by changing an area of its web page on the fly. I think
Wikis will blossom in the next years, as soon as more people understand and
then use them. Check the list of other conference bloggers, I discovered Tim
Oren’s Due Diligence there.

Maybe I was still jet lagged, having just returned from Germany, or other
things were on my mind, but after the webcast was in full swing I had problems
taking notes while following the panels, the chat and vote in the polls.

Everyone has to find his own comfort level of how many things can happen simultaneously
while they still get the most out of an event. You need the discipline
to shut certain things off that go beyond your threshold.

All that said, I wouldn’t want to live without any of these technologies at a
conference, only some fine tuning is needed.

Larry Wall’s State Of The Onion,
where he
announced Ponie, which will be Perl 5 running on top of Parrot, renewed my faith in the Perl 6 effort. I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of Perl 6 being two, two, two projects in one: Perl 6 and Parrot. Now we can have two separate and distinct goals.

Having Ponie and Parrot as two deliverables means we can have twice the faith in the correctness of the code. Without this setup, we might not know if a problem lies with Parrot or Perl 6. Now, we’ll be able to isolate some of our problems.

Once I started thinking about the project (and talking with Leon Brocard over gin & tonics), I realized how much automated testing would be required to verify that Ponie works as advertised. I put on my Testing Evangelist hat and started hatching plans for how to make use of the existing Perl 5 tests, as well as the tests for the top 20% of CPAN (following the 80/20 rule), to help verify the correctness of Ponie. Not all modules have great test suites, so I’m going to work with those authors to see how we can beef them up, and increase the coverage, both for the module and for Ponie.

Automated testing is a low-cost, high-payback benefit. Cycles are cheap, and it makes sense to let the machine be watching over your shoulder as much as possible. I’d like to see daily, or even hourly, builds of Ponie to make sure that nothing’s been broken.

(And please, allow us a month or two of bad Ponie puns. The Java guys have never stopped with theirs….)

(Mirrored at http://use.perl.org/~petdance/journal/13544)

How else can we help ensure the correctness of Ponie?

Related link: http://www.twingalaxies.com/

Steven Wiebe is the new King of the Jungle among Donkey Kong gamers.

With a score of 947,200, he demolished the old record of 879,200. Now that’s something to beat your chest about!

Think of the tricks he must know. It takes real ingenuity and creativity to think all those moves up. The tricks he knows must’ve taken years to figure out.

“Donkey Kong Hacks” would be the perfect vehicle to capture all that expert knowledge. It’s perfectly in line with the rest of the series - tips and tricks from seasoned experts.

Can I preorder mine? Wonder if I can get it autographed?

Related link: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/23/oscon_grid.html#friday

I arrived a couple of minutes into href="http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/06/17/dyson.html">George
Dyson’s talk about the pioneering computing work done at the IAS. I’d been
looking forward to this talk for months and it did not disappoint —
suffice it to say that I’m trying to get the content online very soon.

Two things struck me. First, the spirit of hacking I enjoy with software is
very similar to the spirit of hacking that went on building the big machines of
the 40s and 50s. (It also helps that Ward Cunningham demonstrated the tiny IC
hacking he’s been doing for a hobby right after the talk.) Second, Dyson
exhorted the audience to keep alive the spirit of that age by continuing to
explore the world in an open and free fashion. I’d love to hear from Dyson
again next year.

Next up, Miguel and Nat from Ximian
talked about their successes with Mono. It was quite interesting to see
Eclipse running (well, launching with painful slowness, though anything on
stage with Nat will look amazingly slow) on Mono.

I have mixed feeling about Mono. On one hand, I’m glad to see more
attention given to a language that’s more appropriate for systems programming
than C or C++. (Given the long history of Java being all-but-ignored on Linux,
I’m not sure what to say.) On the other hand, I have to agree with Dan when he
points out that href="http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog/archives/000218.html">the .Net folks are
missing a lot of useful language features. Then again, there were a lot of
people asking why you’d ever want garbage collection five or six years ago.

Next up, I caught most of the session about why Ticketmaster uses the
patronage system with open source developers. I’d love to hear this message
repeated further and wider — if you have an expert in-house, you can
support an open source software project yourselves. That’s not to say that
Ticketmaster won’t ever call someone from Apache, MySQL, Linux, or Perl, but
that they have control over their destiny. (It’s also nice to hear that Geoff
Young has a job. Good work!)

Ask (from Ticketmaster) and Robert then presented an overview of href="http://www.perl.org/">Perl.org’s single-sign on process. SSO has
been a bit of a project on the O’Reilly sites lately and it’s on a lot of
people’s minds. There are ways to make it easy, and if I ever end up working
with lots of sites and lots of subdomains again, I know where to look. By the
way, Robert and Ask are two of the hardest working and least appreciated people
in the Perl community. Thank you.

Finally, the official content wrapped up with a talk from Nat’s old college
buddy Milton Ngan, of Weta. Milton had
lots of wonderful photos, including their massive (and continually growing)
server room as well as video explanations of the more impressive shots from
The Two Towers. Unfortunately, there were no sneak peeks at The
Return of the King. The Gollum footage was quite nice, though.

After that, the party broke up into smaller parties. Lots of people headed
off to the Zoo and the final Stonehenge party. I went home for lunch, a nap,
and some quality time with my e-mail. Yeah, that was naive.

Saturday and Sunday were Perl 6 design meetings, with lots of edge cases of
Perl 6 OO worked out. A few still remain, but we’ll get there.

What worked well at OSCON this year? The same things that always work
well: good talks, good speakers, good attendees. Portland was quite nice,
though I’m less enthused about the light rail system than I was before I tried
it every day. The OSCON wiki was a
tremendous success and there’s a nice buzz inside O’Reilly about using it at
other conferences. Oh, and wasn’t the weather nice?

The Portland user groups were very nice. Thanks to you all. Our href="http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/23/sponsors.html">sponsors
also deserve a round of applause. Active
State, Apple Developer
Connection, Hewlett-Packard, href="http://www.ibm.com/">IBM, href="http://www.sunsource.net/">Sun, href="http://www.ticketmaster.com/">Ticketmaster, href="http://www.realnetworks.com">RealNetworks, href="http://www.redhat.com/">Red Hat, href="http://www.dyndns.org/">DynDNS, href="http://www.jabber.org/">Jabber Software Foundation, href="http://www.microsoft.com/">Microsoft, href="http://www.pogolinux.com/">Pogo Linux, href="http://www.stonehenge.com/">Stonehenge Consulting, and the media
sponsors all helped bring OSCON to Portland. They’re worth considering.

Some things weren’t perfect. The wireless network was flaky early in the
week, but with some troubleshooting (thanks, Schuyler and Rob!) and some
hardware (thanks, Portland Personal
Telco!), things had much improved by the end of the week.

Several of the rooms were too small for their talks, though that’s the best
kind of problem to have. In particular, subjects like testing, Ruby,
Subversion, and Fit (presumably also Kwiki, though I’d seen that presentation
before) were more popular than anticipated.

All in all, I’m quite satisfied with OSCON 2003 and am happy to have played
a part in making it happen. Here’s to an even better OSCON in Portland
(hopefully!) next year!

Software process improvement doesn’t have to come only with the approval of the Pointy-Haired Bosses. There’s plenty you can do on your own without telling anyone… until you show how well it works.

I spend a lot of time in the pulpit of automated testing, talking about the benefits of writing tests for your code, in effect creating your own guardian angels. At a
Chicago Perl Mongers meeting where I preached the gospel of testing, someone said “That’s great, Andy, but I can’t do this. How do I convince my boss that this is a good idea?” The short answer: you often don’t need to.

The number of tools available to us in our toolboxes is amazing, and you can usually make great use of them, even if you’re the only one using them. You can set up macros in vim or emacs to make life easier for your fingers. Create shell scripts in your own ~/bin directory to speed repetitive tasks. Use CVS to keep track of changes to your files, even if you’re the only one in the shop. Check your web pages, especially those dynamically generated, for syntactic errors with
weblint or any of the online checkers. Set up automated tests on your code, even if you’re the only one on the project who’s doing so.

Acting as the one-person prototype also means that you’ve got real-world experience with the process that you’re pushing. Maybe you find that CVS doesn’t do all your department needs, and you need subversion instead.
Better to find out after your own experimenting, rather than after it’s implemented across the department.

Improvements under the radar mean immediate results, whether good or bad, without the endless meetings and discussions of how things should be. Far better to show your boss or departmental peers something that actually works than to talk endlessly about what might work.

Whatever your idea, try it. Play around. Maybe it’s not the best practice, but you won’t know until you try. Once you have some success, whether it’s taken the drudgery out of a tedious build process, or had a bug found by an automated test, show it off. In the words of the great Bobbie Flekman, “Money talks, and BS walks,” and we PHBs always like the sound of money.

What have you done to improve the quality of your coding life? Was it under the radar? How did you approach it?

A look back at OSCON. I’ll do my best to weave together some impressions under my
three themes of PHP, Productivity, and Trends. I’ll also mention a couple of things (collaborative editing, and
wireless video) that will undoubtedly come into play in future
conventions.

Any wrap-up
after such a wide-ranging conference is bound to be a sliver
of a sliver - there were lots of Perl, Python, Ruby sessions
I never went to; not to mention many non-programming sessions,
such as legal issues (SCO vs IBM, Intellectual Property Law Basics for Open Source Developers). Indeed, there were often 11 things going on at once!

PHP

Sterling kicked off the week with a great tutorial
on Advanced PHP. I wrote about this in my Monday ORN blog.
A key area of interest in Sterling’s talk is performance. I’ll be checking
out the PEAR package APC - Alternative PHP Cache very soon. PHP can take longer to compile
classes on the fly than to execute them, so a cache can really
speed things up.

I got two looks at doing web services with PHP. The more
theoretical talk was Sterling’s “Web Services with PHP”. Adam Trachtenberg did a more applied version
with his “Web Services in PHP” (yes, titles are similar). Want to
come up to speed on Web Services with real data? A first step
is to be a client that consumes a web service. One possibility
is to head over Amazon, sign up ( ) and experiment
with product searches and how you can output the data.
(such as smallest shop)…

Some places to explore PHP & SOAP:

• PHP + SOAP + Amazon - onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2003/07/03/php_amazon_soap.html
• Shane Carvaeo’s SOAP Presentation - talks.php.net/show/soap-phpcon-ny2003
• XML.com’s Web services area: xml.com/webservices/
• http://www.soapware.org
• http://www.soapbuilders.org

Use PHP? Check out PEAR (pear.php.net), which provides libraries
much in the same spirit as CPAN does for Perl. I wrote about
Shane Caraveo’s talk on PEAR in my Wednesday blog entry.
A flip side to this may be how PHP is used at Yahoo. Michael Radwin
of Yahoo gave a talk (also mentioned in my Wednesday entry) where
a key point was: “use abstraction sparingly. Don’t add a bunch of layers, as it can be costly”. It is good to know that PHP has
matured to the point where a wide range of developers can
approach it from different angles. Want ease of getting
started? Go to go-pear.org, follow
the instructions, and then try some Pear packages (like PEAR::DB). Want performance? Use PHP calls
directly, or better yet, write a C/C++ extension using PECL.
Yahoo has written about 70 of them.

Shane also gave a talk on PHP5, with slides available at talks.php.net/show/php5-intro-oscon-2003. I mentioned this on Thursday. There
are lots of improvements in PHP5, and if I had to pick one
that will really help me out, it would be exception handing
(try/catch/throw). I am eager to get away from a myriad
of “if” statements! The “Objects are automatically references”
aspect is also great. SimpleXML and SQLite are also crazy sexy cool.

Productivity

There are two main projects that I will mention that can
do a lot for productivity. Jabber is useful today (but also
falls easily into my notion of trends). Eclipse is
intruiging, and I managed to keep it mostly away
from my PHP writeups.

Jabber

Jabber is so much more than an IM and group chat client.
In the context of productivity, though, I’ll point out the
following:

• Multiple transports - need to talk to someone on AIM, MSN. Yahoo Messenger? Jabber talks to all of them
• Multiple platforms - yes.
• Encrypted? Compressed? - yes, can do
• An application can effectively have YOU on its contact roster, and send notifications when it needs attention (errors, jobs that have finished, status updates, and so on) - this frees you up so that you don’t have to keep watch over a process

Eclipse

Eclipse is a highly extensible IDE for whatever you would like to customize it for. An angle that
interested me was Christopher Judd’s talk “Eclipse PHP for Developers”,
which took a look at how to construct an environment with
debugging, navigation, and other traditional IDE features.
I’m about to try out the TruStudio tools, which sit
on top of Eclipse. It will be great to have a true debugger,
as opposed to watching statements flow into an Apache error log.

Another site for finding eclipse plugins is eclipse-plugins.2y.net/eclipse/index.jsp

Three Trends

Crossing over from Productivity to Trends, I still have
things to say about Jabber. But first, I will mention
once again a tidbit from Tim O’Reilly’s talk: networking enables collaboration.

I can easily remember Usenet days in the 1980’s, and
how software development projects were posted to newsgroups
(shar archives, anyone?) Patches to those projects (as in, Larry Wall’s
Patch program) would be posted to newsgroups as well. The next
leap was the web, where every project seemed to have its
own .org domain. Networking enables collaboration.

Does Jabber have the potential to take this a step
forward? It’s two XML streams per connection, one
in either direction. Apple’s iChat uses Jabber.
File Transfer is there, and the potential to ask
a program for a custom file is there. The potential for a Hydra
clone (for multiuser collaborative editing) is there.
The potential for videoconferencing (perhaps Out Of Band?)
is there. I think we are going to see interesting
applications where Jabber is used for a transport
to enable web services (it’s much more efficient
than HTTP). Keep an eye on jabberstudio.org/

Another big shift revolves around the idea “I like my
custom web site, but I want to use your data”. Amazon
Web Services are one of many examples of this.
Jeff Barr, Amazon Tech Program Manager, stated
a simple goal: Enable discovering and buying from anywhere.
A few examples of it in use:

• store.nba.com
• greeklandscapes.com - (see the travel guides)
• simplest-shop.com/camera - (compare cameras)

For more information on Amazon Web Services: http://amazon.com/webservices

Amazon is just the tip of the Web Services iceberg. Google
is also leading in this area with their offerings: http://www.google.com/apis/
See webservices.oreilly.com/ for a lot more information.

I’ll ignore all things blogging, so far as trends go. As Clay
Shirky has put it, we could have been doing this 8 years
ago with web forms. It just took some easy to use front
ends (like Moveable Type) to get it going. What’s more
interesting to me is the wonderful world of Wiki.

A Wiki that got lots of use before and during OSCON
was Brian “ingy” Ingerson’s Kwiki powered oscon.kwiki.org
Wikis allow for a very diverse group of users
(grannies running www.quiltzilla.com/,
geeks running londongeek.org/) to
evolve a website that can capture, organize, and make searchable
a lot of information. The emphasis is on the information,
more than pretty presentation. Get Kwiki at http://kwiki.org/.
What happens when Wikis start calling web services?
What happens when Wiki links can fire off a jabber session,
possibly leading to the automatic update of other Wiki pages?
I can visualize a lot of intersections, and while it is
true that some of them will be skipped, it is also true
that it is getting easier to glue functionality together
in any of the three P’s: Perl, Python, and PHP. Stay Tuned!

Future Conventions

Note Bene: These are my personal opinions, which may
or may not reflect what the O’Reilly staff is thinking.
I haven’t talked to them about things to do with
video from laptops. I do see it as an issue on
the near horizon that they, and indeed any tech
convention organizer, will need to ponder.

Hydra was used quite a bit at the Emerging Tech Conference,
but was much less in evidence at OSCON. I found this
puzzling, and wrote an entry, “Hydra Missing”, in my personal blog. The gist of it is: we need a
Hydra clone for all platforms, and we need people
to trust the process of collaborative editing. My selfish
interest in it is that I want a more complete set of
notes from a talk (even ones where I am not in the room).
No one person can capture a talk like a group.

The capabilities of iChat AV and iSight should be
considered by conference organizers going forward.
There are a couple of reasons for this: bandwidth,
and the notion of broadcasting a talk (permissions).

Imagine a conference like OSCON, with up to 11 simultaneous
sessions. Now, 2 or 3 people in each session decide
to open up iChat AV or its equivalent, so that the
talk can be seen in other rooms, captured, etc.
That’s about 20-30 decent quality video streams.
What happens to the network?

I suppose one can say “capture it, and make it
available via BitTorrent later”. There’s
IM and IRC, Jabber and Hydra… all mostly text,
and consuming pretty
low bandwidth. Cheap laptop video has the potential
to consume the majority of available convention wireless
bandwidth, and it will start happening within a year.
Heads up, conference planners!

Which leads to the whole permission aspect. There
will be a need for clarity as to whether it’s cool (in increasing
levels of permissiveness) to a) video capture a talk for yourself, b) share
it later, and c) share it live

Did you go to OSCON 2003? What were your impressions? If you did not go, was the coverage helpful?

Related link: http://www.oreillynet.com/oscon2003/

The tone at the

2003 O’Reilly Open Source Convention
was one of business-like confidence. I sensed much less of the
demonstrative posturing that I noticed at earlier conferences, where
many people felt that they had to prove themselves as well as their
projects’ viability. The free software movement has made it by
now. Just look how the trade and mainstream press has covered the
story of the SCO lawsuit. A few years ago, all the buzz would have
asked what the suit meant for IBM, but now everybody’s more concerned
about Linux.

And with this mainstreaming comes responsibility. Developers, system
integrators, and other professionals are acutely conscious of the
millions of people who depend directly on Open Software. The time has
come not for manifestos but for the unflagging work of keeping the
systems at peak operation.

One corollary of this sense, I believe, is a silent acceptance by now
that the world of proprietary software is deeply entwined with Open
Source. This entwinement has been going on from the beginning, whether
one considers the popularity of Cygwin tools or the many free software
bindings for proprietary databases.

Consider SAP, one of the most ensconced providers of heavyweight
software in the industry. Its financial tools are considered
indispensable in large corporations and its consultants get some of
the highest salaries in computing. But SAP realizes its products need to
interact with outside scripts and applications. It further realizes
that free software tools and languages are key to its usability.
Piers Harding has developed Perl, Python, and Ruby bindings to SAP’s
binary API, and along with DJ Adams he presented the interface in a
conference session.

So free software has become a key element in the strategies of large
proprietary corporations. I am not referring to the cynical
exploitation of Linux by SCO (see my early weblog on the issue,

Irresponsible SCO),
but to a deliberate embrace of free software to enhance proprietary
offerings. Oracle supports Linux in order to reduce customers’ total
cost of ownership and free it from dependence on proprietary operating
systems. Meanwhile, SAP partners with MySQL to reduce its
customers’ total cost of ownership and free it from
dependence on Oracle.

Will SAP’s turn come in a decade? And is
Mono
a bid for compatibility or an implementation of a platform that is
inherently superior to non-Microsoft offerings? Miguel de Icaza,
who delivered

one of the last keynotes
today, claims the latter. He puts all his time into Mono because he
believes the .NET approach to components makes software develop faster
and easier, period.

Meanwhile, Open Source opens opportunities. At the

kernel hacker panel
today, attended by six generous Linux developers, it was pointed out
that a student can show potential employers some work done on real
projects that are actually in production, not just toy projects done
for class. Furthermore, the employer can check mail archives and see
whether this student can get along with others while working on a
project.

Some predict that we are in a historic transition to a world of
completely Open Source software (the references to “commoditization of
software” everywhere one turns), but we can’t really be sure that the
hybrid, symbiotic situation we are in will ever end. All we know is
that maturity brings responsibility.

Related link: http://www.osafoundation.org/desktop-linux-overview.pdf

If you’ve ever played the classic arcade game Punch-Out chances are you’ve heard the words, “Body blow” echo in your head when you’ve seen someone take a painful hit.

I sometimes wonder if Microsoft feels like the computerized boxers of this game, defending itself from the ever increasing number of coders who decide they want to take a shot at the champ. Open Source makes the cost of entry low, you don’t even have to pump in a quarter to play.

Here is the commentary from the lastest two minutes of the fight:

• 80,000 Linux desktops deployed in Spain–Body Blow!

• Open Source bills in Oregon and Texas–Body Blow!
• 2 Councils in England, representing 10,000 desktops, considering switch to Linux–Body Blow!
• The city of Munich, third largest in Germany, to switch 14,000 desktops to Open Source solutions–Uppercut!
• Ximian working with various governments in Europe to deploy 250,000 desktop Linux systems–Body Blow!
• Opengroupware.org releases an Exchange replacement–Body Blow!
• Thailand sponsers the sale of 1 million Linux laptops–Uppercut!
• HP to sell a corporate desktop model running Linux–Body Blow!
• OpenOffice.org to release 1.1 with speed improvements, better document conversion, and a macro language–Body Blow! Body Blow! Body Blow!

We may never hear the fight announcer shout out, “Go for the knockout!” There may never be a killer app from the Open Source world that delivers the final punch that puts Microsoft to the mat. It may be that after the final round the judges award a decision victory to a battered and bloody, but still standing, Microsoft. But, even if that were to happen, Open Source would still be the winner in the eyes of the people. A rematch would be in the works before the fighters had finished their showers.

Remember, Rocky was the true winner in the first movie, Rocky, even though the decision went to Apollo. And we all know the rematch did not go Apollo’s way.

Related link: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/23/oscon_grid.html#thursday

Thursday was a long time ago. The keynotes have been covered in detail
elsewhere, so I’ll just give a general impression. It was really nice to hear
Mitch Kapor’s enthusiasm for Linux on the Desktop. He also mentioned that his
first brush with free software was in the mid 80s, when Richard Stallman was
protesting outside the Lotus offices. Kapor took a strong stand against
software patents, which endeared him to the audience.

Mark-Jason Dominus is well-known as an entertaining speaker as well as the
capable host of the Perl Lightning Talks. He’s so good at what he does, he was
able to give the conference committee only the title of a talk and
receive 45 minutes to do whatever he wanted. The result was “Nine Views of
Mark-Jason Dominus”, nine lightning talks about cool hacks and good ideas.

One of the most useful talks was “How to Progress”. Dominus gave some of
his secrets of being smart — read the books no one else is reading, take
good notes, and read one sentence and really think about it before you read the
next sentence. The final talk explored a message to aliens, encoded in a radio
signal. It’s really interesting to think about how you would explain human
concepts and science starting from the number system and working up to ideas
such as gravity and pressure.

Andy Lester then presented “Automated Testing of Large Projects with Perl”.
The big secret is how his company handles their smoke tests. In short, they
run the complete smoke test suite automatically every hour. Any failures are
e-mailed to all developers. (There aren’t many failures.) Andy’s learned
quite a few things and most of his experiences and conclusions match mine. It
was nice to see forty or fifty people picking up good habits. Andy suggested
daily, weekly, and monthly goals to improve testing. (Good suggestion one:
read our testing materials! Good suggestion two: everyone writes at least one
test every day! Good suggestion three: keep records on how much testing helps
you.)

Microsoft provided lunch again. Version 2.0 was better than version 1.0.
It’s unfortunate that they won’t have the chance to impress us with version
3.0.

During lunch, I helped James Duncan man the href="http://perl-foundation.org/">Perl Foundation booth. We explained the
goals and principles of the foundation to a few hardy souls wandering the
exhibition booth during lunchtime. If you’re looking for a way to support your
favorite language and community in a volunteer fashion (and possibly a non-code
fashion), there are foundations for other languages.

Next up was an O’Reilly Network meeting, with Daniel Steinberg, Derrick
Story, and Nancy Abila. We discussed href="http://today.java.net/">Java.net and href="http://www.onjava.com/">ONJava, how they complement each other and
how our editorial strategy needs to evolve. Since both sites address different
audiences in different ways, we’re just looking for the right way to handle
things editorially. Enough work, though, there are still talks to attend!

Just about everything Perrin Harkins says impresses me. I rushed to his
“Object-Relational Mapping Tools for Perl” talk. I’ll admit that I don’t ever
want to write a serialization layer again, so I was interested to see his
survey. His conclusion was about what I expected — I really need to look
into Class::DBI. Fair enough.

The next talk was a little disappointing. While David Fetter’s “How
Database Projects Fail” had some good content (it’s always amusing to hear
horror stories of when things went wrong, and it’s usually easy to learn a
lesson or two), he spent a lot of time bad-mouthing MySQL. I understand that
PostgreSQL fans are disappointed that MySQL gets a lot of press for adding
important features that Postgres has had for years, but they’re both fine
projects. Fetter’s information about MySQL features and flaws was a couple of
years out of date in places and just plain wrong in others. Hopefully he’ll
revisit his research and improve his comparisons for next time.

I ducked in for the tail end of the “Perl Certification Panel”. There are
few subjects more contentious in the Perl world. Things were winding down, but
I heard two good points that really changed my mind on the issue. First, Andy
Lester, who manages more than he codes these days, asked the question, “Why
would I need to look at a certification if I’m going to interview prospective
hires from a technical perspective, anyway?” Brian Aker responded that just
having a certification for Perl allows Human Resources people to filter CVs
before dumping a huge pile on a developer or a technical manager.

Andy’s right, in that a company that wants to write good code would be
crazy not to interview people in detail. (Of course, there are good
arguments that the software industry is crazy, and you don’t
have to look very hard to see why I think that.) Brian’s also right, in that
it would be useful to be able to say “Hey, this guy knows a few things while
this guy doesn’t seem to.”

I wonder if there’s a certification that could be built that doesn’t imply
that one person is a great developer, only that she demonstrates a basic
proficiency with the language. You wouldn’t hire her based on just having a
certification, but you could consider her for a more detailed interview.

It’s a thought, and there’s a Perl
Certification Wiki in place now to discuss these ideas. Perhaps we’ll see
more progress along these lines in the near future.

Fotango’s James Duncan (yes, the guy
from lunch) next gave his “One Year, 93,210 Lines of Code, Ten Staff and Some
Lessons Learned” talk. He gave this at YAPC to good reviews. Fotango grew
from a startup with a website thrown together by consultants into an effective
development group with a large product written in Perl that’s spawning
generically usable open source libraries.

The real secret of Fotango’s success is good teamwork. Part of that is
their strict hiring process. Another part is their agility. It’s possible to
build really good, really useful, really elegant large applications in Perl (or
just about any other language). They don’t talk a lot about doing Extreme
Programming, but their development process is definitely agile. Good talk.

The Testing Cabal had a BOF partway through the talk, but as Schwern was
listening to the ever-clever Dave Thomas and I was entranced by the wacky
antics of orange-loving Londoners, I showed up late. Unbeknownst to me, Dale
Dougherty and Steve Mallett were meeting in the same room so we discussed some
of our upcoming publishing plans. There are lots of interesting ways to start
conversations, and we’ll be exploring those in the future.

The DynDNS/ href="http://www.onyxneon.com/">Onyx Neon open bar party came next, so I
was a good little citizen in my free Onyx Neon shirt. My sometime co-worker
Curtis Poe had come up with an interesting idea for training that we might
explore; see the Onyx Neon site for further details.

The rest of the party is a little fuzzy. The TPF auction had the usual
assortment of ridiculous items, including Andy Lester eating pages from his
book, Karen Pauley donating Dominus’ boxer shorts (clean) and then buying them
back (and you should have seen Marty Pauley’s face), and the right to determine
the color of CPAN Search for the next
year (and you really should have seen Leon Brocard’s face when
London.pm LOST!). I wish I had one of those nice wizard hats, though….

As I started fading, I was in a heated discussion with Curtis Poe and Piers
Cawley about the best way to test to make sure that your individual code units,
well tested with programmer tests, fit together. I think we finally convinced
him, but I really wanted my bed at that point.

Then it was midnight and we missed the last train home and my brother and
sister-in-law are absolute saints for driving downtown to pick us up. Maybe
next year they’ll build a hotel within walking distance of my house so I can
cut the commute from an hour to about two minutes. Ah, a man can dream. See
you tomorrow!

There is fountain near the Willamette River. A circle of
high velocity water jets converge in the middle. There are signs
that warn you about the intense water there …

This convention is a little like that. You are in the middle,
the conference tracks surround you, and you get hit with
a firehose of information. There are no warning signs
here - you just learn at some point that the schedule,
with all of its “kid in a candy store” appeal, can clobber
you if you try to take on too much in such a short period of time.

Therefore, I move that next year’s convention be expanded to three weeks!

At the end of the week, I will look back at some other
Thursday sessions (JabberJazz, IngyOnKwiki, and Amazon Web Services).
I was particularly interested in the new capabilities of
PHP5, and will highlight those today.

PHP5

The lone PHP session I attended on Thursday was “Introduction to
PHP5″, presented by Shane Caraveo (Shane at ActiveState.com).
The presentation is available at talks.php.net/show/php5-intro-oscon-2003.

There are tons of improvements in PHP5, such as access (public,
protected, private), unified constructors and destructors, object
dereferencing ( $f->bar()->barabarina(); ), abstract classes,
and interfaces. I will pick a
couple to mention, because there’s too much to write about on a deadline.

PHP5: Exceptions

Hooray! We get try/catch/throw. The Exception class is the base
you extend. See the slide on Page 27 for an example. A nice
thing about this for me is that it is something I liked about
C++, and it gets rid of the need for many “if” statements.

PHP5: Bundled SQLite

SQLite has excellent SQL
standards support. It is an embedded flat file SQL DB (you
pretend it’s MySQL) You can call it via a function or OO
interface. It is good for developing something where you are not
sure if customers will have access to MySQL, etc. A very cool
thing about it is that it can exist as an in-memory db. Having
said all that, my gut tells me that this will be useful for
small projects, but it remains to be seen how it will stack
up against MySQL or other relational DBs for anything big. Still,
it definitely has a place.

PHP5: Stream Servers

Easy servers! Stream servers allow you to open up a socket on a port,
creating a server. Basic example:

$s = stream_socket_server('tcp://localhost:8080');
while ($client = stream_socket_accept($s))
$line = fgets($client)
echo $line;
}


PHP5: Timelines

Beta 1 has been out for about a week. Don’t use it for production.
Shane says a release in 4-5 months is optimistic, and that
his conservative guess is 6-9 months.

A Thank You, and a note

Getting together a conference like this is never easy. I think
the O’Reilly folks have done a great job. Yes, I personally
want a “Power Strip In Every Pot”, but I also note that
most things ran very well. Thanks to chromatic for
giving me a chance to write, and thanks to the people
behind the scenes that figured out enough of the
networking stuff to keep most of us online, most
of the time.

If I can refer to a Slashdotism for a second,
which starts with “In Soviet Russia…”, I’ll leave
off with this point: most people with tech ambitions
in some quite undeveloped parts of the world
have never experienced what we live everyday:
Consider the hotel lobby, full of folks lounging around with
wireless 5 pound devices
that can reach out to any Internet spot on the
planet. That is a powerful capability. Having
lived long enough to remember the very first
Compaq “luggables”, I marvel, and am thankful
for the progress.

Related link: http://www.oreillynet.com/oscon2003/

Total registration has reached 1,650 at the
O’Reilly Open Source Convention,
and it showed in the overflow crowds spilling out from some of the
sessions.

By the way, six of the kernel hackers I mentioned in
Monday’s weblog
will be here for a panel at 10:30 tomorrow.

I can’t say much about this morning’s keynote speeches, even
though I heard them twice. Relying more on the slides than the jittery
sound system, I can report that the
keynote
by Stormy Peters of Hewlett-Packard offered a no-nonsense guide to
bringing free software into a large business based on her company’s
extensive experience. Companies are used to monitoring the spread and
use of proprietary applications, but she recommended that they also
provide policies and controls about what Open Source software can be
run and who is allowed to run it.

Industry leader Mitch Kapor offered in this
keynote
a bit of a personal odyssey concerning Open Source, a bit more of a
social history, and something of the role played by his
Open Source Applications Foundation.
He put up a rather dismal report card
(which a
report
expands upon)
concerning Linux’s readiness in various areas ranging from peripheral
support to applications. His talk got down to quite practical levels
as well, even to the question of font compatibility. He predicted that
Linux would start appearing in call centers and other restricted work
environments in 2004, but no on standard consumer or office desktops
until at least 2007. Deployment outside the U.S. has progressed much
farther than within. I guess Microsoft employees still have plenty of
time to cash in their new company stock.

My coverage of the conference sessions is also sparser today than href="http://oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3472">yesterday. I had
meetings to attend, and because I stayed out late with some O’Reilly
authors last night I took off a bit of time this afternoon to get a
horizontal perspective on things.

In
OpenSSI (Single System Image) Linux Cluster Project,
Bruce Walker of Hewlett Packard laid out to some 35 attendees the
clever and ambitious steps with which this project solves the problems
of transparent, self-managing clustering. In a brief hour he uncovered
some of the magic behind processes hat migrated between nodes in a
self-balancing manner that depended on self-repairing networks.

Take for instance the carefully planned way in which processes can
continue using interprocess communication mechanisms (semaphores,
pipes, and so forth) even when bouncing from one system to another. A
single IPC nameserver keeps track of all such IPC mechanisms
throughout the cluster. If it goes down, a new node is chosen and
built up dynamically with the same information. To send something
through a pipe to a process, one sends it to the nameserver. (There
are unified namespaces for processes, devices, files, and so on.)

Emerging Open Source Business Strategies,
moderated by Tim O’Reilly in the last session of the day, rounded out
the theme with which he opened the conference in yesterday’s
keynote. He brought in managers from three companies that somehow
market Open Source software to discuss motels for making money. Ian
Murdock of Progeny pointed out that commoditization is not necessarily
bad for business: “You can build a great business around a commodity,
but there are only a few slots there.” But an attendee told me later
that the casual application of the term “commodity” is misleading. A
commodity is characterized by very low marginal manufacturing
cost. But there is still some manufacturing cost, and that
provides the profit businesses can fight over. This marginal cost is
totally absent in software and information, so they’re a whole new
ballgame.

I ended the day with a trip to Powell’s Books (a store I mentioned in
my
first weblog from this conference),
where I met some of the wonderful people who staff O’Reilly’s
competition, a party, and an auction to benefit the Perl Foundation.
The Perl community knows how to have fun. Among the items auctioned
were a promise by Guido van Rossum to implement conditional
expressions in Python, and a “Twenty-Five Years of Animal Magnetism”
O’Reilly mug that the audience voted instead to throw against the wall
in a re-enactment of the stunt Jon Orwant employed a few years ago to
indicate his insistence on need for the Perl 6 project.

Come back tomorrow for my wrap-up and observations on the conference
as a whole.

Related link: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/23/wednesday.html

Conferences need naptimes.

Tim O’Reilly started the day with a keynote that explored the relationship
between open source and web services. We spoke later that night, at the
author’s signing, about the curious gift some people have for developing new
abstractions. Once you realize that two existing projects or ideas can be put
together in a new way, you wonder why you never noticed it before. I’ll talk
more about that in a moment.

Paul Buck followed with a demonstration of IBM’s Eclipse IDE. What struck
me is that his short demo looked exactly the same whether stepping through Java
or C++ code. It sounds like the future of Eclipse development will be in
plugins. I’m reminded of Mozilla… maybe there’ll be a framework unification
sometime.

Next I escorted Sun’s Danese Cooper to the Speaker’s Lounge. She’s been
back and forth to Europe several times since I last saw her in Santa Clara a
few months ago — the EC is making decisions about open source adoption,
apparently. She’ll probably have more to say on this. href="http://www.dibona.com/">Chris DiBona, ex-VA and Slashdot leader, was
upstairs, and we chatted about his new game company. The game industry has
always seemed to be five years behind the times for what works in software
development, but it sounds like he’s got his head on straight. I’m hopeful
that his technical and business acumen will lead to a successful company.

Ward Cunningham and Brian Ingerson demonstrated href="http://fit.c2.com/">Fit and href="http://search.cpan.org/search?query=Test::Fit">Test::Fit before a
packed room. Fit is a framework for customer testing — just define a set
of inputs and expected outputs in a simple HTML table and link to a Fit runner
that will run the tests. If you make this available, for example, on a Wiki,
it’s very easy for customers to start writing tests.

It was interesting to watch Mark-Jason Dominus, who arrived a couple of
minutes late. He’s very clever, and the wheels in his head are always turning.
When Ingy explained that you could use Fit tests as baselines for the behavior
of any language, just linking to any other website that actually contained the
Fit runners, Dominus’ hand shot up. “How does that work?”

The Fit runner just looks at the HTTP Referer variable to determine the
calling page (the one that defines the tests), grabs the HTML, parses the
tables, and returns a slightly modified HTML page with the test results.
That’s the kind of simplicity and interconnection Ward’s really good at.
That’s the kind of thing Tim’s thinking about when he talks about data, not
code, reuse.

Brian Aker, fresh on his new job as Senior Architect at MySQL, shocked the
world (or, at least, me) when he announced that he’d embedded Perl in MySQL and
was using it for stored procedures a couple of years ago. Of course, it did
segfault rather often. Fortunately, it’s highly mature now. In his talk on
“Making MySQL Do More”, Brian showed the embedded function API. You can write
new functions for MySQL in Perl, Python, PHP, and Java. (Keep asking him about
Ruby.) You can link to C libraries; he’s used Image Magick and zlib. I’m
excited about how easily you can modify queries — SELECT DIFF(foo)
... anyone?

Lunch was decent. My brother met Dominus for the first time and, I think,
was a little intimidated.

The Perl Lightning talks are always worth watching. Though a few were
repeats from YAPC, it’s always nice to see such a wide spectrum of interests
and ideas all crammed into short, sweet talks. Andy Lester spoke on getting a
job, though he refused to tell me how to give up a job when you have too many.
Allison Randal sang “Allison’s Restaurant” again, about Perl 6 Development.
Autrijus Tang brought down the house by rapping, in Chinese, about 1% of his
favorite CPAN modules. (There’s no truth to the rumor that he learned Chinese
in two hours just for the talk. He’s that smart, though.)