Related link: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/29/presentations.html
Slides from many of the sessions at OSCON 2004 are now available, including “Advice For Open Source Job Seekers” that I presented with Bill Odom.
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/29/presentations.html
The best thing that I can say about this conference was that I stayed the entire time. I’ve bailed early on the last three O’Reilly conferences because I just could stand them after 3 days, but I stayed for the full five days this time.
I think part of this was my new conference mindset: don’t volunteer for anything and don’t join any new projects. Talking to people about getting things done is about as useful as wearing my scuba gear in my apartment: I might really want to dive in, but but that’s only going to happen if I do it myself without waiting for other people.
Some of us checked out a BBQ place on the other side of the river. Don’t waste your time, it’s Oregon which is just another way of saying ! South. They had neither corn bread, corn on the cob, nor hush puppies. They didn’t even have pulled pork.
We wanted to see the submarine at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (where Tom Pheonix used to try to set cermanic tiles on fire with a blow torch), but there was a three hour wait for the next available tour. Bummer. Randal ended up programming a simple computer bit by bit so its display spelled out “OSCON 2004″. (There are other photos on my moblog, until they scroll off).
After that the day was over. I needed a nap and Randal disappeared to his part of the house to do whatever he needed to do (I think it involved email and SG1). I woke up a bit later, played with Kwiki (cursing its lack of documentation in the code), and figured out how to get the Perl Curses module to compile on darwin (the hints file is messed up. longname takes no arguments and touch takes three arguments, not four). Maybe I should take another look at Konfabulator, but then, I couldn’t do my personal bloomberg application from any terminal with Konfabulator.
Randal and I went to a steak dinner and met up with a business acquaintance who happened to be in the same place. After a few drinks he was feeling his oats, and as a manly sort of competition thing wanted to see what it would take to embarrass me. Well, let’s just say I’m no homophobe and that’s what he was counting on. Gimme a break. I lived in Manhattan for five years and my wife is an opera singer. I run into more gay guys than straight guys. I shut him down with “That’s all you got? Bring it on <expletive>”, but he didn’t have the guts for it. That might work with the Java weenies who have to wear ties to work, but I’m open source all the way. All we have to do is call the bluff. :)
So that’s it. I’m leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again. Sometime next year at a place they haven’t picked out yet, but probably isn’t Chicago.
Day 3 was mostly given to hallway sessions, talking about testing
and WWW::Mechanize, and talking about The Perl Foundation to booth
visitors. It was also great to be able to put faces to the names
of all the folks at O’Reilly and oreillynet.com who I’ve worked or
corresponded with over the years, like
Terrie Miller,
Chuck Toporek,
Marsee Henon and
Tony Stubblebine.
Derrick Story turns out to be
very tall. I’m glad he fights for the forces of Good.
Another person I’ve known for a while, but never met, is Pat Eyler.
We’re both active on the perl4lib mailing list for libraries that
use Perl. He gave a talk on Koha, the open source library automation
system that’s a competitor to the products that my former employer,
and corporate sibling, Follett Software Company sells. It was scary
hearing about all the cool stuff that they’re doing, but Pat also
pointed out that free software, and especially library software,
is more like a free puppy than free beer. It echoed Tim O’Reilly’s
keynote where he noted that when the software becomes commoditized
that the the service will be the differentiator. For the sake of
my own profit sharing check, I’m glad FSC has always pushed quality
service as much as quality software.
The Perl Lightning Talks were a lot less frantic and comedic this
year, and half the length. I gave my little lightning talk on why
you should use the prove utility, and a couple of people told me
afterwards that they were glad to have heard about it. Where past
years had a full 90 minutes of talks, this year, Geoff Avery used
the 2nd 45 minutes for a session called “Works In Progress.” It
was a chance for people to get up and tell about projects they have
going on, and call for volunteers if wanted. It’s a great idea
that I’d like to see done at future OSCONs.
Thursday night, I detoured from the Stonehenge party and went to
Powell’s with Marsee, O’Reilly’s user group contact. I think
Powell’s grew since last year. It just seems larger than last time
I looked. I ran into someone from OSCON, and talked about career
management, and then someone else who was looking for a book about
automated unit testing, which I was only too glad to discuss as
well. It’s just as well that the store closed before I was done
talking: I would only have bought a dozen books to stuff in my
suitcase for the trip home.
Finally, on Thursday was my “Open Source Hiring Tips” talk with
Bill Odom. About 100 folks sit and listened to us discuss how to
present yourself through all stages of the job hunt. It was an
honor to have Larry Wall and Damian Conway sitting and listening,
and when I noted that I am indeed hiring, Larry piped up “I’m looking
for a job.” What a hiring coup that would be!
I’m now at the gate at PDX, pleased with how many electrical outlets
there are. O’Hare has one per gate, so far as I can tell, and the
seats around it are usually already taken by someone else with a
laptop. I’m surprised, however, that there’s no wireless. For
such a wired city, I’d think that it would be available here, even
for pay.
A final note: I finally got to meet Tom Limoncelli, and he’s one
of the nicest people you could ever want to know. My list of
“swell people I’ve met at OSCON” gets bigger every year…
Paul Graham’s talk was excellent, save for the audio set-up. Randal and I, both wannabee sound wannabees, bet that the awesome AV guys were gouging their own eyes out in the back. Besides that, Paul played the audience well. He speaks the geek language without sounding like it. Now I feel guilty about not hacking on anything this week. I have to track him down to get him to write “What Perlers Should Know About Lisp” for The Perl Review.
Most people don’t realize what it takes to make the AV portion of a big show work. I’ve done a lot of big shows, including COMDEX, and the people who do the O’Reilly shows are the absolute best. I don’t know the crew this year, but David Hooper is still around. I think I’ve seen him at almost every O’Reilly conference.
If you hang out in a room early in the morning, you may get to hear the AV crew talk about what they have to do, which is a lot more than you probably think it is. They are a lot more than just cable pullers. Take a look around at the conference tomorrow. You’ll probably see AV guys moving quickly and with a purpose. Hang out within earshot and you’ll hear them swapping stories about users just like system administrators. If they look calm and collected, it’s because their good, not because nothing is happening. My wife is a big shot opera singer, but when I talk to people about what I’ve seen backstage, I tell them about the union and trade people who make everything look effortless backstage. They are doing a good job when you don’t think about them.
However, there are some things these supermen of AV aren’t going to be able to fix. For instance, don’t walk on stage with a laptop they have never seen before and that you have never tested with their projection setup. They will try to fix things in real time, but then your audience has to see them. They end up looking bad if they can’t get your goofy computer patched in instanteously. If you are a speaker, sign up for an AV rehearsal slot, or show up really early in the morning when they aren’t fighting fires.
Here’s something that will freak them out: I challenge everyone at the conference to go up to one of the AV guys tomorrow and just say “thank you, you guys are awesome”. You don’t have to buy them beer unless you want extra credit. I bet if enough people do that, someone is going to ask Gina what the hotel put in the muffins.
Anyway, I ducked out before Damian’s talk (which is excellent: I saw it in zero time). He stepped into the slot of the Internet Quiz Show since Jon Orwant couldn’t attend (I hope everyone is sending him “Get Well” messages). I had to meet up with Randal after he setup a bunch of access points and NoCat for Bar 71. I still don’t know everything that is going to go on there, but I think there is going to be some live webcasts, and maybe something to do with The Perl Foundation. Bill is still being really secretive about the party: not even Randal knows the whole plan, and he’s paying for it. Bill did let me hold the check made out to the bar, and all the ink on it made it really heavy. It’s free drinks and food, and that costs a lot. Randal flew in some heavy-hitting musical help tonight. I can’t say who it is, but she’s not Prince, Michael Jackson, or Madonna.
I got back to Randal’s place to find my audio equipment had shown up. Apparently Bill stopped by Stonehenge today, saw the packages for me and took them back to Randal’s house. That’s good news for me and saves me a trip beyond the wireless range of the hotel. I should be walking around the hotel with a big microphone tomorrow (a Beyer M58 for you audio weenies). Find me if you want to be part of my new project “Talk About Perl”. I’d like to get people to simply tell me “What is Perl?” for an audio collage, but I’ll take unsolicited statements and rants and raves too. I want to create an oral history of Perl over the next couple of years.
My moblog seems to be working pretty well. The camera doesn’t take the greatest pictures, but I love the fact that I can email as many as I like from my phone for only $5/month. I just skip one Starbucks coffee a month and I’m all set. I can’t send photos from the lower level of the hotel, but I discovered that if I get on the escalator and hit send at the bottom, about half way up I get enough GPRS goodness to connect, and by the time I hit the top, the image is mostly sent. By the time I turn the corner to hit the down escalator, the outbox is empty and the image is one the way to my server in New York. Sadly, I can’t figure out how to make server side includes use a different time zone, so I need to add a hack tonight to set the file mod times to three hours earlier. I really don’t each lunch at 3pm.
Remember: freak out the AV guys by saying “Thank you”.
Press kits seem to be a godsend to a lot of journalists. They can take the text in them and put it right into their articles. No one calls them onto the carpet about it because no one wants to admit that the press releases are a bunch of crap and that no one really understands them. Let’s just pretend that we know what all these things are, and that technology reporters aren’t just data entry clerks for businesses.
Let’s look at the ones that vendors put out in the OSCON press room. I only open their folder and read the top page. Anything beyond that is too much work. If I don’t understand what they are by then, there isn’t much hope for me understanding what they are trying to sell me.
Gluecode Software: “Gluecode Software(TM) is an open source application infrastructure company. The company’s enterprise software solutions include business process management and enterprise portal.”
I have no idea what these people do, but they said “enterprise” twice in the same sentence, and they said “open source”. I’ve checked that second sentence a couple time because it sounds wrong: is there a missing indefinite article in front of “enterprise portal”? Did anyone proofread this before they spent the money for the four-color glossy flyer?
They don’t have a product, they have a “solution”, which linguist Geoffery Nunberg says companies say when they want to make us think we have a problem. When marketeers tell me they are “complete solution providers”, I tell them I’m a “complete problem provider”.
ObjectWeb: ObjectWeb is an open not-for-profit corsortium of leading companies from around the world who join forces to create open-source, standard-based solutions for middleware and distributed software infrastructures.
There are so many things that disturb me about this paragraph at the top of their page. It’s their most important statement because it’s white text on a blue rectangle. This is what they want me to see. Aside from being overly wordy (doesn’t consortium mean they have already joined forces?), what is middleware? I know what it is supposed to mean, what does it really mean? What’s the “solution” here? And what about these leading companies? Everyone is always a leader in their own press releases. Does anyone have the nerve to say “We’re a small company that hopes to make a big difference”? Out of over 30 company logos on this page, I’ve only ever heard of NEC, SuSe, Red Hat, and France Telecom. None of those have particularly seemed leader-like to me, unless leading means being behind the people in front of you.
MySQL: MySQL AB develops and markets a family of superior, affordable database servers and tools.
Any questions? I thought not.
M1 Global: M1 Global’s MDE Studio is an integrated model-driven development environment. Running on the Eclipse platform, MDE Studio transforms a simple UML model of an application into the majority of the implementation by executing MetaPrograms.
These sentences sound worse than they are. No, maybe they do sound as worse as they are. The page does have a side bar that defines Eclipse, UML, and MetaProgram. I started to scratch my head at “simple UML model”. If it’s simple, why do I need this thing? What if it is complex? Does it not work right? If I don’t know about any of these things, why should I even care about you? No fear: below the folder pocket it mentions Java and Windows, so I don’t even need to worry about it. Shouldn’t Java things run everywhere though? It also says it minimizes modeling and maximizes code generation. Most people try to maximize modeling and reduce code generation. Better design with less code seems like a good thing, but maybe they can’t sell that.
ActiveState: ActiveState Komodo is the award-winning, professional integrated development environment (IDE) for dynamic languages, providing a powerful workspace for editing, debugging, and testing your programs.
Well okay then. Besides the bluster about “award-winning” and the near meaningless-through-overuse “professional”, I know what these guys are selling and what it does. It edit, debugs, and tests my programs. That seems pretty simple.
Now here’s an interesting tidbit. I thought MySQL AB and ActiveState had clear statements. MySQL AB is in Seattle and ActiveState is in Vancouver, so it must be something about the water or the fresh air up there.
The afternoon was mostly me trying to stay awake. I’m getting too old for these week long conferences and all night parties. This is why you’re supposed to go to college right after high school—otherwise it would kill you.
I chatted with Andy Lester at the end of the day. I keep asking hom when he’s going to write a book on Perl testing, and he doesn’t have the answer yet. Somebody is going to write the book, and Andy is a good person for it, but the opportunity is not going to be around forever.
Randal, Brenda Brewer, and I ended up at Bar 71 for dinner. You may think it’s just a bar. You may think it is the bar where Stonehenge had it’s party. You may think it’s the bar across the street from the homeless shelter. You probably aren’t thinking about it’s baked Mac & Cheese, but you should. It’s the best I’ve had anywhere, and I’ve tried a lot of Mac & Cheese around the world.
After dinner Randal and I went to the mod_perl BOF. Stas Bekman wants to get the word out about mod_perl. The Netcraft and Securityspace trends reports show mod_perl penetration at at a plateau, which doesn’t mean that it is holding it’s ground, but that it’s not keeping up with new installations. The crowd had a lot of ideas about fixing this. David Wheeler wants mod_perl 2.0 so the community has a new version and new development branch to rally around. Various people talked about setting up a position within The Perl Foundation to oversee mod_perl advocacy, and a lot of the crowd agreed that mod_perl could use some good old public relations work (although it might be too pricey).
I think a devious path could help mod_perl: publicise mod_perl working when Microsoft IIS fails horribly enough to get on the news. I also think we need to hack the social network to personally get our message in front of mainstream media like The Economist and PRI’s Marketplace. I think we need to forget about the tech and think about the decision-maker level. You have probably seen “Oracle makes Linux Unbreakable”. That’s a full page ad in almost every Economist. Image the same ad “mod_perl makes apache unbreakable”. I want to write a non-technical article about mod_perl performance: “Ten times the hits, one-tenth the resources”. Other people came up with other devious paths too. Think MoveOn.org and Meetup.org style action.
Some party was going on in the bar, and I ended up over there. I don’t know whose party it was, what sort of product they have, or anything like that. At least the Stonehenge party made just about everyone wear the Stonehenge shirt (and there were ads above the urinals too, so you’re going to see the name). It was just free beer so that’s where everyone was: that is, if you could get in the door. They were counting people to keep within the fire code, which means people has to leave before people could go in.
I ended up chatting with Dale Dougherty about his new magazine Make, and we talked about The Perl Review for a bit. A lot of people are giving me a lot of tips and hints about magazine publishing, and I could use all the help anyone wants to give because I’m new at this.
After that I chatted with Dick Hardt about his new thing, sxip, which is going to be a Microsoft Passport sort of thing, but done right, and done in a distribute manner. No one should have to store your personal information ever again, and you could have a single sign-on to everything on the web. I like the sound of that because I only have to update my personal info in one place.
I left the party for The Perl Foundation auction a room over. Robert Spier and Schwern ran the show while Ann Barcomb, Bill Odom, and Jim Brandt rounded up the money. The auction was going pretty slow until Michel Rodriguez and I got in a bidding war for Peter Scott’s out-of-print Perl Debugged. For the hell of it I did $65 at the last moment, then it was game on. We went back and forth with the crowd going wild. Michel bid $90, and I wanted to slow it down, so I bid $91. He jumped it up to $100, and I yielded. But hold on! Robert produced a second copy of the book and announced it was a dutch auction, so Michel got his for $100 and I got mine for $91. Overall, they wanted to raise $2,000, so that was just about 10% of that. My bid was an ugly number, so I wanted to round it up to $100. I challenged Schwern to auction the shirt off his back, and started the bidding at $9. The next bid was $10 for Schwern not to take his shirt off. Chaos insued, and people lined up on different sides of the room collectively bidding for Schwern to strip or to not strip. It was pretty close: a hundred or so dollars on each side. What the hell, I bid another $100 for the strip side. It’s for charity! Think of the children! The non-strip side tried to match that, but they couldn’t come up with the money. Now I have the shirt, and TPF has a bunch of money. They ended up with $3,300 at the end of the night, and Schwern went home without a shirt.
I think Schwern’s shirt should go on a world-wide tour to the Perl Mongers groups. For a small donation to The Perl Foundation, it can make an appearance at your user group meeting. Who wants it next?
I discovered late last night that the GPRS service around here really sucks, so I had a lot of trouble updating my moblog. I also discovered that once my phone can’t connect to GPRS after several tries, something happens that just keeps it from creating a conection even when it should be able to connect. If I reboot the phone, though, it connects immediately. Great, now I have to reboot my phone to get it to work, as if computers weren’t already a pain in the butt.
Related link: http://www.real.com/beta/harmony.html
Real Networks wants to use its Harmony stuff to let iPod owners put stuff on their iPods. Apple is being a big poopyhead about it.
This reminds me that I’d really like to stream Real content over the Airport Express. I guess Apple is going to be a poopyhead about that too, now.
Related link: http://groups.yahoo.com/
You may remember that the word Hack and Hacking are banned from the Yahoo group descriptions.
Today they took it one step further, double XX is not allowed [see the picture]. I guess they are fighting the naughty side of the business. But fans of the Vauxhall Trixx will have to find another place to gather.
The funny thing is, that they cut into their own business, because the ‘xx’ in my group description is in the link from a Yahoo Map that points to the SAP Palo Alto location. Thankfully there is also MapQuest without X.
Sometimes I really wonder, why I still use Yahoo Groups.
Which other groups are Xed from Yahoo?
Related link: http://make.oreilly.com
Make: technology on your time is a new magazine from O’Reilly.
The promotional postcard has three stories:
On the back it says:
Make: is a technology project magazine for the Digital Age. Coming in early 2005, this full-color quarterly is loaded with exciting projects that make the most of your technology, at home and away from.
Where did I leave off? I think I was in the middle of the afternoon in the last entry.
Most of the Perl talks are over-subscribed, it seems. People sit in the aisles, stand in the door, or try to peer around the corner. The rooms are a bit small, but from talking to people, I think even with bigger rooms the talks would be just as crowded. A lot of people go do something else when they see the overflowing crowd.
In the evening I ended up sitting next to Brian Ingerson (Ingy) in the press room, and since it was just the two of us we decided to get dinner in the sports bar upstairs. Apropos of that, we started talking about cycling. He used to live in Chicago, and I now live in Chicago so I was picking his brain for good routes and shops. We both bemoaned the boring riding situation around Chicago. Most of the midwest is flat, so I don’t get to ride the hills like I could in Southern California, or Ingy could when he was here in Portland. I think it’s the first time I’ve talked to him about something other than technology, and it was a good subject break in the middle of the conference.
After that we wandered up to Nat’s “Presidential Suite” (that’s what it says on the door for the annual P5P thing. There is a wonderful view of the river from the 16th floor, and I ended up standing next to Michel Rodriguez on the balcony. He has an article in the current issue of The Perl Review. While Ingy wasn’t explaining the aerodynamic properties of the American carrot versus the Australian carrot in reference to glide ratios and the distance to the street from Nat’s balcony.
That party got hopping, and I got a chance to talk to Chris Nandor (pudge) for a bit. He explained to me why Derek Jeter is a jerk, how I should have set my TiVo to record sports events (like the tour de France) by recording several hours past the advertised end time so I don’t miss anything when it goes long, and why a whole new generation of kids won’t know who the real “Pudge” is.
After that I got a tech support call from my wife, and I solved it by sending her shell commands over iChat. That problem solved, I talked to her for a while since I have been neglecting her this week. This made me a bit late to the Stonehenge party, but I’m not a drinker so I didn’t need to get started early on the free drinks.
The party was amazing. The bar was packed and overflowing into the streets. It was so packed that Stonehenge and the pub renegotiated the price a bit so the bar would not lose money on all of the extra people who showed up. I’m not a great party person, and I got there when most people were a bit worse for drink, so I’ll leave the myths and legends to someone else.
The party was so hoppin’ that the The Perl Foundation auction decided it was too crazy to try a simultaneous global web-cast. It was just far too noisy. I think they are going to try again tonight around 9ish pm, somewhere in the hotel. They have boxes and boxes and boxes of donated swag as well as donated services, like an hour of pair programming with Ward Cunningham. They also have “First Copy” of The Perl Review. Keep checking the bulletin boards and announcements.
I got to drive Randal home, which was a bit of a treat for me. His car is really, really fast, and red. He kept telling me “this is a six speed!” and I kept telling him “but four is all I can handle!” Not only am i tired, but it’s dark, I’m in a foreign country, and everyone else in the car (save Paul Blair who only need a ride back to his car at the hotel) were feeling how people feel after these sorts of things. Randal’s instuctions to his house were “Blah blah blah south, turn right, go through 18 lights, turn right.”
This morning I got up late. I stayed up too late last night not just because the party ran late but because I decided to work on some things back at Randal’s place too. I ended up at the hotel around 11 am, just in time to get in line to interview Tim O’Reilly. He pushed back our original time to see a talk on Make, a new O’Reilly venture that is going to be the ditigal age version of Ready Made. It’s not available yet, and there is no official announcement, but look for it this year I think. I blew off the talk because I thought he was going to a talk about make(1), which seems like a boring topic for an Emerging Topics track (also known as the “Things Nat Likes” track). I wish I had seen the talk, now. It ran long without anyone getting anxious to go to lunch, and I ended up chatting to Suzanne Axtell and Nat while we waited for it to end.
I grabbed Tim on his way out of this talk, having brought him a selection of bag lunches to save him a bit of time. Andy Gurevich showed with a camera crew to interview Tim for an open source movie he’s working on for Feel (This) Films, Inc., in Portland too (gees, Portland is a hot area). The details are developing, but not only is the movie about open source, but he might use shared footage too. I didn’t get much chance to talk to him since we were competing for Tim’s time. I yielded to him so he could get a quick interview before my longer one. I’m not sure where the film is going, but their flyer shows a person holding a sign that says “Software patents makes God cry”.
My interview with Tim went well. I might upload the raw audio soon, depending on whether or not I should embarrass myself with the juxtaposition of some of my fumbling questions next to his excellent answers. As I said earlier, I’m starting a project to capture the history of Perl in audio form, but not the dates and places and facts. The story is not the code. I’ll have more details on this later. I plan to interview a lot more people for this project.
After that I came back to the press room, where I am now sitting. I started at a table by myself, in the usual seat I’ve taken this week. Jay Lyman from NewsForge normally sits on the other side of the table, but I haven’t seen him today, and Steve Mallet and his crew take up the table at the back, although he’s already left. As I’m pondering my loneliness, Dr. Freeman Dyson comes in and sits in Jay’s spot and starts reading Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell. I’m not making this up. I have a picture. I haven’t said anything to him because I figure he’s like me: he’s hiding out so he’s not mobbed by people asking him the same old question that everyone asks. Before I could get up the nerve to say “Hi”, a couple of interviewers showed up and started talking to him. No wonder he’s here.
I offered to get lost so I didn’t bother the interview with my existence, but they didn’t mind so I’m still sitting at the table. I’m at a live interview of Dr. Dyson talking about wireless networking, missions to Mars, the legal environment of innovation, cheap space travel, the social hierarchy of Princeton, the Kyoto protocol, global warming, the profitable business of protest, and raising children. Holy canoli.
Related link: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2004/
Kernel developer and author Robert Love wants to take all the fun out
of Linux. Someday you won’t have to specify /dev pathnames to
utilities when installing new devices, or configure CUPS and download
a driver to make a printer visible, or determine which application can
read data from a consumer device (unless you choose to do it the
old-fashioned way). Instead, when you plug in something, it will just
work, OS X style.
Love aired some even more extravagant fantasies, but we’ll stick to
plug and play for now. One of the pleasures of hearing Love’s talk is
that he brought alive the details of kernel and userspace
implementation for these features, a collection of interfaces known as
Project Utopia. Back-to-back with a talk from
freedesktop.org developer Havoc
Pennington on the messaging component called D-BUS, Love showed how
Linux will hopefully soon make the leap to the ordinary consumer.
Love’s and Pennington’s appearances also highlighted how the free
software community is pulling together around Project Utopia. Love
started working for Ximian around the time it was bought by Novell;
Pennington works for Red Hat. Love has deep roots in the Linux
community, Pennington among X developers.
The hardest parts of plug and play are actually implemented already:
detecting a plugged-in device, figuring out what driver handles it,
and loading that driver. Given that all this has been in the Linux
kernel for some time, the rest of the key steps toward plug-and-play
support are:
This kernel subsystem creates a directory named /sys and
populates it with pseudo-files (there’s probably a fancy, formal term
for that but I’m not going to waste search engine time on it) that
contain all the information the kernel knows about every device on the
system: memory size, addresses, USB information, and so forth. The
sysfs facility is similar to the familiar /proc directory and
is gradually replacing it.
This is a common industry term standing for “hardware abstraction
layer.” On Linux, it consults sysfs and presents the information about
devices and memory in a structured form convenient for programs to
query. (If I understand this right, the lower layer, sysfs, is
visible through both an API and as human-readable text, while the
upper layer, HAL, is visible only through an API. This seems a little
odd.)
D-BUS
This has nothing to do with hardware buses, but just presents a
publish-and-subscribe interface that lets programs be notified when
devices are added and devices be automatically associated with
programs. For instance, when you plug your digital camera into a USB
port, a film editing program might pop up on the computer monitor. The
publish-and-subscribe model is familiar to modern GUI programmers and
in many other programming environments. In this model, the process
being monitored sends messages indicating events that occur within the
process, while processes who want to do the monitoring register
themselves to receive these events through asynchronous notification.
D-BUS consists of two components:
A library that implements the publication and registration.
A daemon that listens for events from publishers and sends them to
subscribers. Different users may want different tools to respond to
events such as the plugging in of a consumer device. Therefore, one
instance of the D-BUS daemon handles events that should be responded
to on a system-wide basis, while multiple instances potentially run
for each login session.
These provide a convenient and appealing user interface to devices and
events; an example is GNOME Volume Manager.
sysfs, HAL, and GNOME Volume Manager are implemented now; D-BUS is a
work in progress. Another facility, hotplug, which lets the kernel
handle devices when they are plugged in, is also implemented now. (I
did not attend a related relevant talk today, Greg Kroah-Hartman’s
session on udev.)
Another sort of internals was the subject of another session at the
conference today: Brian Aker’s “Building Your Own Storage Engine for
MySQL.” The talk was a tribute to MySQL’s clean, modular design and
carefully thought-out interfaces. The very existence of multiple
storage engines shows MySQL’s adaptability to different needs; it’s
quite impressive to learn on top of this that users can reasonably
expect to be able to create their own storage engines–and in fact
that some users seem to find this useful in order to accommodate
legacy data with particular needs.
How far is Linux from Plug ‘n Play?
Related link: http://www.oreillynet.com/oscon2004/
Wednesday morning I just missed the MAX train and arrived ten minutes late for
Tim O’Reilly’s speech. I decided to spend the time organizing my files and
setting up Monday’s report.
During the morning break there was a brief press conference with Tim O’Reilly
and Nathan Torkington. Paul Blair came with me to take pictures. Most of the
initial dialogue related to the talks I had just missed. Things were a little
rushed because Tim had to attend a panel; I also wanted to go to a speech in
the next slot. Before I left I asked Nathan about the possibility of a future
European OSCON. I remembered hearing about one before the economic downturn
and wondered if there was a chance of the idea reviving. Nathan indicated that
2005 was a possibility, then began talking about the difference between American
and European hackers. Although I was interested in the subject, I left to see
Megan Conklin’s talk entitled ‘Do the Rich Get Richer? The Impact of Power Laws’.
In the past I have primarily attended talks in the Perl track, supplemented with
a few on tools I use, such as Postgres. This year I have developed an interest
in analysis of social dynamics, which was why I found Monday night so intriguing.
Megan explained the basic scale-free model as akin to an airport hub system:
airports (nodes) which already have a lot of traffic (routes/links) get more traffic,
unless they change by becoming less appealing (lose fitness). In open source
development, projects are nodes and developers are links. Her initial theory
was that open source development would follow this model.
Using Sourceforge as a source of data, she graphed the number of developers per
project. There were thousands of projects with only one developer, and, at the
other end of the scale, one project with 180 developers. Most projects had no
more than a dozen developers. The ratio remained consistent even if inactive
projects were discarded. Furthermore, even highly successful projects–such
as Apache–failed to form a monopoly when compared with other projects of a
similar type.
Therefore, Megan proposed, there are barriers in the open source world which
prevent this. She made several suggestions: projects are divided in to small
teams, so that they seem less monopolistic; one node simply can’t accept all the
links because there are too many links; there is a mutual selection process where
the node can choose to reject or re-deploy a link. Finally, the developers themselves
discourage a monopoly through a desire to be innovative and distinct.
The term ‘innovative’ reminds me of the comparison between programmers and
cats: trying to get all developers to do the same thing at the same time is
like herding cats. I’m not at all surprised that there are a limited number
of opinionated people who can work together on the same project.
Lunch was provided by Microsoft, but I opted for Indian food instead. After
lunch I went to the exhibition hall and collected stamps, swag and information.
Yahoo had the nicest freebies: pens that lit up if you tapped on them, purple
coffee containers, and playing cards. I also liked the bookplates from
Developer’s Library. It was interesting to see some local flavor in the form
of two booths promoting Oregon.
In the afternoon I attended the Perl Lightning Talks, hosted by Geoffrey
Avery. The network in the room was unbearably slow, to the point of affecting
Schwern’s talk. There were 8 talks in total. Thomas (who did not provide
his surname) gave a talk about his NGO in a box project, which provides free
software for non-profit organizations in a format they can access. David
Turner argued about Parrot licensing in a humorous fashion.
In the main, the talks were less amusing than they have been in previous years.
I was especially disappointed that Allison Randal didn’t follow her success
in 2002 (with a Dr. Seuss inspired rhyme on Perl 6) and her 2003 singing effort
by performing the Perl 6 Elements song (based upon the
Perl
6 periodic chart
and
Tom Lehrer’s
Elements song), despite the fact that I hinted heavily that
I would like to hear it.
I decided to leave early in order to catch up on writing and get enough sleep.
After my exhaustion Tuesday, and slight weariness Wednesday, I wanted to enjoy
Thursday with more energy.
I got several compliments on the lucky find shirt from the
Buffalo Exchange.
It reads: "Putting the RIOT back in patriot".
Related link: http://www.oreillynet.com/oscon2004/
After only four hours of sleep, I was naturally a little tired Tuesday
morning.
First I attended the tutorial on ‘RT Developer Training’ by Jesse Vincent and
Robert Spier. I was interested in the subject because I recently spent six
months convincing my now-former employer to use RT in place of emails for
bug and request tracking. After they decided to use it, I spent two months
twisting it to their specifications in my spare time, and was pleased that I
was able to handle all the requirements without even touching the code. However,
because I didn’t have to amend the overlay code, I wanted to hear how to best
do that.
At one point Jesse named some of the ways in RT was being used which differed
greatly from what he originally expected with writing it. In particular, he
cited a project in Germany to assist troubled teens which uses RT to track
interaction and has built in special features such as sending an automatic
message to all staff members whenever a transaction mentioning suicide is
received.
I was so tired by midday that I skipped lunch and accepted Allison Randal’s
offer to let me take a nap in her room. This refreshed me somewhat.
Rocco Caputo’s POE tutorial was next. As with the RT talk, I was familiar
with the introductory section. Having not had the opportunity to use POE
for some time, I was interested in how it is progressing. POE is still an
innovative solution for time-slicing, and from the sound of things, it has
only gotten easier to use.
Several of us wandered down the pier for dinner. I got back just in time
for Larry Wall’s talk on screensavers. In his usual fashion, he drew seemingly
unrelated threads in to a tale about Perl and its hackers.
My favorite part of the talk was when he described diving. He saw a school
of cuttlefish swimming and changing colours in unison. For no obvious reason
they split in to two groups, each with its own colour scheme. He made the
parallel between this and some open source projects, noting that for all he
knew, the squid may have split over the colour choice, and, if so, they wouldn’t
have been the first group to do so.
Larry was followed by Paul Graham, who gave a talk about what makes a great
hacker and what the best environment is for innovation. Most of us appreciate
talks about ourselves (although I do not profess to be a great hacker), so this
look at the mindset of the hacker was fairly well received. I can’t imagine
that anyone–hacker or not–likes to work in a cubicle, however.
Next David Adler presented the White Camel awards. Earlier he had asked me
to hold up his laptop to display pictures of the two absent recipients, and
the idea of presenting it as if it were a famous awards ceremony by wearing
formal clothing. David had a tie, and I put on a gown. In the end we spent
more time getting dressed than on stage, but that was the intention. I displayed
the pictures of Dave Cross and Jon Orwant, and I understand the camera technicians
were able to zoom in on the laptop to display the pictures on the larger screens.
Because Jon Orwant was not present, the infamous and amusing internet quiz show
was canceled. Damian Conway filled in with his ‘Life, the Universe, and
Everything’ talk. It was the second time I saw the talk, but it was still
funny. At least one attendee vowed on IRC to switch to Perl simply for larger
doses of Damian. If you have never seen this talk, do not pass up a future
opportunity to learn about Perl, the game of Life and Klingon programming.
I left with the intention of going to bed early. I just managed to make it to
bed by midnight, in part because I stopped to purchase an extension cable. I
think this valuable piece of equipment will become a part of my standard
conference kit.
Related link: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200407/msg00220.html
I’ve been hollering this for years now (softly counseling in the case of my clients), and I’m glad to hear others giving the same advice. As no less a sage than Mike Kay says:
“I wonder whether [creating huge XML files] is a wise way of using XML. Even with XML databases, most databases are optimized to handle large numbers of small/medium documents rather than a single gigantic one. I don’t think that using an XML document as a replacement for a database is a particularly good idea. It’s not the job it was designed for.”
Yes folks. XML is not designed to be a monolithic database instance implementation. If you’re dealing with gigabyte XML files, I can almost guarantee your design is broken somwehere. Between modern file systems and modern archive formats and tools, there is no reason not to decompose XML into reasonable chunks.
Update: for a bonus, see Kay’s argument against some overcooked RDBMS dogma. I strongly agree with him here, as well, even though I’d guess Fabian Pascal and gang are still looking for scalps of such heretics.
Related link: http://zephyrfalcon.org/weblog2/arch_e10_00590.html#e591
Good old Daily Python-URL led me to Hans Nowak’s musings on controlling the operation of generators from the “outside” once they had started running. Interestingly enough, his technique is precisely the same as one I (successfully) experimented with in my recently-announced Scimitar , an ISO Schematron implementation in Python.
Warning: This article is soaked in the inevitably arcane ideas introduced by the exotic code control flow opened up by Python’s generators. I do think these ideas are well worth soaking in if you’d like to harness Python’s full power. Way back when, I was very excited to hear of the inclusion of generators in Python because I had many plans to use them to supercharge XML processing in Python. I’m starting to harvest a good lot of that fruit for the market.
In my own work towards more flexible generators I started with Dave Mertz’s brilliant explorations in his article “Generator-based state machines“. The Mertz technique simulates co-routines (and Mertz has extended the technique to simulate microthreads). This is done by having generators yield a control cookie to a central scheduler in order to indicate which generator is the co-routine to which control should be passed. The generators also yield a global value (which Mertz called “cargo”) that can be seen within the body of subsequently invoked generators. No summary can do justice to this idea. If you haven’t read the article linked earlier in this paragraph, consider opening up a new browser tab or Window and giving it a quick read.
The Mertz technique is certainly sound, but what Hans and what I separately worked out was the refinement of encapsulating the generators in a class, and using instance values to share cargo between generators. This tweak not only makes the code a little cleaner, but it provides some allowance for re-entrance. I also found that in most cases, you can ditch the scheduler, and lose very little of the power of the Mertz technique using only semi-co-routines (roughly code that invokes generators which can invoke further generators).
My experiments led to a pretty powerful mechanisms for taming the notorious complexity of SAX processing. SAX involves having the XML parser call back into user code to handle elements, text, etc., not unlike classic event-driven GUI programming. This typically calls for complex state machines to stich the various snippets of handler code into coherent logic. In parallel to my experiments with generators, I’ve been experimenting with techniques for helping automate (no pun intended) the state machine design. See my latest article, “Decomposition, Process, Recomposition” for an example of how such state machine factories can boost XML processing. The _state_machine class in listing 2 is the crux.
In Scimitar, rather than making the state machine easier to architect, I went for largely eliminating it through the co-routine approach (as I mentioned, semi-co-routines seem to work just as well in practice). Specifically, I passed SAX events to generators which would then effectively knit the separate call-backs into one smooth run of code, allowing me use local variables and the like to make state management a cinch.
I am very excited by these fresh directions in Pythonic XML processing, and I expect to marry the self-assembling state machine technique with the semi-co-routine technique in future Python/XML columns, and in future releases of running code. I do want to remind readers that Scimitar provides a very practical example of these techniques, implementing a Schematron to Python compiler in less than 500 lines of Python/SAX code. Even if you’re not interested in XML validation using Schematron, have a look at the code and let me know what you think of the basic technique. I already have plans for streamlining it, but that’s for another release.
I must say that from my perspective it’s hard to imagine a more exciting time to be processing XML using Python.
Have you tried co-routines or semi-co-routines in practice?
I’ve been walking around with my microphone asking people “You’re at a party and someone asks you what Perl is. What do you say?” I thought this would be an easy question for everyone, but more than a couple of people have immediately gone deer-in-the-headlights at the question. Surely everyone has gotten this question before.
The ones who don’t immediately go into shock fall into some distinct categories. There is the “maps my mind” crowd. I started to wonder if everyone had read the same queue cards. Is there a memo that I missed?
The clever crowd talks about oysters. One guy told me that his wife bit it a raw oyster to discover a real life pearl. He ended up setting it in a ring.
Then there are the salesman, which we may have called the evangelists long ago but have since then polished their pitch and can speak in complete sentences without steaming at the ears. I’ll come back to that later.
Chris DiBona assures me that the computer language Perl comes from a tawdry romance that Larry Wall had with Minnie Pearl (ayep, there really is a miniperl, too). She suffered a debilitating stroke in 1991: the same year that O’Reilly & Associates published Programming perl, the first book about Perl. Coincidence? Or not? No one seems to have any answers for this. What is everyone hiding?
There is an undercurrent of the B word here, although I dare not say its treasonous name. Most of the Perl people I talk to are not going to the Perl talks, and most of them give the same reason for it. When I ask people what they aare want to see, they tell me about things in the Emerging Technology track. Today’s favorite seems to be “Darwinian Software Programming”. One Perl hacker ended up there because he hadd the wrong room, but he stayed there because he liked the talk. Despite the many talks with “Perl 6″ in the title, the Perl track seems ho-hum. I’ll have to catch Nicholas Clark’s Perl 5.8.5 Was Boring (And Why You Should Be Excited by This)” later today.
Today’s free lunch is from Microsoft, and it’s one of those carbohydrate-hysteria-wrap menus. I don’t think they get to choose the menu, but leave it to them to put their name on crap. What I could really use is a grilled cheese sandwich on sourdough bread. This is the left coast after all.
It’s time to walk around again. I’m the silly guy with the microphone and the headphones. If you want to tell me something about Perl, just come up to me and I’ll listen (and record). :)
Related link: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2004/
The morning dawned cool and overcast, much to the relief of everyone present
for the previous week’s heat-wave. The industrial-strength hotel
air-conditioning was almost too intense.
I started the morning with Damian Conway’s ‘Best Practices’ tutorial.
I recently finished participating the lengthy process of setting guidelines
for an organization’s code and wanted to see if Damian had some interesting
ideas we hadn’t considered.
Damian dove straight in with the issue of style. In my experience, style
is a battleground and the issue is best saved for the end, when everyone
is worn out from discussing the important issues. Damian, however, is braver,
and suggested that because it is less important which style is selected than
to choose and stick with a style, the issue should be tackled right away.
I was pleased to learn that God (according to Damian) and Damian also likes
K & R style, a 4 space tab, and vi. Although I’m not sure I agree with
everything this pair supports, some arguments were quite persuasive. I will
certainly try things Damian’s way at least once.
It was when Damian approached the subject of naming schemes that I knew why
I was there. He put in to words the rules I’d internalized but couldn’t
express. For example, a subroutine name should give an indication of what
it does, so appropriate naming templates include verb_noun
(set_surname) and verb_noun_preposition (fetch_user_by).
After lunch I attended Tim Bunce’s ‘Advanced DBI’ tutorial. Having previously
limited my DBI complexity to transactions, I was eager to learn more about
what I could do with it.
Tim addressed optimization, error handling, and debugging. His tutorial,
which is also
available on
CPAN, is lighter reading than the full DBI documentation. It covers
optimization, error handling and debugging. I look forward to the updated
version of his
DBI book.
I joined a group of people who were going in to town for dinner, then had
the pleasure of browsing in two of Portland’s nicer shops:
Powell’s
(used and new books) and Buffalo
Exchange (used clothing). We concluded
the tour with Mio Gelato
(new ice cream). All these establishments are
located near 11th and Burnside and are recommended. I’ll be wearing one
of my purchases Wednesday.
After returning to the hotel, Michael Schwern, Bill Odom, and David Adler
offered to help me write this article. We went to the hotel bar, which,
in retrospect, was a poor choice for productivity.
I was on the third paragraph when a woman from a nearby table came over
and introduced herself as Patty. She explained that she was a retired
educator and hoped we could answer some questions about OSCON attendees.
She was puzzled by the fact that she saw people sitting near one another,
concentrating on their laptops. In her eyes, this showed a disturbing lack
of human interaction. We quickly explained that most of the evening had
been spent with our laptops tucked away, but now we were working. As for
many of the people she’d seen, this early in the conference it was likely
that they were speakers polishing their presentations.
This led to further talk on the nature of communication, the merits
face-to-face and online interaction, and the purpose of conferences within
the open-source and free-software communities. I think that by the end,
Patty was convinced that we aren’t antisocial and isolated. When we
talk with like-minded people around the globe, collaborate with someone
without knowing her or his given name, and share our code with complete
strangers we’re communicating. By explaining more of the ideals of the
community I was able to think about some of the assumptions of what we
consider normal interaction, and what someone like Patty considers
normal.
The most difficult concept to explain was the meritocracy and the
position speakers occupy. Patty had overheard two people on the elevator
talking about using IRC to chat about a speaker during the his or her
presentation. Patty considered this unbelievably rude, and was incredulous
when we spoke of people who speak with IRC projected behind them.
We were unable to persuade her to give a lightning talk to present her
opinions on audience courtesy, in part because she left Tuesday.
It was interesting to note that although Patty peppered her questions
with phrases about not being part of our world she exhibited characteristics
that are valued in this world. She could have observed us and left the
bar with a poor opinion of us, instead of asking questions and engaging in
dialogue. It was such an interesting experience–and certainly the first
time in quite a while that I’ve encountered someone with no knowledge of
the world I live in–that I am not only writing this Tuesday, I didn’t
return to Château Poe (a friend’s house) until 03:00 and still
only regretted drinks, not the lack of sleep.
I’m glad that I don’t have to help out too much with the Stonehenge party: it sounds like its a really big production. It’s coming down to the wire and the details are working themselves out as they always do: at the last minute.
I started off sitting with a couple of people talking about open source employees. One person brought up the fear in his company that when people gave things away, they would later walk away from the company and try to sell it updates to the stuff they locked it into. I can understand that. Some places even have rules against this sort of thing: you can’t become a contractor after some long period that removes any advantage you might have from working there.
Other places want to own your mind, your body, and your soul. They aren’t interested in hiring you unless you will work for them for twenty years. They see employees as an investment rather than a trade. Anything that gets you out from under their control, such as participation in the open source community, frightens them. They can’t control you when you have opportunities. It amazes me how companies want to hire mediocre people just so they won’t have to hire again in a couple years. They don’t see any advantage to retaining employees by keeping them happy.
On the other hand, some places expect that you are going to change employers every couple of years. They recognize this and adapt to reality. If they can’t help their employees move forward in their own lives, they know that the employees are going to walk out. Instead of sticking their heads in the sand, they make happy employees. I know several big companies that have insanely loyal employees for just that reason. Phil Graham said as much in his talk last night: good people care more about how they are treated and what they work on than how much they get paid.
At the moment I am back in the press room, which is right next to the big room where the big talks are going on. I saw part of Tim O’Reilly’s talk, but since I tend to keep up with Tim’s writings and talks, I knew most of the talk already. However, I can still hear it while I sit across the hall. Not only that, I have subethaedit open, so I can read the transcript as it happens.
Subethaedit collaboration is this amazing thing (and Randal has been bugging me to start using it with him). If students can bring laptops into the classroom, this is going to be their killer app. Conference attendees are taking notes in the same document (each author gets a color), so they can add things that the other people may have missed. They end up with a very good set of notes, in real time. Authors fade in an out (probably chatting on IM) and other authors take join in. And, everyone, including me, can read it.
The subethaedit notes tend to read like a screenplay as the author not only include notes on content, but presentation and environmental details. If a picture shows up on the screen, they describe it inline:
blah blah blah
[picture: exterior nature scene]
blah blah blah
[picture: Sam Adams beer]
I think that this could even be the new boring-meeting game. Everyone looks like they are typing or adjusting numbers in their spreadsheets, but they are really just typing back and forth to each other. Maybe they have another document open with the real notes and everyone is talking one set of notes.
This could also be a really good tele-conference tool. I have always tried to convince my employers (back in the day when I had a job) that we should be on IM when we are conference calls with clients. We could warn each other about things we shouldn’t say, remind each other of things we should say, or tell people to stop talking immediately to avoid conversational land mines. Add subethaedit and you don’t have to designate a scribe because everyone can take notes.
Now, related to all that subethaedit raving, I have also noticed that the terminal room (sponsored by Apple) is almost empty almost always. Most everyone seems to have wireless, and the wireless coverage on the conference floor, and even my aluminum PowerBook gets four bars. We’ve come a long way since the first YAPC in Pittsburgh when it was a novelty. There are a lot of PowerBooks and iBooks here, and I bet most of those people bought Airport cards when they got the computer. The PC people seem to favor the Lucent (or whatever their name is now) cards.
In the fireside chat with Tim O’Reilly and Nat Torkington, Nat hinted at a possible OSCON maybe in Europe, but he didn’t narrow it down more. Besides making it closer to a far away market, a lot of people who don’t want to travel to the US for political reasons. That’s all he would let on. I’d be happy if they could just make it as far east as Chicago.
Related link: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2004/
The second annual Portland kernel hackers’ BOF took place last night,
bringing in five men and two women programmers to speak to a dozen
serious, hard-core Linux enthusiasts. Portland is a major, if scantly
appreciated, computing site, home to a large number of Linux kernel
developers (mostly working on Linux drivers and driver-related
subsystems) who meet socially once a month and are employed by OSDL,
IBM, Intel, and a variety of other local companies.
It was a pretty self-assured and convivial bunch, offering such
opinions as:
Copyright issues raised their head, too, as one would expect. (A Moot
Court on Monday night, led by professor Pamela Samuelson, laid out
both sides of the SCO v. IBM case, not necessarily with equal respect
for each side, and led to a lively discussion of the legal risks in
free software development.) The kernel developers agree that one
should ask contributors to verify that they have the right to donate
their code, but think that the safeguards put in place by major
contributors (notably IBM) are more than sufficient to ensure the code
is clean.
This year’s White Camel Awards, which Perl Mongers started in 1999, go to:
Me! Holy canoli! No wonder Dave wouldn’t let me in on the secret.
The other recipients are Jon Orwant and Dave Cross, who couldn’t be here this year. Gees, all the cool kids skipped, and I’m the lone dork who has to walk up to the stage.
I’ll have to write more on this later. I have to go meet Randal who’s setting up wireless hot spots for the Stonehenge party.
Fewer sessions today, but far more hallway meetings. I’m still surprised by the long-term effects of the things I’ve said in the past, and amazed at what a well-connected group we are.
This morning started with Joe Celko’s Advanced SQL tutorial, a big disappointment. I’m a huge fan of his SQL For Smarties, but the presentation didn’t have any direction. I bailed after 45 minutes to go have a late breakfast / early lunch and crank out slides for my second Lightning Talk.
Somewhere in the halls, someone stopped me and said “Hi, I remember you from last year. You talked about your
10 Favorite Non-O’Reilly Books, and I picked up Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People. You’re right, it’s great.” It’s exactly why I gave that five-minute talk, and yet it surprises me (and pleases me) that it actually worked.
I’ve barely talked to brian d foy, but reading his blog entries still amaze me. I never realized quite how well-known he is. Between him, Bill Odom and Tom Limoncelli, I think they know everyone in this building. And I thought I was sort of well-connected…
I got my shipments of The Perl Review this afternoon, and a lot of my afternoon was talking to magazine people in the press room. There are a lot of experienced publishing people here, and they have all been very kind and willing to help. I have to talk to these people again after the conference so I can take advantage of their experience. I’m glad that I knocked myself out to get TPR ready for OSCON because it has let the right people know that I am serious about this thing, and they are here to meet me and offer their help. I have one copy I’m keeping all of my notes in.
Besides that, I talked to, or rather, listened to Brian Ingerson tell me how Kwiki can help TPR editors and authors work together. I’m sold. I didn’t have a use for Kwiki before, but now I do. It all sits on top of version control stuff, which is one of my big requirements. We also talked a lot about IO::All, which abstracts most input/output so it looks the same. I think I mentioned this before, but I keep running into Ingy as he toils away on his kwiki stuff.
I had another good steak at Sanders (down by the river and around the corner). I really am not that much of a red meat eater, but I’ve been a bit decadent lately. This obsession will pass, and maybe in several years my arteries will unclog too.
This evening’s activities included Eric Raymond announcing some new Open Source awards, saying that we need such institutions in the community to get the attention of the non-technical world. This is not the new thing he wants to make it out to be: Perl Mongers started the White Camel awards in 1999, and gave out cash prizes to the recipients. They have given out the awards every year since, and during that time, other communities, like the Apache folks, gave out awards too. This reminds me of all of the press releases in my email this week. Every one of them claims to be the leader of their field. How many leading companies can there actually be?
Larry Wall is giving his “State of the Onion” talk, but without much state or onion, but a lot of screensavers and his take on them. Still, Larry says that according to Sturgeon’s Law, which says that 90% of everything is crap, since this is his eighth talk, he still has two more chances.
While I am half-listening to Larry’s talk, I wanted to transfer some images from my phone to my computer via Bluetooth. I told my phone to scan for Bluetooth devices so I could connect to my computer. I had to wait a while, since all the PowerBooks around me apparently have Bluetooth, as does Tim Bunce’s phone, Nat Torkington’s something-whose-name’s-too-long-to-fit, several Macs, and lots of other computers. I stopped scanning after I found my computer, but by that time I had already found over 50 other devices. Bluetooth has been around for a while, but all of a sudden its everywhere.
Paul Graham is talking now. He gets to follow Larry Wall, poor chap. I’ll wait to write about that later since only two people are still reading at this point. The rest are probably aactually listening to Paul explain why Dilbert is not just commentary, but office anthropology, and why big companies squander their technological talent.
