OSCON: Friday and parting thoughts

The Friday morning keynotes at OSCON were a bit off the beaten path with George Dyson discussing John von Neumann's role in creating the ENIAC computer in 1945 at IAS, and Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friendman talking about Mono and Dashboard.

George Dyson had the opportunity to dig in the archives at IAS (Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies) and examine the records that were kept during the creation of the ENIAC computer. Dyson presented how the project came to be and the evolving friction between the residents at IAS who were focused on theoretical research and the ENIAC creation team. Throughout the presentation Dyson presented an endless number of slides -- memos, design diagrams, debugging notes, testing logs. Each of the slides had the most crucial elements highlighted for easy digestion by the audience. Many of the slides elicited laughter from the audience as we could see bits and pieces of ourselves in the notes of the ENIAC engineers.

A few of these slides outlined heated memos from the theoretical researchers at the IAS, complaining about the ENIAC team. The ENIAC team was exhibiting prototypical geek behaviours that are still present in todays geek culture. Von Neumann was not only an engineer who was ahead of his time, but he was also a leader and a geek who set the tone of the geek culture that was to follow him.

I really enjoyed Dyson's lighthearted talk -- it was action packed with warm fuzzy content to make everyone smile and feel good about being a geek. It was a warm welcome to contrast the other excellent but far more serious keynotes.

Miguel and Nat followed suit in the lighthearted tone in their keynote when they spoke about the progress that Mono had made in the last year. They talked about the common runtime code and how many languages will compile to the common runtime code, including Java. To demonstrate this feat, they compiled IBM's Eclipse to bytecodes and then translated them to Mono's common runtime and then ran it from there -- quite impressive.

The best part of the keynote was when Nat started demonstrating the new dashboard application they dreamt up. Dashboard takes in cluepackets (packets of information) from other applications (such as IM clients) and requests that the various back-ends for dashboard retrieve information related to the data in the cluepacket. Nat demonstrated this concept by sending an instant message to the IM client which then passed off a cluepacket derived from the IM message to the dashboard application. Dashboard promptly pulled up Miguel's personal information (including his real-live cellphone number, which was shown to all audience members), pictures and other related links.

Given that the application took only a few days to write, it was quite impressive. If you'd like to know more about Dashboard, check out DJ Adams' write up.

And a note to Miguel -- if you're going to have someone show off your cellphone number to the audience, you should remember to turn off your cellphone before your speech. :-)

As usual, this O'Reilly conference rocked the house -- the keynotes, presentations, exhibition and the watercooler discussions in the hallways were lively and interesting. Never a dull moment; action from morning until late at night -- its hard to write about the conference when there is so much to do. But there are worse things in life. :-)

Finally, I have a few random observations to make that don't fit into any other topic:

• Random overheard quote: "Novell, the failed satan. -- Alan Nugent, Novell"
• C++ is dead. Miguel de Icaza dislikes C++, and many more people had plenty of negative things to say about it. Personally, I hope to be able to wean myself off C++ in the near future.
• The geek gender ratio is still severly out of whack. The women's restroom at the conference was converted into another men's restroom. Sad, but logistically necessary.
• The subversion source control system seems to be getting more talk than other source control systems that hope to replace CVS.
• Many people are unhappy with SourceForge. Users from Asia seem to be very unhappy with the connectivity to SF. This combined with the fact that public CVS access lags behind the developer CVS access by 24 hours, does not spell out a promising future for SF. I've overheard a few conversations about developers looking at gforge as a replacement for SF.

And I really liked the new Portland location for the conference. Overall I give an enthusiastic two thumbs up to Nat and the O'Reilly conferences staff for putting on an excellent conference.

What did you think of the conference?