Related link: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/23/oscon_grid.html#friday
I arrived a couple of minutes into
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
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
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
also deserve a round of applause. Active
State, Apple Developer
Connection, Hewlett-Packard,
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!
