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No OSCON in 2006 For Me
2006-04-15 11:38 in /tech/oscon
Various other people seem to be making posts about this year’s OSCON, so I guess I’ll add mine.
I almost certainly won’t be going to OSCON this year. Mostly this has nothing to do with the conference itself. Theoretically, I might have liked to give a talk again this year, but I’ve been so busy there was really no hope of me producing something. I’m also hoping to take some extended vacation around that time; originally we were thinking in Europe, although that’s probably getting pushed a year. At any rate, trying to conference and vacation in close proximity just isn’t something I want to do again this year. Finally, there’s this unfortunate fact that OSCON pretty much always conflicts with my daughter’s birthday, and while up until now she’s been young enough to be happy with celebrating while off in some new place, that’s not going to work indefinitely.
I do have to say, though, that this year’s Perl track surely doesn’t make me feel like I’m missing much. Haven’t I heard 90% of these talks before? I wonder what’s going on in the talk selection process. Are there just not enough novel submissions to fill the week, or does the committee really feel that half the schedule has to be the same “Annual Update on Foo” each year?
I am pretty happy to see a new Programming track, although it seems to me that there’s plenty of room for that track to grow with more meaty programming subject (rather than version control usage and project management).
Anyway, that’s all I have to say on the subject for this year. We’ll see how next year looks.
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Talk Preparation
2005-06-20 23:46 in /tech/oscon
I did my first practice talk today. It was fairly productive at finding the points in my talk where I didn’t actually know what I was going to say. I went back this evening and polished up a couple points and I’m feeling a lot better about it now.
I’m still stressing a bit about this whole summer adventure, but I’m hoping that once we actually get on the road I’ll relax a bit.
BTW, you have about 15 minutes left to get early bird registration for OSCON
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OSCON 2005 Schedule is Up
2005-05-07 00:55 in /tech/oscon
The schedule for OSCON 2005 was just posted today. I think I got a pretty decent slot, on the first afternoon of regular sessions. My biggest fear was that I’d get scheduled at the same time as Damian Conway and have no one show up. Instead, I’m actually scheduled in the same room right after Conway, which seems like half blessing and half curse, in that I might get some spill-over but it’s a tough act to follow.
The YAPC::NA schedule was also published a couple days ago. Unfortunately, I got a spot in the middle of Autrijus’ half-day session on Perl 6 and Pugs, so that kinda sucks.
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Accepted!
2005-03-08 22:18 in /tech/oscon
My talk got accepted for OSCON! Whoot!
Now I get to stress about actually writing it.
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Submitted
2005-02-12 13:03 in /tech/oscon
Well, I did conquer my writer’s block, and braved the perils of corporate communications, and the proposal is submitted. Now we wait and see.
Seriously, though, dealing with corp.comm. was much less painful than I expected. No hard time at all, and they were very helpful. I was pretty happy to see that we were on the same page with respect to participating in conferences like this.
Update: I forgot the most amusing part of this adventure. When I got on the phone with corp.comm., they said they’d had some difficulty opening my draft of the proposal because it was in “some wierd file format”. What was it? Plain text.
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Submitting an OSCON Talk?
2005-02-03 17:58 in /tech/oscon
Well, I did say that I would submit a talk to OSCON this year. And, the CFP is out. And, I don’t really doubt that I could talk intelligently for half-an-hour about high performance systems.
And yet, I just can’t manage to sit down and write up an abstract. Of course, part of the problem is that it’s really hard to write an abstract before you’ve written the paper / talk. But, I’m also just going through a bit of a slump where I’m just not really excited about much of anything, and it’s really hard to work up enthusiasm for something over 6 months in the future. Plus, every sentence I write just seems to come out as lame marketing-speak.
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The Week in Review
2004-08-03 10:57 in /tech/oscon
Well, looking back, it’s been a pretty good week. Really busy, but interesting and worthwhile. A couple sessions disappointed me, and there were a few things the conference organizers could have done better, but on the whole it was quite valuable.
My big synchonicity of the week revolved around Damian Conway, Paul Graham, and Brian Ingerson (IO::All). I had actually been rereading some of Paul Graham’s essays before the conference, including Programming Bottom-Up, a concept that he touched on briefly in his Tuesday night talk. The basic idea is to extend the language to match your problem domain, thus making it easier and more natural to express your programs. Ingy has created a few examples of this in IO::All and Spiffy. Damian talked about this and more in his Sufficiently Advanced Technologies talk.
At a minimum, this got me to think about some of my basic utility classes and how I could modify them to be more natural to use. But, I’m also thinking about new development and how to keep things cleaner. I need to give some thought, though, to understanding how to ensure that this technology is used for good. If you have a small group of highly talented developers, it is clear that using this power is the way to go. What is less clear is how to scale it to larger development groups. How do you educate people if you change the language itself? And, how do you ensure that this sort of deep magic is used carefully and with restraint?
My other big conclusion was that we can definitely contribute more to this conference. There are interesting problems we are addressing which I didn’t see anyone talking about. To a certain extent, we will be limited by confidentiality, but there should still be general stuff we can talk about that isn’t specific to our application or so critical to maintaining competitive advantage. So, I will probably submit a talk next year, working title “How to serve 1,000,000,000 requests a day with mod-perl”. Keep your eyes open for it.
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Open Source: Economic Nonsense, Kent Beck
2004-07-30 12:17 in /tech/oscon
With one child in college and three to go, the Kent started thinking about the economics of software. Concluded that open source is nonsense. Not saying he won’t do it, or that you shouldn’t, but just that you should be aware that it’s nonsense when you do it.
A goal of society is to apply scarce resources where they do the most good. Money is a tool to do this. Money is information about what is valuable in society (mostly, not perfect). How does the OS movement figure out what is important to do if not with money? Prediction: open source will result is really good software with minimal impact.
Ex., rough estimate of value created by JUnit is $1 billion / year. Kent Beck’s profit: $0. Geek cred is nice, but doesn’t pay for college (or food, or rent, ...).
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: survival, love, esteem, self-actualization. Must fulfill lower levels before you can proceed to higher levels. But, open source turns this completely on its head. Do what you want, maybe then get recognition in community, maybe then form close relationships, only very few manage to fulfill survival needs through OSS.
Pricing in traditional economic: price set by a seller is a statement of worth. Price paid by a buyer is a statement of perceived value. We (OS developers) think we are making items of value, but to most of the world a price of $0 signals otherwise.
Situations that don’t make sense are warnings of impending change. In what direction will change happen? Hard to say, but if we are aware that change is coming, maybe we can steer it in a direction that is good for the creators of value. But, if you don’t pay attention, MS will capture all the value instead.
Accountability: software development doesn’t have a good history of accountability. Increase in test-driven development is a step towards accountability. OSS tends only to have peer accountability. The problem with your peers is that they tend to let you off the hook. “Oops... it was 3AM and I made a mistake”.
Why does OS seem to work? The first world is a land of plenty. If you have a technical background, you can’t fall that far. At least in the short term, people are willing to sacrifice basic needs for higher needs (doesn’t work so well in the long term, though. Do need sleep, housing, food). Programmers are willing to write software instead of being involved in other hobbies or local community.
How could it work in the future? “Whole people working whole jobs”. Sponsorship (why not USPS JUnit instead of cycling). Patronage (shortage of interested wealthy people, audience member recommends Public Software Fund). Pay-per-use (direct feedback for developers). Licensing. Complementary products.
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Sufficiently Advanced Technologies, Damian Conway
2004-07-30 11:37 in /tech/oscon
Preable: big “thank you” to Larry Wall for making this all possible. If everyone in this room got their company to donate $500 to The Perl Foundation, it would be more than enough to keep Larry working on Perl for the whole year.
Desire from someone: implicit
$self->
for method calls inside a class module. Sub::CallAsMethod does this. Very simple. Very magical. Probably evil.This talk is about modules that are indistiguishable from magic.
hmm... blah blah blah... Harry Potter jokes without end...
Modules which do magic without any user interaction aren’t new. Most famously,
use strict
. More recently, IO::All. But, maybe not magical enough...use IO::All:Pulp::Fiction my @horrors = <~/foo.txt>
Lots of stuff in the Perl6:: namespace.
How can mere mortals write S.A.T.? Find the clunky bits of your code and do something about it! IO::Prompt was pretty cool, but originally needed too many flags. Changed to autochomp by default and autodetect boolean context.
Why can’t comments be more useful and interactive? Progress module presented last year weren’t simple enough to use. Solution, smart comments:
use Smart::Comments while ( ... ) { ### Preparing--->done do_work }
also provides checks and assertions.
Wrapped up with Lingua::EN::Autoinflect, which is like Lingua::EN::Inflect, but with no interface, just works.
Takeaway: look at the interface of your modules. What could you remove? What could you just infer? Could you have better defaults? Could you use objects with overloaded operators to acheive things with more natural usage?
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Open Content & Online Digital Libraries, David Rumsey
2004-07-30 09:37 in /tech/oscon
It’s pretty hard to do this justice, but check out the David Rumsey Map Collection. Amazing historical maps with the ability to compare, overlap, evolve, and knit maps.