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OSCON day 3: Reflections on OSCON 2008
July 25 2008
Today was the last day of OSCON and I'm in the mood to think about the conference and share some of my random observations that didn't make it into any of my other blog posts. First up is a comment that Brian Aker of MySQL fame made during the "Tim… read moreOSCON day 2: Do You Believe in the Users?
July 25 2008
After enjoying Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick's comments on the anti-patterns panel yesterday, I decided to peek into their "Do You Believe in the Users?" presentation. Ben and Fitz started the presentation with "Successful software requires more than just technical effort." as their premise and then went on to build… read moreOSCON day 2: Prophet, your path out of the cloud
July 24 2008
Some of you may know Jesse Vincent as the guy who hands out snarky t-shirts like last year's "My free software runs your business" shirt. But today I got to see Jesse's more serious side when I attended his "Prophet, your path out of the cloud" presentation. He started his… read moreOSCON day 1: An Open Source Project Called "Failure:" Community Antipatterns to Know and Avoid
July 24 2008
The second session of the day that really appealed to me was "An Open Source Project Called "Failure:" Community Antipatterns to Know and Avoid". When I saw that Ben and Fitz of subversion fame were joined by other open source heavy weights, I was sold on this panel. In this… read moreOSCON day 1: Beyond REST? Building Data Services with XMPP PubSub
July 24 2008
Its good to be back in Portland for my favorite geek convention: O'Reilly's Open Source Conference. The overcast sky in Portland is making it a little easier this year to focus on the plethora of excellent speakers and sessions. The first session to really grip and and speak to me… read moreOSCON day 1: Beyond REST? Building Data Services with XMPP PubSub
July 23 2008
Its good to be back in Portland for my favorite geek convention: O'Reilly's Open Source Conference. The overcast sky in Portland is making it a little easier this year to focus on the plethora of excellent speakers and sessions. The first session to really grip and and speak to me… read moreReally, Really, Really Intimate Interfaces
March 05 2008
This afternoon I had the pleasure to listen to Kyle Machulis' talk about teledildonics in his "Really, Really, Really Intimate Interfaces" talk. I've been joking about teledildonics to my friends for many moons, only to be met with incredulous looks of "Really?". Little did I know that teledildonics is real… read moreFuturetainment: The Asian Media Revolution
March 05 2008
My second day of ETech started off with Mike Walsh's "Futuretainment: The Asian Media Revolution" presentation. Mike presented a view of how young people in Asia consume media and how their experiences differ vastly from what kids in America and western Europe experience. read moreCute Cat Theory of Web Activism
March 04 2008
This afternoon I had the pleasure to listen to Ethan Zuckermann's presentation on the "Cute Cat Theory of Web Activism", which opened my eyes to a side of Web 2.0 technologies I'd never seen before. Ethan started his presentation with this thesis: Sufficiently usable read/write platforms will attract porn and… read moreHow billions of examples lead to better models of images and text
March 04 2008
Its time for my favorite conference of the year! ETech kicked off this morning to some awesome keynotes and moved straight into some killer sessions. The first session I attended was Peter Norvig's "How billions of examples lead to better models of images and text" presentation. Before I tell you… read moreJuly 27 2007
My last session of OSCON yesterday was Danese Cooper's "The Art of Community" panel talk with Karl Fogel, Jimmy Wales, Dawn Foster, Sulamita Garcia, Whurley, and Brian Behlendorf. This year Danese asked community oriented questions and let the various panel members jump in to answer the questions. Blogging panel presentations… read moreJuly 26 2007
After today's excellent OSCON keynote speeches I attended Adam Keys "People Hacks" presentation. Adam started with the disclaimer that the goal of this talk was not to manipulate people, but rather how you can change your behavior to foster improved communication when working with groups of people. Adam suggests using… read moreOSCON: Mozilla Firefox and the Internet as an Open Platform
July 26 2007
Yesterday at OSCON I attended Mitchell Baker's "Mozilla Firefox and the Internet as an Open Platform" presentation in which she talked about Mozilla's mission to ensure that the Internet stays open and healthy. She outlined the two ends of the spectrum of what the Internet could turn into in the… read moreOSCON: Performance Whack-a-mole
July 25 2007
Today, the main sessions of OSCON kicked off and after the keynotes I attended Josh Berkus' talk entitled "Performance Whack-a-mole". Since MusicBrainz relies on Postgres for its database back-end and I've had to deal with database performance issues, I'm keenly interested to learn the tricks of the trade. And since… read moreO'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing: Why Free Software Values Work for Business
July 24 2007
In the afternoon at the Executive Briefing Tim O'Reilly spoke with Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu/Canonical, in the "Why Free Software Values Work for Business" session. Like many conversations, this conversation veered off the main topic pretty quickly and started focusing on collaboration in the open source space. Mark… read more
