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Fri, 27 Jul 2007 20:22 UTC
As OSCON winded to a close today, I attended the morning’s keynotes, which I found to be some of the better keynotes I’ve seen at OSCON. They were entertaining, thoughtful, and weren’t filled with marketing drivel.
Jimmy Wales of Wikia (Wikipedia) announced Wikia’s acquisition of Grub and their intent to release it under an open source license. The concept is that Grub will run as a distributed search system, using the idle computers of people who have installed it to index Web pages in much the same way SETI uses CPU cycles during idle times. The goal is to make Internet search a more open and transparent process so that everyone can see how the search data is collected and used. Since it’s open, it can potentially be improved by the community and fine-tuned to perform better searches and return more accurate results.
Following Jimmy Wales, Simon Wardley spoke about “Commoditisation of IT and What the Future Holds,” a talk that would have otherwise been dull and boring had Simon not presented it in such an entertaining way. The basic gist is that, as new ideas develop and become more ubiquitous, they become commoditized, which is better for everyone because of the competition involved as businesses and communities compete to create better versions of the ideas/products.
Finally, the keynotes rounded out with Nat Torkington giving three keynotes in about fifteen minutes and James Larsson giving the humorous presentation “Pimp My Garbage” in which he showed numerous hilarious hardware hacks.
Now, I’m sitting in the airport enjoying PDX’s free wi-fi (commoditization done right!) and waiting on my flight. So, I’ll leave you with this moment of Zen:
Yesterday, I remarked about the free beer served at the Mozilla party that “someone should fork the beer and make it better.” As a result, a hilarious conversation and observation about open source ensued. Enjoy!
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Thu, 26 Jul 2007 23:35 UTC
I didn’t get a chance to post yesterday, so today’s post will include my thoughts on sessions I’ve attended for the past two days, but I’ll try to keep things short. If you know me, you’ll understand how difficult this can be.
I’m trying to attend many of the community talks and panels, especially because of my involvement in Atlanta PHP and the #phpc IRC channel. So, the first talk I attended yesterday was How to Herd Cats and Influence People by Jono Bacon. I actually have a lot of notes on this, but I won’t share them here, but the one big quote I took home from this talk was: “Always be flexible; when you stop being flexible, that’s when bureaucracy kicks in.” The bottom line about dealing with an open source community is: you want to encourage people to accomplish things quickly. Getting newcomers involved right away and accomplishing things helps them to get involved right away achieving and contributing. This gets them excited about contributing, and they’ll move on to do more, and they’ll become effective members of the community. If anyone has to ask questions about how to get involved, then you’ve lost. You need to have all this stuff documented so it’s easy for them to figure out how and where to get involved.
Afterwards, I attended the panel Who Gets to Decide What Open Source Means?, Rob Richard’s Who Am I? The Age of the Digital Identity, and Patrick Reilly’s Improving Performance by Profiling PHP Applications.
The day ended with the Mozilla party off-site. The band was good, but the free (as in “free beer” and “freedom”) beer was awful. Someone should fork the beer and make it better. After the Mozilla party, we descended upon Sun’s OpenSolaris party. In years past, the OpenSolaris party was small and held in one of the suites at the DoubleTree Hotel. This year, it was held in the hotel’s garage, and it was huge and loud. I prefer the more personable parties they’ve had in the past; they were quiet, and the Sun representatives were fun to hang out with. I didn’t see any Sun representatives at the party this year, but perhaps I wasn’t looking.
Today, I attended Andrei Zmievski’s VIM for PHP Programmers, A Resource-Oriented Approach on Data Services by Mike Pittaro of SnapLogic, Accessibility for Web 2.0 by Eric David, the Art of Community panel, and Brenda Wallace’s PHP Add-ons for Fun and Profit.
For the “Resource-Oriented Approach” talk, Mike Pittaro described SnapLogic’s method of returning resources through the use of “pipelines.” Basically, as I understood it, the client would request data from one particular URI, which would send the request through a “pipeline,” do something with the data, and return a new URI from which the data can be fetched. For example, if you request a sorted representation of data, you would send a request to the sort URI, which would return a URI that represents the sorted data, but this URI is temporary and is no longer valid after a time.
Now, a group of us are sitting around in the hallway trying to figure out our dinner/party plans for the evening. My flight leaves tomorrow, and I can’t wait to get home to my wife and son, so I’ll miss the brewers’ fest, but I’ll be glad to be home.
(On the board next to me is a place for people to list software tools they wish they had. Someone put in one of the blocks that they want a “virtual girlfriend.” Beside it, a note was added in a different handwriting: “that doesn’t suck.”)
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Tue, 24 Jul 2007 23:51 UTC
Yesterday, I mentioned a “super secret” announcement party that Intel was throwing for bloggers and the press. So, what did they announce? Well, in short, they are releasing a fully open source version of their Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBB) C++ template library. It’s under the GPLv2 (and not an Intel OSS license). The TBB simplifies development of software running on multiple cores (in parallel).
The announcement itself doesn’t really apply to me and the work I do. I am a PHP programmer, and I rarely hack at the PHP core. Even if I did contribute to the PHP core, it’s all in C, so using TBB, which is for C++, isn’t an option. Still, TBB might be useful for PHP extensions written in C++, so there is that.
Today, I sat in on the OpenID Bootcamp and Simple Ways To Be a Better Programmer sessions.
The latter was by far the most entertaining session I’ve attended thus far, and it wasn’t anything that I expected. It focused more on “people hacks” than programming principals. The basic gist was to be a better programmer by being a member of the programming community, communicating more effectively in the community and with your co-workers, looking in the right places for help, taking part in community discussions, and meeting other members of the community. I can attest from experience that these all do really make you a better programmer.
Tomorrow the official conference begins with opening keynotes and regular sessions. Lots of great sessions to attend, but, for now, I’m heading to the Zend/MySQL party.
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Tags: intel, oscon, oscon07, parallel, php, tbb, threading
Mon, 23 Jul 2007 23:44 UTC
Hi, all. It’s been about a month since my last post, and, for those who know me, I’ve been off of IRC and IM for nearly a month, as well. It’s been very busy around the office, but now that things have slowed down a little, I plan to be around a bit more.
So, now I’m breaking my “radio silence” to write about OSCON. I’ll be here all week, and I hope to blog consistently about the goings on.
Today and tomorrow are the tutorial days, and, at times, tutorials can be too long because the speakers are often dry. The information is great, but the delivery is not always very engaging. Nevertheless, I did enjoy the two tutorials I attended today: Rasmus’s “You Got JavaScript in My PHP! And…” and Theo’s “Scalable Internet Architectures” tutorials.
I’ve also had the chance to catch up with some old friends, and I ran into Cal Evans in the hallway today wearing the t-shirt below. On the shirt, it reads: “PHP is the new BLACK.” Anyone want to enlighten me as to what that means?
So… now, I’ve heard tale of some secret announcement party for bloggers and the press to attend. Gotta make my way there and see what the hoopla is all about.
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