It’s going to be hard for the OSCON Keynotes presenters to top last night’s Tuesday Evening Extravaganza. First up is conference chair Nat Torkington welcoming us to the conference. There are over 2100 people attending this year making it the biggest OSCON yet. It looks like OSCON will remain in Portland, OR at the OCC (depending on feedback from conference goers).

Trends in the Open Source Marketplace

Nat then invited Tim O’Reilly up to speak about trends in Open Source. Tim started off by speaking about The O’Reilly Radar, a blog where Tim and team note trends they’ve spotted and try to figure out where we’re headed next. Tim states that the community is currently going through “The Open Source Paradigm Shift”, where value is moving up the chain — hardware has been commoditized, application frameworks have been commoditized and now the value is at the level of eBay, Amazon, Google, etc. Tim had some key questions for Open Source:

• Will “web 2.0” be an open system?
• What do “open services” look like?
• Will we end-up needing a Free Data Foundation in 2010 if data becomes the “Intel Inside”?
• How does the paradigm shift change our business models and development practices?

Tim and Nat also gave us a glimpse of the items on the O’Reilly Radar:

• Ruby on Rails: new platform and new language. May well be the Perl of Web 2.0.
• GreaseMonkey: an extension for Firefox that allows users to alter the content of websites. With the view source command, folks were able to see how websites worked, with GreaseMonkey you can now rewrite other people’s websites.
• HousingMarket.com: combining Google Maps with Craigslist to build a better service for people looking for apartments.
• Ajax: (D)HTML, JavaScript and CSS. It appears that CSS and Ajax occupy the same mind-space as Ajax has increased at the expensive of CSS.
• Findory: Some guys from Amazon.com left to start this tool which uses something similar to Amazon’s recommendation system to help you find articles you’ll like.
• Internet Telephony: especially Asterisk, Skype and BroadVoice. Apparantly BroadVoice is pushing BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). Nat mentioned a guy who setup Asterisk at home and unless you’re on a whitelist you cannot make his phone ring between 11pm and 6am.

Next Tim shows some stats from bookscan — it appears that the computer book market has finally stabilized. This signals that the computer industry will start a rebound (or has started a rebound — a recent article in USA Today states that companies in general and tech companies in particular are removing wage freezes instituted back in 2001). From the stats it looks like Python and Ruby are on the rise, while Java still maintains a huge lead against the other programming languages.

From DIY to DIT: Building on the Architecture of Participation

Next Kim Polese spoke about her new company, SpikeSource and how it plans to help the Open Source community through testing. Remember Kim from Marimba? Most surprisingly, to me atleast, SpikeSource is funded by KPCB one of the finest VCs. Her talk revolved around the transition from Do It Yourself to Do It Together and the long tail. Unfortunately there were some technical glitches and Ms. Polese didn’t seem to handle it very well (though she did recover once A/V was back on). Kim claims that testing will do for open source what it did for hardware a generation earlier — the velocity of software development will be greatly increased (I guess she’s claiming a Moore’s Law for Software? Not quite sure how that will work).

Open Source as Commoditization and Cost-optimization of Legacy

Software

Next came Andrew Morton from the ODSL, unfortunately his presentation skills were so lacking that the room started draining, I stayed, though I remember nothing from this portion of the keynote (I guess it’s a self-defense mechanism ;–)).

Open Source at Yahoo!

It’s too bad that so many people were driven away by Mr. Morton, because Jeremy Zawodny was next speaking about the use of Open Source at Yahoo. Unlike Mr. Morton (and Ms. Polese), Jeremy is an excellent speaker and even with the A/V system not working/rebooting he gave an excellent talk about Yahoo’s use of BSD (and Linux to a lesser extent), mdbm/MySQL, Perl, Apache, etc. Yahoo uses open source software for several reasons:

• Flexibility – Yahoo! customizes lots of OSS for its needs (and doesn’t want to be told ‘No’ by a proprietary vendor).
• Platform Availbility – for those platforms that Yahoo! cares about.
• Low Cost – as Yahoo scales with many servers, per CPU licenses would get quite expensive.
• Documentation – OSS tends to have better docs.

Jeremy also spoke of Yahoo’s APIs which they are opening up. Many are already available! See Yahoo Developer for more info.

Interview with Jonathan Schwartz

Finally, Nat sat down with Jonathan Schwartz, President of Sun Microsystems, and discussed Java, OpenSolaris and more. Jonathan was actually quite engaging and Nat asked the hard questions (open sourcing Java, giving up on Solaris and switching to Linux, allowing Linux to implement/borrow technology like dtrace). Jonathan said that by open sourcing Solaris, Sun has removed the “political” issues around Solaris and now it can be compared against Linux solely on the merit of its features/benefits.

I just attended OSCON’s Tuesday Evening Extravaganza and it was quite enjoyable. Unfortunately, the evening started off with the evacuation of the OCC due to a fire alarm (not sure if there was any actual fire as no smoke was seen). At any rate, below are my highlights from the event.

Nat Torkington from O’Reilly is the MC and the first introduction is for the Google/O’Reilly Awards ($5k and a plaque). They are as follows (hopefully I don’t misspell too many names):

• Communicator – Doc Searls
• Evangelist – Jeff Waugh
• Diplomat – Gere Magnusson Jr (Harmony & Geronimo)
• Integrator – Dr. Richard Hipp (SQLite)
• Hacker – David H. Hansson (Rails)

Next up was Larry Wall and his State of the Onion. It was quite funny (hopefully the slides will find there way to the net). Basically revolving around spies, spy movies and the different types of folks contributing to Perl (I know it sounds inconguous, trust me it wasn’t and it was very funny). Then we had David Pennock from the Yahoo/O’Reilly Tech Buzz Game. I’d heard of this before and it is cool to watch, though playing gets a bit tedious (I was unaware that there were prizes — first place was a mac mini, a pass to an O’Reilly conference, a year subscription to O’Reilly Safari and a t-shirt). Next was Paul Graham — this was the talk I was most looking forward to: What Business Can Learn from Open Source. More on this later (hopefully PG will post it to his website or someone will make available a transcript/audio of the talk). Next David Adler gave out the White Camel awards. Sorry, I’m no Perlie so I have no idea what’s going on. Damian Conway, who’s an amazing speaker/presenter, is up next with his research into Dead Languages. His first foray is into Lisp (PG is cringing in the first row), next he delves into programming PostScript (now the NeXTSteppers are cringing), then he attacks C++ and his improvement SPECS (Significantly Prettier and Easier C++ Syntax), finally he proposes that we all program in Latin! TAGS: OSCON OSCON2005 Business Perl Google O’Reilly

Kathy Sierra’s talk on Creating Passionate Users was quite good, unfortunately it was very visual and involved several group projects (even having the slides won’t do it justice). Thus it is quite difficult for me to sum up. The key take away is that getting users passionate about your product is that your product needs to empower the user and fade into the background (I know, it seems like there’s a disconnect). The secret is to get to the state where your customers have an “I rule!” experience — they care about how they feel from using your product, not about you or your company. Her primary example comes from game developers called the experience spiral. It is a cycle starting with a compelling benefit then there is a (long) period of activity with an eventual resolution or payoff for the user where they achieve the next level (which involves new capabilities and a new set of compelling benefits to drive them on again). Related to this was getting your users into a state of flow where time passes quickly for them because they are so absorbed by your product. Some of the ways you can facilitate passion for your product are:

• Helping users to connect with one another (community), such as discussion forums, local user groups, something for advanced users, etc.
• Myths, legends/lore, stories, recognizable people (special users and/or the developers), special insider knowledge (community jargon), etc.
• The tribe / Pride items such as t-shirts, bumper stickers, mugs, decals — ways for users to demonstrate that they belong.
• The wake, allow others to create products or services associated with your product (see the iPod effect), such as plug-ins, add-ons, training materials, etc.
• When they want to give you money … what do you have for them?

Once a link to the slides becomes available, I’ll post it here. Much of this information is available on the Passionate Users Blog and it looks like Kathy will be coming out with a Creation Passionate Users book in January 2006. TAGS: OSCON OSCON2005 Passionate Passion

I’m currently in Alex Russell’s sold out Learning Ajax tutorial at OSCON. He’s generously made the latest version of the slides available online, as well as all of the demo code. Below are my notes from his excellent session. Since the slides are available online, I won’t go through my notes as thoroughly as I did for the Business for Geeks tutorial. Instead, I’ll simply highlight the items which Alex stressed in his talk:

• Only use Ajax when it can make the users’ lives better! It may be fun to add gee-whiz effects to your web-app, but you must resist the temptation! Look at the bad name DHTML got from all of the websites which over-used it.
• Whenever you run into trouble related to browser differences go to Quirks Mode first.
• XMLHttp uses one of two available sockets, so if you have expensive jobs save them for last otherwise all of your little jobs will be blocked while two of the expensive jobs are working (or all of the little jobs will have to share a single queue if one socket is occupied with an expensive job).
• Use synchronous XMLHttp requests sparingly — i.e. only when there are dependancies where you must download the required item, for example some JavaScript, before doing anything else.
• Using innerHtml is fast and easy, but not very flexible. Try to use XML and the DOM to selectively interact with nodes (don’t forget that the server must declare it as “text/xml”!
• Ajax style UIs should call the REST APIs your apps already expose (this is what flickr did)
• What does “Grab the Chicken” mean? It’s used at JotSpot to discuss a neat feature the user discovers without being told about it. It comes from the Zelda Nintendo64 game where you’re trying to get over this wall and can’t figure it out, then you climb some nearby stairs and find a bunch of chickens — by grabbing one and then walking down the stairs you’re suddenly flying and can easily get over the wall.
• Unfortunately, time ran out and Alex didn’t get to any of his application demos or “The Future” slides — which is a bummer because some of these things look really interesting.

TAGS: OSCON OSCON2005 Ajax XMLHttpRequest XMLHttp JavaScript XML DHTML

O’Reilly Connection is now in beta. You can already setup an account and start making contacts (by looking folks up by their full name after clicking on the “Connect To” link). It’s too early to tell how this will turn out, but so far I like it much better than LinkedIn and Friendster (even though it retains much of the social network feel).