Sean Mountcastle

The OSCON Friday Keynotes are over and here are my notes. To save folks some trouble (in case none of these people interest them), I’ve listed the speakers:

• Conference Announcements - Nat Torkington, O’Reilly Media, Inc.
• Linux - In Search of the Desktop - Asa Dotzler, Mozilla Foundation
• Open Source Biology - Drew Endy, MIT Biological Engineering
• Open Source Licensing Issues - Tony Gaughan, Computer Associates
• On Evil - Danny O’Brien, Need To Know
• Howtoons - Saul Griffith, Squid Labs

And the afternoon closing session was keynoted by Miguel de Icaza.

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Phillip Torrone, the Associate Editor of Make Magazine, demoed some great Do-It-Yourself items and talked a bit about the recent resurge in the DIY movement. He showed how to replace the Japanese firmware on the Sony Libre with an English version — after that you can download tons of eBooks. He also passed it around and the resolution is amazing, even in direct light. Following that he showed how you can use homebrew games as well as a web browser (from the crappy Wipeout game) on a Sony PSP (as long as you haven’t upgraded the firmware to 2.0). After that he showed us his mouse bot (as seen in Make magazine) which gets him into trouble with the TSA each time he travels. Then he showed Linux on the iPod — it’s ability to record up to 96Khz quality audio and play back video. He also showed us what he did with this iPod box (made it into a cardboard/foam robot for kids). The penultimate demo was a powerful green laser which cooks/burns anything red (he demonstrated by popping red balloons). Finally, he demo’ed an old rotary phone which he hooked up to a cell phone (then folks made several phone calls to/from his franken-rotary phone). I highly recommend subscribing to Make — you won’t be disappointed.

Update from PDX’s Free WiFi: Phillip Torrone posted video from his “mini-MAKER” fair on Wednesday night at OSCON and I’m in the video! Well, part of me is, I’m standing to the right of (left of, from the camera’s perspective) and slightly behind the laser so you can see my khaki pants and red shirt.

Alex Russell gave an interesting talk this morning on Building Responsive Web UIs with DHTML. My notes are below.

Updated Aug 6, 12:38: I fixed the errors in the post pointed out by Alex Russell. BTW, he’s an excelllent speaker, if he ever gives a talk and you are able to go, I heartily recommend doing so.

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For the final session of the day I decided to take a lighter one (i.e. not programming intensive as my mind had been pickled in Ruby code throughout the day), so I attended Andy Lester’s Preventing Crisis: Project Estimation and Tracking That Works. My notes are below (along with links to the slides/velocity chart).

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Jim Weirich gave an interesting presentation on dependency injection entitled, Dependency Injection: Vitally Important or Completely Irrelevant? Since the slides are available online and my wrist is beginning to bother me, I’ll sum it up quickly. Is dependency injection important in a dynamically typed language? No.

Why the lucky stiff dazzled the audience with his performance art piece entitled, A Starry Afternoon, a Sinking Symphony, and the Polo Champ Who Gave It All Up for No Reason Whatsoever. My mind was blown and my gut busted. O’Reilly should hold a Monday Night Extravaganza at next year’s OSCON and give the entire night to Why (and his band, The Thirsty Cups). My (very limited) notes are below.

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