Some observations from OSCON. The short form is that Ruby, Ruby on Rails and Ubuntu were the biggest things around at this year’s OSCON, closely followed by Ajax. My more detailed observations are continued below (except for Ubuntu, since I can’t really add anything — I use it, I like it, but if another Linux distribution comes along that I like better I’ll easily switch). Read the rest of this entry »
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:
And the afternoon closing session was keynoted by Miguel de Icaza.
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.
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).
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.
