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Extending And Embracing In Portland At OSCON 2003
The goods: Commercial vendor booths have been fork-lifted in and assembled throughout the course of the day in the lowest of three convention floors, but OSCON's company-sponsored exhibit booths are likely to be low-key and informative, not the glitzy schwag dispensaries of LinuxWorld Expo. (Added to which, the exhibits will only be up six hours on each of Wednesday and Thursday.)
Tutorials and other information-heavy sessions are the core of OSCON; attendees who have paid (or had their employers pay) more than a thousand dollars to attend a five days of tutorials and conference sessions are understandably serious about actually learning things.
I stopped in on one such serious session this morning, "A Day of Extreme Programming" taught by the Irish team of Marty Pauley, Tony Bowden, Marc Kerr and Karen Pauley. The instructors skipped over justifying the methodology of Extreme Programming, and instead immediately launched into a short, funny demonstration of multi-programmer iterative debugging before splitting the 30-or-so attendees into three programming teams for the rest of the day, each team coordinating its efforts using provided CVS servers to work for a simulated client (Karen Pauley, a manager in real life) with a nethack-style game to improve.
Marty Pauley drew some laughs by pointing out the "high-tech project coordination system" he had purchased in anticipation of the all-day session, which he said had cost about $14 in for the whole group. At this, he pulled out several packs of index cards, a plastic case to house them, and some rings to bind smaller collections of cards. "Forget about Gantt charts, every aspect of the project goes on an index card."
Cheap, not necessarily dirty. Pauley's Index-cards and CVS make a decent capsule of the whole conference: there's a definite leaning toward the practical, get-things-done-cheap aspect of open software rather than appeals to the importance of sharing emphasized by Richard Stallman's Free Software movement. OSCON features dozens of sessions and tutorials emphasizing the efficiency, standards compliance, and low-cost of source-available software, with just a few sessions touching on underlying philosophy or licensing. In one session yesterday, for instance, Free Software Foundation executive director Bradley Kuhn talked about the GNU General Public License as it applies to managers as well as to coders.
This doesn't mean that attendees aren't interested in philosophical underpinnings or changing the world -- more likely it's simply that in summer 2003, most programmers who would show up at an event like this have already wrestled with and come up with their own conclusions about software openness, including what licenses or license types they're comfortable using.
One indicator of the Open-vs-Free pragmatism at OSCON is the prevalence of Apple laptops running Mac OS X; Apple's OS may be the best poster child right now for the pleasing results possible in a mix of open source with proprietary software. One tutorial room I looked in on 22 attendees using Intel laptops, most of which were running graphical desktops on Linux or BSD, and 6 with PowerBooks running OS X. I note a similarly high proportion of OS X machines being used around the conference floor when hundreds of attendees swarm out of conference rooms at each break between sessions.
Changing the world, one press release at a time. A handful of interesting announcements have come out during the convention so far. Among them: MySQl and PogoLinux have announced a joint project, a turnkey database appliance running MySQL on an Intel based box. ActiveState (makers of well-regarded IDEs for Python and Perl, among other things) will show an alpha release of Komodo 2.5, the latest iteration of their IDE for programming in Perl, Python, PHP, Tcl and XSLT. Many more such announcements are likely after the exhibit hall opens tomorrow morning.
Not everything at OSCON is about helping businesses produce more virtual widgets per square inch, though -- the sense of collaboration isn't limited to downtown Portland. Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Tripod, and now founder of Geekcorps, will talk Friday on Geekcorps' efforts to bring digital independence to poor countries; he and several other geek activists took part today in a by-invitation roundtable discussion about spreading good through technology, and will be speaking together in a press conference tomorrow on the various ways computers and other high-tech tools can be used to promote prosperity worldwide.
Viva la revolucion! At a conference about extending and embracing proprietary software, the SCO-initiated legal fight over UNIX copyrights is surely on the minds of many attendees, but readers who have grown tired of the ongoing drama will be pleased that there's been little buzz here among attendees about SCO's legal actions. Is it because SCO's suit against IBM is simply irrelevant, or because most people are withholding judgment until SCO actually points out the code the company objects to? SCO is not forgotten, though: tomorrow afternoon, Bradley Kuhn, Chris DiBona, Alan Nugent and Lawrence Rosen will discuss the SCO case in a session called The IP Wars, which ought to get some blood pumping.
In the meantime, conference attendees will get to see something more fun and less contentious this evening: status reports on six different open source software projects: Perl (explained by Larry Wall), Python (Guido van Rossum), PHP (Shane Caraveo), MySQL (Monty Widenius and David Axmark), Apache (Greg Stein), and Linux (Theodore Ts'o).
What would Goatse say?
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=70366&cid= 6396071
Indeed, I walked in on a three-way between CowboiKneel, Michael, and Timothy. Michael was the so-called "Lucky Pierre." I quickly exited the room.
I am at this conference right now, and there is a woman from Microsoft in the hotel (email me for room #) who is giving blowjobs to anybody who signs up on their mail list! I don't even know what the list is for, but believe me, I signed up. Email for room #.
For the most part, you can determine howmany times you have jerked off. Pick a year that your jerking began and how many times you jerk it a day. Now, consider how much jizz you produce at each jerk session. Do you think it is enought to drown a small child?
That's right you butt whores.
To anyone reading, DO NOT post stupid comments on Slashdot. What better way to reveal your idiocy and paranoia than posting anti-Microsoft diatribes on Slashdot.
Construction begins July 8 to reconstruct I-10 interchange at Maricopa Road
July 8, 2003
A $12 million project to reconstruct the Interstate 10 interchange at Maricopa Road and widen sections of I-10 near Maricopa Road will begin this week.
I-10 will be narrowed to one lane in each direction at Maricopa Road on Tuesday night (July 8) from 9 p.m. until 5 a.m. while crews install temporary concrete barriers to establish work zones for the bridge construction.
The construction project will build a new bridge to carry Maricopa Road over I-10 and reconfigure the freeway entrance and exit ramps at Maricopa Road to a diamond interchange, eliminating the current cloverleaf ramps.
Starting next week, crews will begin excavating dirt and building piers in the freeway median for the new Maricopa Road bridge over I-10.
The alignment of Maricopa Road will be altered as part of the new bridge and ramp construction. Maricopa Road will be built across I-10 at a 90 degree angle, meaning drivers will travel straight over I-10 instead of using the existing diagonal bridge crossing.
Maricopa Road will be realigned on the east side of I-10 to connect with Sun Dust Road and Nelson Drive within the Lone Butte Industrial Park. A new connection from Maricopa Road to Wild Horse Pass Boulevard on the west side of I-10 also will be built.
The project also will expand I-10 from two lanes to three lanes in each direction at Maricopa Road to better accommodate traffic entering and exiting the freeway. Crews will remove approximately two miles of the existing asphalt roadway and pave the freeway with concrete.
Pulice Construction, Inc., of Phoenix is scheduled to complete the project next spring (2004).
2) Although unclear, your post is nonetheless *annoying and pedantic.*
In short, you're a wanker.
Goooooood job!
Microsoft isn't evil, it is just a corporation. If you can't deal with that maybe you should movie to Russia, you damn hippie -- wait, nevermind, they are capitalist too now. Ok, maybe you should KILL YOURSELF.
He who wanks first wanks best!
I disagree. Instead, credit should be given to he who wanks most frequently.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.