Wednesday was the busiest day so far.
The keynotes today were both really interesting. Lawrence Lessig was a great speaker. I really need to check out some of his books. RMS was an "interesting" choice to speak at OSCON. He spent a lot of his talk reminding us of the differences between "free software" and "open source software", but all in all I think he's mellowed a bit and he seemed far more able to laugh at himself.
After a short break, the entire Perl community sat in a talk where Larry and Damian talked us thru some of the changes coming in Perl 6. After lunch we came back to the present as Jarkko gave us an overview of Perl 5.8.0 and Hugo talked briefly about what his plans are for Perl 5.10.
Later in the afternoon were the Perl Lightning Talks. The quality was as high as usual. A particular standout was Brian Ingerson proposing a weird new languages called "ingy" in an early talk, and Damian showing how he'd implemented it (during the other talks) towards the end.
The lightning talks ended with the unveiling of acme and gnat's super sekrit project. It's a promotional film for The Perl Foundation. Of course the questions that acme asked us all when interviewing us for it, aren't the same questions as he uses on the film, so his victims end up looking pretty foolish - but it's all in a good cause and it looks great. The film is online for your viewing pleasure (unfortunately, both gnat and acme have been drinking too much of the iBook Kool-Aid so it's currently only available in Quicktime).
A quick stop into the "marvellous musical mixer" for some mexican food and we were all off to cwest's "Whose Code Is It Anyway" where gnat, Chip, Damian and Allison played improv games for our pleasure.
The plan then was to have a quick drink in the bar before going off to the ActiveState party. It didn't quite work like that. A group of us got heavily involved in a discussion of a new abstraction layer module for Perl GUI apps - a kind of DBI for GUIs. Some really good stuff came out of the discussion, but once we found ourselves deciding on a name (Perl User Interface - or PUI) and a marketing slogan ("There's More Than One Way To Display It") we decided to put it aside for the night and go to the party.
Then it all starts to get a bit hazy. I remember explaining how I'd been in Perl's boat race (the drinking game) team at the party last year and how I had no intention of doing the same this year. I just can't understand, therefore, how ten minutes later I found myself standing behind Randal in the "other" team. We did really badly, but it's unclear whether we threw it deliberately to help the Perl team or whether we were just rubbish at drinking.
Soon after 1am, the party broke up. I think the neighbours had been complaining about the noise and I ended the night sitting outside the West Tower of the hotel with a number of people, talking about Really Deep Things and listening a couple having sex a few floors above.
