All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Music, OSCON, and Books

gnat on 2003-01-24T08:09:58

No progress on the Cookbook so far, but I have been busy. I finally got Audio Hijack registered, and I've been ripping to mp3 the various BBC documentaries and dramas available in Real Audio streams. More fodder for the long long plane trip.

I've been working on OSCON, sorting out rooms and tracks and trying to drum up proposals. We're on a really tight time budget once the proposals come in, so if you're thinking about submitting something then you should do it sooner rather than later.

And tonight I just wrote another 1500 words of The Novel. They just came. They're not perfect, but they flowed. I think I've found my voice. I'm getting a better sense of when to mix reaction and action into dialogue, I sure hope the flow is easy to find again. I was getting worried for a while there.

More Cookbook tomorrow, I promise. Tom came up gold with my questions on ch17, so I'll have to finish that chapter and make a start on ch16. I think ch16 is where threading goes, so this promises to be a painful day of learning. Over and out.

--Nat

ARGH!

autarch on 2003-01-24T17:20:33


I've been working on OSCON, sorting out rooms and tracks and trying to drum up proposals. We're on a really tight time budget once the proposals come in, so if you're thinking about submitting something then you should do it sooner rather than later.

If the first proposals in get more consideration than later ones, could you please say this in the goddamn CFP! If you just give a deadline, you imply that you won't actually select anything before that deadline has passed. To then go ahead and start assigning spots ahead of time really sucks for those of us who take ORA at its implied word.

If there really is a time crunch, you could have the CFP start and end earlier. It's not like you didn't know before January that there was going to be an OSCON this summer!

Re:ARGH!

gnat on 2003-01-26T01:21:09

That's not what I said. We'll have two days to put together the program. This means that if you're late, you're fucked. So don't be late. Don't put it off to the last minute, get your shit together and do it now.

Take that Prozac, man.

--Nat

Re:ARGH!

autarch on 2003-01-26T07:06:31

Oh, I see. I always assumed that it was obvious that if you were late, you were fucked. That's why it's called a deadline, right?

Prozac? That's for depressed people. Not my problem. And I'm too old for Ritalin. I'm not sure what drug I need. Chocolate, probably.

Re:ARGH!

gnat on 2003-01-27T17:20:12

I always assumed it was obvious that if you were late, you were fucked.

You appear to be in the 1% of people living in the real world. Every year we get a ton of last-minute "hey! I missed the deadline but can you take my proposal anyway?" messages. Normally I say "okay", because it takes us a while to get up to speed on selections. But this year there's no such slack.

--Nat

Re:ARGH!

autarch on 2003-01-27T20:24:44

Wow, someone accusing me of living in the real world! Scary.

You might want to recant that statement ;)

software to do this?

kellan on 2003-01-26T04:54:27

Is there software to do this? Preferably open source?

I'm asking because the main story I'm hearing from friends at WSF this year is how poorly organized the whole conf is, and how its just a couple of volunteers with Word documents trying to do the scheduling.

I feel like if anybody is going to know of an open source solution for conference scheduling it has got to be Oreilly. Software for laying out schedules, and doing rooms assignments, and maybe do what-ifs on crowd size, and send speakers little embossed, lavendar scented apology notes when their session gets moved?

I know in academia we have packages like R25 and EMS which costs $50k-$200k for doing course scheduling, but I doubt they would apply to the unique challenges of a conference.

Re:software to do this?

gnat on 2003-01-27T17:18:37

Unfortunately, no. Anybody who has been on the organizing end of an O'Reilly conference knows what a chaotic hell of databases and CMS our conference system is. A lot of home brewed tools built on an eccentric CMS.

I know there's considerable interest in it from various open source areas, but I suspect that any implementation would find itself confronted with Not Invented Here syndrome. If we wrote one in Perl, I think the PHP and Python and Ruby and ... folks would want to rewrite it to avoid having the "nyeah, you had to use our language to hold your conference" taunts.

--Nat

Re:software to do this?

kellan on 2003-01-27T17:24:40

But once it was written then people would be able to say, "No, you did it wrong, let me fix it for you." People like that, makes then feel superior without realizing that the hard work, the initial version, has already been written. Thats why we see a new PHP CMS get release every Tuesday, Thursday, and alternating Fridays.

Thanks though.

Re:software to do this?

trachtenberga on 2003-01-27T23:57:25

That's why you should write it in C#. With C# you can alienate all groups equally.

-adam