Keynotes: Pretty good. Transactional Memory was far too brief, but
appears to have gotten the audience's attention. Intel's TBB
appears more marketing than product. The Ubuntu interview
was interesting.
Sat thru Greenplum's talk. As someone who's been playing in the MPP sandbox for 20+ years, the stuff they're doing really intrigues me. (Think API for automatic parallel decomposition over petabyte datasets). I may have to hit Luke up for the job I turned down a few years ago.
Then Xquery+XForms. Alas, the speaker seemed unaware he only had 40 minutes, so much of the meat got truncated. But I need to revisit the whole XQuery thing I've thus far dismissed.
Nested data parallelism was interesting, tho being Haskell specific, was perhaps a bit impractical. However, it does dovetail nicely with the Greenplum talk; I wonder if they've looked into it ?
Then a quick talk on YUI CSS by webchic. Definitely gotta add YUI to my toolkit.
I then collared Simon Peyton-Jones for a quick chat to help get my mind right about the stuff I'm doing for STM in Thread::Sociable. Lots more to read and (I fear) to implement. But I think I've got the basics right. I can cheat on "orElse" operator with a simple boolean "acquire()" method; not perfect, but usable. I/O remains a challenge, tho I've vague notions about writing a PerlIO layer to support thread ownership and buffering for such things. That will likely wait until the 2nd or 3rd release. A transactional queue may bridge the gap for tte time being.
The Javascript Performance talk was a high-speed adrenaline fueled affair, with conclusions I had come to already (i.e., Dojo/Scriptaculous/et al are great, but too fat...so get out the trimming knife), and also some new ideas (remove the DOM head before hacking up the DOM...gonna have to try that with those monster PPI::HTML[::CodeFolder] documents).
Lastly, the Machine Learning with Perl talk was far too brief. Great insights, but not enough meat. Would've been nice to see more on how he used PDL.
Looks like Thrusday's DBI BOF @ OBF is a go. Should make the later lighting talk sessions more enjoyable.
Re:Javascript Performance talk
Qiang on 2007-07-26T17:25:24
never mind, googled and found the speaker website with an uncut version of this talk.
http://josephsmarr.com/2007/07/25/high-performance-javascript-oscon-2007/
