Keynotes
More good stuff. First a demo of stuff from processing.com. Amazing that they managed
to do all that with Java (methinks theres a lot more manyears involved than
advertised). Hilf apologizing for MSFT's attitude, and rather sheepishly
announced microsoft.com/opensource. He then introduced the 4 horsemen of the apocolypse,
and they all soft-shoed off the stage.
There was a quick speech that we're all biased suckers. So stop doing that.
Then the best: the leader of the Swedish Pirate party, gave a very coherent and direct message about why copyrights suck, and why we should be mad as hell and not take it anymore. Closing speech by <I forget> about branding open source was very entertaining despite technical glitches.
wxPerl: Alas, more about Eric's app than about wxPerl. I didn't have to give them grief about the lack of docs: someone else did.
Error Handling in AJAX: O'Reilly goofed! Speaker was a no show for an SRO talk; turns out he'd told them months ago he couldn't make it. Grrrrr...so I sat thru a few State Of lightning talks. Nice to see PostgreSQL making such good progress.
DBI BOF @OBF: Went very well. Tim B, jZed, and myself only, but the weather was good, the beer was cold, and its not nearly as crowded on Thursday as Saturdays. jZed and Tim headed back after a couple hours, but I stuck arround and listened to some great jams under the Portland sun, burned a tasty 'gar, and did much sampling before heading back for the Perl lightning talks.
Lightning Talks; Pretty good, tho I didn't see the sort of spirited talks I've seen in the past (e.g., "Stop Using XML For Everything, Dammit!"). Before the Onion talk, a TPF auction was held, at which I picked up PBP, which I've thus far managed to avoid. Once I finish the Erlang book, I'll do my best to give PBP a good read (tho I'm admittedly skeptical of such tomes).
State of the Onion: More techie than spiritual this year (perhaps the focused audience reined Larry in ?)
Evening Festivities: Hit the Sourceforge party w/ jZed. Was OK, free cocktails, but not much grub. Then the night began in earnest when jZed took me down to Outlaws to see the March Fourth Marching Band. Yeehah, what a hoot. Danced my ample buns off...as did everyone else. Massive props to jZed for the invite. He is now my personal Lord and savior! GO TEAM!
Due to the late night, I couldn't drag myself back to OSCON for the Friday keynotes. So now I load up the Jeep and beat feet to Seattle for some R&R, including a ballgame at Safeco, before heading back home.
This was probably my favorite OSCON of the 5 I've attended. Very meaty, with extra crunchiness of the parallel processing variety. Too many ideas to pursue, too many books to read. But entertaining and educational. Kudos to the O'Reilly crew.
