Day 5 was a little bit of a disappointment, really. I think that I had Milton Ngan’s talk built up a little too much in my expectations, so that when he did not show a preview of Return of the King, I felt rather let down. He showed some very cool stuff about Gollum and the Ents, but nothing approaching the amazing stuff that he showed us last year. Apparently he was unable to obtain permission to show us anything of the upcoming movie. I would expec that it would be inthe best interests of the movie makers to have the geek community fired up about their movie, as long as they didn’t show any “spoilers.” Not that you can really show spoilers when the book has been out for 40 years. Sheesh.
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George Dyson and John Von Neumann
This talk just rocked. This guy works in the office where Von Neumann used to work (I’m a little fuzzy on the details) on the MANIAC computer. He discovered boxes of notes from that era, and shared then with us. I can’t begin to tell you all about it, but his slides will be on the web RSN. These folks made decisions, out of several options, and we’re still doing everything the way that they decided was the right way. These documents included a substantial number of “let there be light” proclamations, and a great deal of source code for these initial machines.
What is sad, however, is that most of this work was for the purpose of building a bomb, and that Von Neumann died at a very young age of bone cancer from having worked on the bomb.
It’s important to note, however, that Von Neumann did not think of things in these terms, saying something like, “No, I’m not thinking about anything as unimportant as a bomb, I’m thinking of important things. I’m thinking about computers.”
I’ll link to the slides as soon as they become available.
Travel bugs
Ran out between talks and traded some travel bugs, which will now make their way down to Los Angeles. 🙂
Now I’m in the TicketMaster talk. It is somewhat content-free, but I like these guys because they have hired Stas Bekman (a long time ago) and recently hired Geoffrey Young and Ask Bjorn Hansen, under what basically amounts to a patronage. They get to sit at home and work on mod_perl, and not have to worry about things like income and insurance. They also give a lot of money and resources to the Perl foundation and Perl.org.
OSCon, Day 4
So much to say about Thursday. The goal was to work on the book all day, but I ended up in talks for much of that time. Highlights were Geoffrey Young’s talk on Apache-Test, and the Perl DateTime BOF.
I know that if I don’t write about this stuff now, I’ll probably never get back to it – like last year – but I’m very tired and and grumpy and still disappointed about missing my geocaching date this morning, so I think I’ll sit and sulk and work on my book instead.
Wil Wheaton, a geek like me
One of the highlights of yesterday was a trip over to Powell’s technical bookstore, which is the most amazing bookstore I have ever been in. Let’s put it this way: This is the only bookstore that I have *ever* been in which has a better Apache collection than I do. 😉
Anyways, Wil Wheaton was there, reading from, and signing, his new book, “Dancing Barefoot.” I have to admit that I didn’t expect much, but I was very impressed. It’s stories about his time on Star Trek, but, more than that, it’s about being young, and a geek, and unsure of oneself, and trying to deal with the world. He read one story, and an excerpt from another. He’s a very good writer. And he was very good at reading it as well.
I got a signed copy of the book, and have already enjoyed a number of the stories.
See also his remarks about it, and about the conference. He seems like a pretty cool guy.
Geocaching this morning
I feel like a complete idiot, and I’m sure that someone is cursing my existence. I was suposed to meet someone at 5:30 this morning to go caching. I waited for an entire hour for him to show up, and then went to check for his full name, so that I could call his room. I had been waiting in the wrong place. I’m amazingly disappointed, as I was really looking forward to doing some difficult caches. Not to mention having gotten up at an ungodly hour to do it.
Moose
We have a cover design now.
OSCon, day 3
I’m not entirely sure how it became Wednesday already. Sheesh.
OK, last night I was out until 3 this morning, and so I’m a little worn out. Last year, I left everything early so that I could get sleep. In doing so, I missed out on some stuff. So I determined that this time I would attend everything I possibly could, be the last to leave, and get everything possible out of the week. So, this morning I am a little ragged.
Tim O’Reilly gave the same talk that he gave at ApacheCon. Well, different title, and a few different examples, but essentially the same talk.
Next, there was a talk about Eclipse, which is apparently very cool and shiny if you like that sort of thing. I think that if I cared at all about Java or IDEs, I would have had the patience to endure the speaker saying “uh” every 5th word. No, I’m not exaggerating.
Right now, I’m in Justin’s AAA talk, which I will hopefully be able to pay attention to, but I need to make sure I’m ready for my talk, which is immediately after. Migrating to Apache 2.0.
OSCon, day 2
I’ve been in an Extreme Programming class all day, and it has been very useful, although I’m not sure 1) that it is immediately applicable to my job or 2) that I could really say *how* it is useful.
In part, it was cool in that we worked on a cool project, which looks interesting to continue working on after today.
OSCon Day 1
07/07/03 15:45:29
Not much to say so far today. I gave my “intro to apache” talk this morning, which, by some great miracle, I managed to finish on time, even though the first hour of the talk took an hour and a half. This afternoon I went to the first half of the DocBook talk, but was getting nothing out of it. Admittedly, it was a pretty good introduction, but by the end of the first half, I feel that he’s unlikely to get to anything that will teach me something I don’t know.
So, for the second half, I intend to attend Schwern’s talk on testing. I think I’ve been to this talk before, but I’m sure it will be entertaining, if nothing else.
Meanwhile, the network is down, which is irritating me a great deal.
Tomorow I’m supposed to attend the Extreme Programming talk all day. That could be interesting, or it could be a lot of stuff I already know. I really am not quite sure yet.
Some time in the morning, it seems that something on the network was producing a ton of UDP traffic, and killing the network. Now there are signs all over the place telling OSX users to turn off Rendezvous to help save the network.
So, I want to complain and moan on IRC, but, of course, I can’t get to IRC. It’s deeply annoying, and merely serves to increase my irritation. Sort of a feedback loop of sorts.