I attended quite a few talks, grabbed a lot of swag, and entered a few contests. I ended up buying the Arduino Starter Kit from MAKE so I can do some awesome embedded Ruby like I saw at FOSCON. It looks really fun – I can’t wait to try it out.

The talks I attended were half-way decent, but I learned a lot more on the first day.

Hadoop and EC2

A good overview of how one can use Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services to cheaply process and store data on a pretty large scale. The New York Times digitized hundreds of years of articles in a single day using these services and some awesome C++ code.

Open standards in cloud computing

This ended up being a marketing talk. I don’t know what it had to do with cloud computing, and I didn’t stick around to find out.

Ruby 1.9: What to Expect

An awesome overview of all the new stuff in Ruby 1.9 given by Sam Ruby. I had no idea they were changing so much, and this was a good dive with code examples into that. There was some discussion among everyone in the middle on whether for loops should work like .each blocks with regards to scope. I happen to disagree with what ended up being the popular thought on this subject. Most were advocating that a for loop constitutes a block, and that scope variables and iterators should be localized inside of it. This is contrary to almost every language, which I brought up using the example of C. Yet, when you iterate with .each, you immediately define a block and a scoped iterator, which, if it has a conflicting name with the outside world, it doesn’t matter since that’s out of scope. The only thing this changes is the value of a variable outside after the loop finishes. I think leaving the ability to modify a variable external to the loop is very convenient – in summary, leave it how you’ve done it in Ruby 1.9 already.

Ubuntu on the Go: Subnotebook and MID technologies

This was an interesting session on where Canonical is taking mobile technology, and what the community can do to help. They seem to have a pretty neat subnotebook coming out soon.

Python, C++, and SWIG

This could have been one of the best talks, but the speed at which it was given and the lack of enthusiasm in the presentation left most of us either bored or unfulfilled at the end of the talk. He spent the first half explaining what Python and C++ were, then he got to what SWIG is. The end was a quick dive into an extremely complicated bunch of files that didn’t help very much. In the future, it would be helpful to go to a SWIG talk that details how to make a simple Python extension with SWIG. I may have to throw that one together myself…

I also attended the tail end of Designing Political Web Apps for MoveOn.org, but I didn’t take any notes.

We ended up going to dinner at Widmer Brothers, which was pretty awesome. I had the Pork Schnitzel, a very tender piece of meat if I do say so myself, along with 2 Full Nelson IPAs. Afterwards, we caught the bus from the convention center to BeerForge and the SourceForge Community Choice Awards party. Beerforge was a blast. I ended up talking to Jean-Baptiste Kempf, one of the developers of VLC, for hours – a truly great guy. I learned a lot about France and the French people, but also about VLC. Apparently, you can use VLC from the command line much like mplayer, which I did not know. Yet, he explained that they removed Directshow support from VLC in Linux in favor of open source alternatives, which in part I can understand. Yet, the only codec available that is able to smoothly play 1080p h264 video is closed source (CoreAVC), and until the ffmpeg avc codec catches up, I’ll have to continue using mplayer. When I can play everything back smoothly with VLC, I may consider switching.

The beer at BeerForge was pretty good – I had the IPA. SourceForge had some sort of mixed drink which wasn’t too great. All in all, a good day, but now I’m dehydrated…

CouchDB

CouchDB is a distributed non-relational database written in Erlang. It is unique in that its main query interface is simply HTTP REST, and for every UPDATE, it simply creates a new version of the row. Additionally, you can request the entire history of a row very simply.

Hypertable

An open-source implementation of Google’s bigtable. Hypertable uses novel methods such as Bloom filters to significantly decrease query times, as well as smart messaging to distribute a database across many nodes. It is also non-relational.

Creating and supporting Free Software in Africa

A group of CS professors hailing from Africa have gotten together to create a community that fosters creativity and innovation from people in Africa. People in first-world countries can participate by acting as mentors, or directly contribute to the projects involved. Chisimba is an open-source MVC framework for rapid application development. I am very interested in contributing to this project.

LucidDB

I thought going in that this would be somehow in the same ballpark as Hypertable and CouchDB, but I was disappointed. Basically, they are using compression and some fairly neat indexing to speed up traditional database queries. The main problem is that they only have a Java API, which completely turned me off after 30 minutes. Before that, it seemed like they were getting some pretty promising results. If they add some more APIs in the future, this may be another one to take a look at.

A History of Failure

An awesome talk by Paul Fenwick from Australia, generally detailing failures in computer science and engineering going back into the 20th century and even back to Roman times. This was a wonderful presentation – he’s a really good speaker – and it poked a lot of fun at New Zealand.

All in all, I must say that this OSCON is much better than last year’s at least according to what I was looking for in the sessions. The exhibit hall is also very good this year – I’m pretty loaded down with swag at the moment.

I know someone who would have gotten a kick out of Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces…Made Easy! had they been here. He needs to come next year (you know who you are..)

Tonight, I also attended FOSCON 4: Cooking with Ruby. This was a spectacular event hosted by Cubespace. I have to say that the live coding competition was a great spectacle, and held everyone’s attention for hours. It was an epic battle between Symfony, Rails, Smalltalk/Seaside, and Drupal. The rankings ended up being the following:

1. Rails
2. Drupal
3. Symfony
4. Smalltalk/Seaside

The presentations were good as well for the most part (notes here). AND THEY HAD BEER! I had some of the best keg beer imaginable – I thought it would be crap like you usually get out of a keg, but this was real quality Northwestern hopped pale ale. My cup says Bridgeport Ales, so I’ll have to investigate. If anyone knows the exact beer that was available in the left-side keg tonight, I’d appreciate a comment. I also met some cool people, some of which are all into XMPP and ejabberd. I may have to check all of that out now…

Pro PostgreSQL

This talk was alright, but it wasn’t really tailored for people who hadn’t used Postgres extensively. Yet, I’m sure the notes will come in handy in the future.

Introduction to Django

This was an awesome talk. He went through designing an actual working application using Django. It turns out to be incredibly easy to quickly create a really cool application. I need to research this because it looks to me to be better than Rails.

Ubiquitous Multithreading

This talk was alright if you wanted to get an idea about the challenges of multi-threading and how Intel’s TBB solves some of them. It was interesting, and I learned a few things, but it would have been a better session than a tutorial (LONG!)

Today I found out they cancelled Ubuntu Live 2008 for unspecified reasons (I don’t know what they were thinking having it on the same days as OSCON, but whatever). It cost too much anyway ($800 for 2 days without tutorials is unacceptable IMHO). But, it’s still sad since Ubuntu is awesome. Now I can not attend the event guilt free since no one can!

It was pretty cool – we got some swag and stuffs.

Thank you for registering for O’Reilly Open Source Convention 2007 happening on July 23 – July 27, 2007.

REGISTRATION STATUS

Your registration includes the following:
Convention Sessions (July 25 – 27, 2007)

PACKAGE INFORMATION

Your conference selections include:

Convention Sessions (July 25 – 27, 2007)

• Access to all convention sessions and workshops.
• Access to BOFs, evening events, and community meetings.
• Convention handouts.
• Entrance to the Exhibit Hall and all events held in the Exhibit Hall.

hardwarehank: ahhh the vim tut is friggin aawesome.

This is hilarious. Look at my terrible spelling. it might was well read …aawesome LOL!!1!1oen!!!one.