OSCON Day 1 (or 3)

I’m at OSCON this week and have just arrived for my 1st day (although the 3rd day of the conference). The keynotes this morning were from Tim O’Reilly and Robert Lefkowitz.

O’Reilly is really good at talking about the directions for technology. He always has some excellent examples and possiblities. My personal favorite during this talk was the need for the open source community to “napsterize calendar and contact information” lest this data become locked up into vendor-specific formats. Frickin’ genius IMHO. Also, he talked a bit about dashboard and how they are doing some neat things with their applications. For example, an email comes in and it sends a trigger to a personal search engine and then posts the information to your “dashboard”; topics of last 3 emails, information about the person who emailed you, etc. It was interesting to see Miquel de Icaza give a talk later that afternoon about how GTK and Gnome have had this functionality for over a year now.

Lefkowitz was excellent as well. The guy has more slides than you can shake a stick at and sometimes you’re not sure where he’s headed with something (see many excerpts of the “Pricess Bride”) but he always brings it back together. His talk focused on the struggles he had with trying to open source at Merrill Lynch and how what things mean aren’t really what they mean with many excellent examples.

Later in the afternoon I got a chance to see Miguel de Icaza’s talk on “Mono 1.0″ which covered where Mono is at and where it is headed. I have to say I’ve all but ignored the entire Mono project until today. Miguel showed off some neat tools (Mono Developer tied together with Glade) and built a localization compatible web browser in about 10 minutes and 30 lines of code. He changed the localization to French and viola … worked like a champ. Hebrew? No problem. It even put the buttons and text justified on the right hand side of the browser (to which one heckler in the audience chimed in “which is the back button then?”). There were no Hebrew speakers in the audience so it went unanswered.

One other tidbit he showed was the documentation tools within Mono. They have taken what PHP has done with their documentation and taken it a step further. Embedded in the Mono documentation tools are the ability to edit a wiki page. Changes you make can be sent off to the “master” server where, through a review process, they are added to the documentation. Now that is frickin’ genius and I have a feel many other projects will be soon to follow (there is a reason that Wikipedia is so successful.

And no OSCON is complete with out some Perl lightning talks.

This years’ conference seems extremely well attended. More from the trenches tomorrow.