journal for 2003-07-10
oscon: day the fourth
There were keynotes today on the open source business model and open source software on the desktop. I didn’t go to either, although I’m told the latter, given by Mitch Somethingorofther, formerly of Lotus and now of OSDL (the Chandler people) was quite good. Instead, I talked with Piers about his cunning PLOT to create Parrot Lisp On Thursday (and about other things). I saw a few other interesting people, including a woman from Apple who made portentous noises about the future of iSight. I was pretty stoked to hear that iSight will work with the next version of iMovie. I don’t think I have much need to play with making video with my PowerBook, but it sounds cool.
There was a talk by Allison on the Perl6 design philosophy, which was pretty good, and a talk about CGI (web, not graphics), which was pretty uninteresting. There was also a talk on “Perl certification”—as in, havings one’s ability to code Perl certified. That was pretty interesting, too. Although I’ll admit that I’m probably among those who wouldn’t want to get a cert, it would be useful to see as a basic “weeding mechanism” for incoming resumes. Then again, that would only be useful if I was able to solicit resumes!
Microsoft provided lunch again. It was good, although not great. It had a little piece of salt-water taffy in it, which was somewhat sinister. “This bagged lunch contains a non-descript unidentified pink substance in a plain wax-paper wrapper, courtesy of Microsoft. Enjoy.” Yeah… so, I threw it out.
Someone—Stonehenge, I think—had little finger foods down on the exhibition floor, and I had a bit of this and that along with a decent bottle of beer and another Haagen-Daas bar. These, I think, were left over from tea time; RealNetworks provided them. Tea and a Haagen-Daas ice cream bar go together well.
I did a bunch of poking around with Kwiki before bed, which was pretty fun. I see potential. I’ve begun making some customizations that may allow me to create my long-thought-about “coredump” project for organizing non-chronological stories. The problem with using coff as the format is that it prevents (mostly) linking to documents that don’t exist but might later. I mean, I can still create links, but it’s more of a pain to enter a link tag that’s about as long as the link text than to just enter some “CamelCase” words.
I did some preliminary packing, too, try try and minimize the amount of packing I’d need to do Friday night.