Off to Portland

I'll be at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCon) in Portland this week. It looks as though I'm free much of Tuesday afternoon (there's an opening "extravaganza" at 7:30), Wednesday morning, Friday evening, and Saturday. Give me a ping at ( cell phone # behind cut )

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Otherwise I'll probably end up spending most of my free time and all of my money at Powells.

OSCon day 0

Hey, it's about the code: as Don Knuth said, "the older you get, the more you use zero-origin indexing".

The Oregon Convention Center appears to be located in a region of Portland that is almost completely devoid of restaurants -- the few that were in the area the last time I was here are gone. The whole area seems to be somewhat blighted. The only restaurants I could find within a couple of blocks of the CC were a couple of burger joints, a Denny's, and the coffeeshop of the Red Lion. I ate dinner there because I had a 10% discount from my hotel, the Inn at the Convention Center (which is even closer than the RL and significantly cheaper, perhaps because the convention didn't make them an official con hotel.

Since I didn't sign up (or pay) for any of the tutorials, the only thing going on was the Tuesday Evening Extravaganza. This featured talks by Larry Wall ("The State of the Onion", which amusingly compared various members of the Perl community with various types of spies), Paul Graham (what business can learn from Open Source: people work better on things they care about [I'm paraphrasing because my memory is lousy], offices are less productive environments than working at home, and the third one I forget), and Damian Conway (Fun with Dead Languages -- LISP (oh, wait...) (Conway's game of Life), Postscript (now only used by printers, binary load lifters, and moisture vaporators) (a Monte Carlo computation of pi, which would burn up one page per cycle on a real printer), C++ (wishful thinking) (defining finite state machines by abusing operator overloading to do evil things with -- and >), and finally Latin (abusing Perl syntax extensions to replace operators with the "appropriate" Latin suffixes) (the Sieve of Erastosthenes -- the damned thing actually ran, and as in Latin you could change the word order (within limits)).

The talks were interspersed with various awards and announcements.

The only thing I appear to have forgotten was a power strip, so I'll have a little trouble charging both my cell phone and my laptop.