OSCon, Day 1, Part the second

Afternoon sessions Wednesday were good. It's been next to impossible to find a time slot with fewer than two sessions I really want to go to; I'm going to end up spending a lot of time on the convention website catching up. Particularly notable were the session entitled "The Madness of AJAX" and the one after it on cross-site techniques. (There was one in the morning on essentially the same subject, but not nearly as well done.)

The afternoon ended spectacularly with a session on interactive browser graphics -- "No Flash Required". Techniques ranged from the obvious, like SVG, to the demented, like a library that uses masses of 1-pixel DIVs to get 3 frame/sec video.

Went out for inexpensive but tasty sushi with randwolf at a sushi bar with trains. By this time my left ankle was complaining slightly; I laced my boots tighter and told it to shut up and not be such a wimp, which it obligingly did.

Went to a convention-related party in my hotel and grabbed a free beer courtesy of Mindtouch; they have an open-source wiki based on PHP and .NET that they sell as a hosted service and an appliance.

Came back to the convention center around 9:15, guitar and songbook in hand (or at least on the rolly), in time for the Open Jam BOF. Found the Fink BOF in progress -- we set up in a corner around 9:35 and eventually drove them out. randwolf showed up later on, and cflute arrived somewhere a little before 10pm bearing a dreadnought and her suitcase full of woodwinds. We also had Larry Karnowski ( http://www.hickorywind.org ), the session organizer, with a fiddle, a guy named (damn! I'll probably remember later today Klaus) who played blues riffs on Plink, a bass trombonist whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, and a friend of Larry's who hung back in the middle of the room and listened. They tossed us out somewhere around 11pm.

I sang "Desolation -- Oh, No!" (added 4:25pm: also "High Barratry") before cflute arrived (Larry made the mistake of mentioning Dylan), we also sang the "House Carpenter" / "Demon Lover" set (I saw the trombonist counting on his fingers after it switched over to 5/4), "World Inside the Crystal", and "Cicero in the 21st Century".

Oscon, Day 2

Some of the morning keynotes were a little disappointing -- more entertainment than content. The first two were good, though: Simon Phipps on "The Zen of Free" (four koans, the most memorable being that one can stay with a piece of OS software precisely because you have the freedom to leave it), and Gary Lang of Autodesk on OSGeo.org -- open source mapping software.

A good session entitled "The Surprising History of Copyright, and What it Means for Open Source". Started with a 10-minute film of person-in-the-street interviews that made it clear exactly how wrong the average person is about what copyright really is and who benefits from it. It is, and has always been, about protecting the business model of publishers.

Good session on Songbird, a Mozilla-based network media player. Basically Firefox browser technology used to implement a music player instead of a text browser. Has some potential for filk albums.

A couple of good talks by Amy Hoy on the user experience and user interface design. Finished the day with a session of lightning talks on community-building.

Had "dinner" at a party celebrating the release of Apache Geronimo; finger food and a couple of glasses of free wine. Went back to the convention center for the Old Fogey's BOF; I was the oldest one there by at least a decade. Foo. Still in the convention center, because it has a good net connection and the hotel doesn't.