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Spent much of the day working on an OSCON trip report. That reminded me of the disk I made for cflute last weekend with an Audacity project on it, so I spent most of my lunchtime walk thinking about "super-single" CD-R disks. The idea would be to bundle up the raw tracks for a couple of songs (gotta have an A side and a B side), multi-platform editing software (Audacity), maybe some cover art, the tracks' web pages, and so on. It could easily be a bootable Linux CD, perhaps based on Lamppix Mini, but you have to assume that many people would prefer to just pop it in and browse to it. Add some premixed tracks, and Songbird as a player.

There are (at least) a few moderately tricky things to work out:

Scripts for building the disk. This is likely to be some variant on an existing mastering script, though the instructions for Lamppix Mini are simple enough that I should be able to write one pretty quickly.
A corresponding website that users could connect to. I'm thinking of something combining a wiki with a git or Subversion repository, so that people could get together and have fun, and upload their variations. Audacity has the advantage that most editing is done by making changes in the project file, leaving the original audio files unmodified.
How to pay for the horrendous storage and bandwidth requirements such a website would involve.

added: here's my previous post on the subject.

Mood: restless

Wrap-up post on NewsForge, with a good description of Eben Moglen's closing keynote.

Mood: cranky
Location: home office

$mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)$

To fill in the OSCON picture a little, here is Joe Brockmeier's report at NewsForge:

And another delibhtful OSCON ends, with a "final snack" in the ballroom lobby. Not terribly well-arranged -- the plates were in the middle and the food on both ends. This left one end blocked as queued-up people scrambled for plates, and one end practically unpopulated. Well, I got my cheese eventually, so I'm happy.

Today's opening keynote was Dave Bradley on "25 years of the IBM PC" -- Dave is the inventor of the famous three-finger salute that we still know and love today. He pointed out that the original BIOS was at least somewhat open source -- it was printed in the technical manual. I remember consulting it in order to tweak the floppy driver to handle odd formats.

Damian Conway's keynote was spectacular and highly amusing, but was basically stand-up comedy rather than anything really useful. But if you see any advertising from a company called CXAP, remember that they have a patent on replacing a consonant in a word with an X while pronouncing the original letter.

Both sessions were useful: "10 tools developers need" from Karl Fogel of the subversion project, and "Livejournal's Secret Spinoffs" from Artur Bergman and Brad Whitaker of SixApart. Some of their stuff for serving ultra-high-volume websites look useful.

The closing keynote was Eben Moglen -- inspiring.

One theme that came up several times -- in at least three keynotes including Damian's and Eben's; I forget the third -- was that Open Source has won. It is now widely recognized that OS is the most effective way to develop software. Proprietary software companies are fighting a rearguard action now.

Mood: content
Location: OSCon (ending snack)

$mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)$

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.

Mood: calm
Location: Portland Convention Center

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".

Mood: cheerful
Location: OSCon (breakfast)

$mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)$

Good talk in the early afternoon sessions, with the fascinating title "The Madness of AJAX". Some good, scary demos. If you have an AJAX app, make sure you validate data *on the server!!* DO NOT trust the client-side code, even if you think you wrote it. Other client-side processes can change it.

Location: OSCon

(Yesterday was day 0 for me, since I didn't go to any tutorials.) I'm having lunch at the moment -- they feed us a box lunch on Wednesday and Thursday.

Last night's keynotes were great, as usual, as were this morning's. One cute statistic that came out this morning -- I don't remember whose talk, unfortunately -- was a list of the top 10 websites and the number of employees in the corresponding company. Microsoft was something like 61000. Craig's List was 18. Disruptive technology? You bet!

Went to morning sessions on cross-site solutions for XMLHttpRequest (all an assortment of hacks, many of them either dangerous or severely limited) and Embedding a Database in a Browser (Derby in a signed applet).

I seem to be concentrating on Javascript and web apps this year, having come to the realization that I need to work on something that gives good demos. Security infrastructure is great, but you only notice it if it's not working.

Portland locals should note that exhibit passes are free, (it's open until 7pm or so), and that there's a BOF session entitled "Open Music Jam" at 9:30. Yes, I'll be there.

Mood: content
Location: OSCon (lunch)

$mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)$

Had dinner at a local restaurant called "Red Robin" - obviously a chain. The clam strips looked good, but more breading than clam. I'll try someplace else tomorrow.

The hotel advertises free wireless, but I wasn't able to connect either in my room or in the lobby. Apparently on different access points; I'll try again later.

Stupid goddamned Mac crashed on me! I thought OSX wasn't supposed to do that! Fortunately, LJ saves drafts! I'm not complaining.

Anybody know how to set up groups on this stupid thing? On a real unix I'd just add a line to /etc/group, but it has a comment saying that it's not used. Something called lookupd is, but there's no /etc/lookupd/ (mentioned in the man page for lookupd). Foo.

Location: OSCon
Music: Larry Wall's SotO talk

Well, here I am at OSCon, enjoying the fast wireless connectivity and the proximity of a wall outlet, in the company of all the other geeks.

The flight was uneventful. I'm travelling light: rolling suitcase and briefcase ("the rolly"), shoulderbag (goes into the rolly's outside pocket), and Plink, my Vagabond travel guitar. Plink is a trifle awkward as a shoulderbag, but when I don't have the suitcase she fits nicely on board the rolly. I'm seriously considering having a custom gig bag made.

update -- looks as though evening programming runs until 9:30.

Mood: content
Location: OSCon, in the Portland Convention Center
Music: geekish conversations

$mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)$

I'll probably be getting to the hotel (the Red Lion Convention Center) 4-ish, which will give me just enough time to unpack and have dinner before the convention kickoff session at 7:00.

( flight and contact info )

I'm almost done packing; I still need to make a final decision about which travel guitar to bring; at the moment I'm leaning toward "Plink", the little Vagabond. It's smaller. (cflute has one, but I want something for the hotel room so I can get in practice for Worldcon, which is in less than a month.

Mood: weird

$mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)$

OC: OSCamp

Welcome to the planning wiki for OSCAMP 2006: "Free as in Freedom!" OSCAMP is a grassroots cooperative effort with O'Reilly. OSCAMP seeks to organize the fringe of activity that has grown up around OSCON during the last several years so that the whole event can rock even more! If you can see a way to add value to the event … just go for it and do it.

... so if you're in Portland next week but can't afford OSCON, there will still be opportunities to hang around in the lobbies and a couple of function rooms.

Location: home

$mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)$

(8:30am) Power is still out at work -- at least on the circuit our router is plugged in to. Just as well that I'm going to be spending the morning taking my car in for an oilchange. I should really have powered down the two Linux boxen in my office before I left, but since they're backed up daily in several different places I'm not going to worry too much.

Next week I'm off to OSCon -- I'll be in Portland Tuesday afternoon through Saturday afternoon. ( contact info behind cut )

(9:55am) The car's likely to run me somewhere north of $400 by the time you add two new tires, an alignment job, and diagnosing the problem with the driver's side window to the oilchange it already needed. Power is still out at work.

I've been thinking again about getting a rolling duffel so that I can take my travel guitar (31" long) on plane trips. Still probably a bad idea; the duffels are awkward, wouldn't work well with my rolling briefcase, and in any case the travel guitar in its gig bag fits in the overhead rack. Looked briefly at some smaller travel guitars -- basically just six strings on a stick -- that might fit in a regular-size suitcase. About the price of two rolling duffels, but less than a car repair. It'll just have to wait, I guess.

Mood: awake

$mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)$

Party at our house next Saturday. The usual potluck bash. Filking is highly probable.

We're going to be at Westercon in San Diego, July 1-4. We'll be spending an additional day or two in the area, since it's impossible to visit San Diego and not go to the Zoo.

I'm going to be in Portland for OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, from Tuesday, July 25 to Saturday, July 29. I'll try to arrive sometime in the early afternoon Tuesday, and leave Saturday afternoon or evening (I'd stay all day Saturday, but we have Lamplighters tickets for Sunday). The keynote is Tuesday evening and the last bit of programming ends just after noon on Friday. (Waves to cflute and randwolf.)

... and we'll be going to Worldcon August 23-27 in Los Angeles.

Interesting how things work out this year. The Younger Daughter is changing schools and school districts (long story -- I'll get to it in another post). In the San Jose district, she would have had summer school starting July 5th, and started high school the week before Worldcon. Now, she re-starts 8th grade (in a district that apparently gives a damn -- this is not a bad thing) the week after Labor Day. School will get out in the middle of July next year, which would normally destroy our travel plans for Westercon, but Westercon is in San Jose next year. Travel time about 10 minutes.

Mood: calm

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The Mandelbear's Musings

Entries tagged with oscon 2006

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Singles. No, not that kind.

One final OSCON post

OSCON report at NewsForge

Oscon, Day 3

Oscon, Day 2

OSCon, Day 1, Part the second

The Madness of AJAX

OSCon, Day 1

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OSCon

Flight and contact info for this week

OSCamp

Why am I still at home this morning?

Summer schedule

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