Blog entries tagged with "osdc2005"

I have just sorted through the stuff I collected at the conference and threw most of it out except for:

• Firefox Secrets (the book that everyone got a copy of);
• Classic Shell Scripting (one of two book that I won in a prize draw);
• SELinux: NSA’s Open Source Security Enhanced Linux (the other book I won);
• A mug from Perl Training Australia with a regular expressions guide on the side;
• Ubuntu install and live CD’s for both Intel x86 and PowerPC platforms;
• and a commemorative t-shirt.

A nice collection but now I need to find time to read the books…

On this third day of the Open Source Developers’ Conference 2005 that everyone was getting a bit tired.

Today’s highlights:

• Learning Haskell (Tang, Autrijus)
  This morning Autrijus followed on from his talk yesterday about the Perl 6 implementation in Haskell by explaining the fundamentals of the language. It is scary how much my head is hurting by those academics and their declarative language. Thesis papers as documentation…
• Lightning talks
  As yesterday the lightning talks session was a must see. One of the talks was allowed, even encouraged, to exceed the five minute limit as it was very insightful about how we (ie Australians) should negotiate with Americans (the talk was from an American now working over here…).

(I may add to this very short list in the next couple of days after I recover and also digest all the new information…)

Following on from yesterday the second day of the conference in all ways met or exceeded my expectations.

As requested by the conference committed a number of people have put the photos they have taken at the conference up on flickr.

The highlights:

• Instrumentation and Control Systems Used on the Australian Synchrotron (Farnsworth, Richard)
  Although the talk was light on the gritty details it was great to hear that a conscious decision was made to select open source solutions where possible. An example that was given was how they simplified the acquistion of RF emitters by telling the manufacturers the output requirements AND what software (an open source physic control suite) it needed to be controlled by out of the box (albeit a very box box). Richard also stressed the parallels between the science community (papers, peer review, building on others research, etc) and the open source community.
• Towards best practise development: Developing standards and procedures for consistent results (Bailey, Nathan)
  This talk was extreemly interesting to us as it was our manager talking about how we work. It is good to know the difference between what management thinks we are doing compared to what is actually happening.
• Lightning talks
  Lightning talks will always be one of the best sessions at a conference due to the high percentage of content versus waffle and the sheer variation in their topics. One of the best today was Paul’s talk on automating mimesweeper using perl…
• Introduction to Pugs: Perl 6 in Haskell (Tang, Autrijus)
  This was definitely the talk of the day as Autrijus ran us through how quickly the implementation of Perl 6 in Haskell was done. However what really hurts the mind is that it was not just an interpreter but also the ability to compile Perl 6 into other languages such as PIL (for Parrot) and even Javascript. Argh!

Today (now it is technically yesterday) was the start of the Open Source Developers’ Conference 2005. The conference was off to a good start as the bag included a book: Firefox Secrets

The talks that I went to today were much like last year, of a very high calibre, with the highlights being:

• Making Things Move: Finding Inappropriate Uses For Scripting Languages (Oxer, Jonathan)
  Although I had seen this talk before it was still excellent and a great opening talk for the conference as there were no heavy concepts. Unfortunately it reminded me of the projects in my list that I really need to get working on…
• Parsing, Analysing and Manipulating Perl (without perl) (Kennedy, Adam)
  We didn’t even make it to lunch before the first head hurting talk came along. Using the perl modules Acme::Bleach, Acme::Buffy, Acme::Morse and others Adam we to the extreme to show us how the oft quoted statement “Only perl can parse Perl” is incorrect, it should really be “Only perl can run Perl”. With that out of the way he explained to us that by thinking about documents of Perl instead of Perl code it was possible for PPI to even exist. Now that we can ‘parse’ Perl it is possible to build into other programs (such as an editor) the ability to correctly syntax highlight, correctly tidy it up, and even calculate a wide range of metrics. That is why my head hurts…
• It’s Good to be Greedy: Keeping a Straight Face around Regular Expressions (Balbo, Ben)
  Ben’s talk on regular expressions pretty much convered ground that I already understood. With one exception: look-ahead and look-behind assertions. Since I have never needed to use them (maybe that is because I didn’t understand them before) I never got around to understanding these assertions. But there was something about the way Ben explained it that made them so clear…
• Zaltana (Penrose, Mr Scott)
  Zaltana is Scott’s name for an environment where different web applications in different languages can coexist under the same authentication and with the same look and feel. The key to it is the greater control over the request lifecycle that is provided by mod__perl 2.0. A filter takes the authentication details from apache and passes them to the application and another filter takes the xml output of the application and transforms it into XHTML/CSS with the appropriate look and feel. I recall having some vague thoughts of this nature back in June when Stas Bekman gave a presentation about modperl 2.0 at perl mongers. But Scott has actually done something…
• Conference Presentation Humour (Baxter, Anthony)
  During the dinner Anthony Baxter gave a presentation about presentations which convered pretty much the same ground as the similar presentations by Paul and Damian. Apparently a joint presentation was in the works between Anthony and Damian however as Damian was unable to attend the conference that did not pan out…

I ended up talking with Anthony after the dinner where he revealed that the format of his presentations was inspired by Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture keynote at OSCON 2002.