OSDC 2005: Day 2

Tuesday, December 6th, 2005 at 09:05pm

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!

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