OSCON 2004 - Conference Day 1
A busy day with the convention now in full swing….
- Tim O’Reilly continued his open source paradigm shift thesis from last year. Interesting viewpoint, but it seems a bit tired now.
- Robert Lefkowitz raised some interesting points regarding the differing interpretations of Open Source between techies and business types. Open Source refers to ideas and expressions as much (or more so) than source code.
- Masahji Stewart described an interesting new CPAN package for traversing database schemas with a further level of abstraction.
- Dirk Elmendorf described a number of design points to consider for building databases. Nothing really groundbreaking, but very well stated and organized.
- Who at Microsoft felt that sponsoring lunch at OSCON would be a good idea? What do they think they are accomplishing? Why did lunch from a Washington-based company include such bland apples?
- Miguel de Icaza had a nice overview of the current state of Mono. Interesting to hear such a Name in the Open Source community openly admit to being very far removed from coding.
- Joe Celko explained why the information held in so many databases is crap yet doesn’t have to be. Garbage in, garbage out, essentially. Pay attention!
- Robert Love described attempts to make Linux hardware support work better. The goal is to make Linux desktops work more like Macs, and it appears they are on their way.
- Uri Guttman showed that fork() and ithreads aren’t the only ways to accomplish parralelism in Perl. Just wish he could have taken some presentation tips from Damian.
- Free drinks to finish the day. Mmm, Pinot Noir, yay Oregon!