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From Software:

OSCON 2008

Wednesday, July 30 2008 UTC

Highlights from the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, July, 2008 (Portland, OR)

General Observations

This was my first OSCON.

It was interesting to see first hand the evolving relationship between the big vendors and the Open Source Software community. Of course, the big guys were all in attendance at the Expo: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Sun, etc. (with the notable exception of Apple). To judge by comments and reactions expressed at the conference, Microsoft’s star definitely seems to be setting and Apple’s rising… there is a big outcry against 'vendor lock-in’ with Apple’s iTunes/iPod/iPhone/... as the classic bad-guy example; yet there are tons of iPhones around at the conference and the majority of participants seem to have Macs. There seems to be a sense of good design and usability gaining in importance, with Apple seen both as something to fight and to emulate.

There was a big focus on scripting and the Web, but rather less less than I would have expected on Linux and desktop apps (if Linus Torvalds was in attendance, I didn’t any evidence of it). There was even an introductory talk on C for people who cut their teeth on higher-level languages (which I skipped).

There were also several talks on design and usability (some better than others) which may indicate an increased focus on usable software from the community, which would be a welcome change.

Notes from the talks I attended

Christine Peterson” gave a very interesting talk on security and privacy. She said the Open Source community dropped the ball on Electronic Voting, which is neither transparent nor secure in many or most US implementations. Nanotech and new sensor technologies will be used to try to counter terrorist and other threats. She asserted that the Open Source community, with its deep knowledge of both privacy and security issues, is uniquely positioned to influence the direction of the new technology and how it is used.

Two other engaging keynotes were Why Whinging Doesn’t Work by Danese Cooper on the relative lack of women in software and what to do about it, and fork() && exec(): Spawning the Next Generation of Hackers by Nathan Torkington on how to teach your kids to program.

Eat my Data – How Everybody Gets File IO Wrong by Stewart Smith explained the various stages of POSIX file I/O and pointed out various ways your application can lose data even if you think it has been written to disk correctly. If I got it right, you have to do the following:

  • open() a temp file
  • write()
  • fsync() the file to get your blocks written to disk (not implemented correctly on OS X!)
  • close()
  • rename the file to the desired location
  • fsync() the directory to get the inodes updated
  • Most importantly, check error codes in each case!

After watching Smith’s talk you’d be amazed that any data ever makes it to its proper place!

The Age of Literate Machines by Zak Greant was a wonderful historical and philosophical foray into the history of language, law and computation, with an emphasis on the impact of free software and free information on a free society. This was possibly my favorite talk of the conference.

Matt Russell gave a neat talk on JavaScript animations with the Dojo toolkit. I have been using JQuery happily for IceCube Live but it looks like Dojo is even more powerful (though with a slightly more complicated interface. I even won a copy of his book!

Ryan Briones” spoke about Ruby frameworks. I didn’t realize Rails had so much company. It still seems Rails is the main go-to focus if you’re in the Ruby camp (personally I love Django but my Dad’s crazy for Rails).

Chris Shiflett gave an overview of the two primary Web site security vulnerabilities: Cross-site Scripting (XSS) and cross-site request forgeries (CSRF). Simple rule of thumb: filter your inputs, and escape (de-HTML-ize) your outputs. These attacks have plagued even the big names (Amazon, Google, ...).

After sitting with Keith and Dave and I for lunch, Jacob Kaplan-Moss gave a talk about some cool undocumented features in Django; there was a more comprehensive Django tutorial which occurred before I arrived, but the notes (which I downloaded but can’t remember from where) are very helpful. Django is about to cough out it’s 1.0 release… to keep up with the latest features (and they are doing nice things), you have to stay on the trunk of the code.

One of the funnest, or at least funniest, of the talks was given by two Google Guys — a well-rehearsed and inspirational talk about usability, although most of the topics they covered are available in a few good books.

Expo

As far as the expo went, one of my favorite exhibitors was Inveneo, who are bringing affordable low-power, Open Source computers to Africa (not the same as OLPC, as it seems they are focusing on shoring up services such as education, health care and economic development rather than providing laptops to individuals).

Our Presentation

Dave Glowacki and Keith Beattie, my partners-in-crime

The Electromagnetic Sonic Boom (photo by Keith)

Our presentation (slides here) went pretty well (5/5 stars so far in all our ratings). The crowd was maybe 60 people only, probably due in part to it being the last time slot. But the people who did attend seemed more 'present’ than usual (less multitasking on laptops), and there were some good questions both during and after the talk.

There was a similar talk about NASA data processing which I did not attend due to the fact that it was in a different room right before our talk.

Afterwards

Portland Beer Festival

Portland is a wonderful city — I stayed with friends after the conference and experienced the Portland Beer Festival. Thanks to the Lishkas and to Robin and Neil for a great weekend!