FSOSS 2006 October 28th, 2006
Mike Shaver, “You should be giving this keynote”. Big things from Small steps. Mike opened the festivities with his 9am keynote, impressing the packed auditorium with his experiences and insights on open source software development. Some of the key points were, big things from small steps, and finding your “X-Factor”. I hope to one day find my own X-factor and to use it for good.
Phil Schwan formerly of Cluster File Systems: Stories from the front in the world of super-computing and high volume, high availability storage. Phil talks about how some of these machines operate and survive various forms of catastrophe while serving up Petabytes of information. Phil conveys great enthusiasm for eking performance from machines under duress and promises to one day include a demo of him destroying an operating filesystem server with an axe on stage while the system continues to run. I can’t wait for the next version of his talk!
He segues casually into discussion of Linux kernel APIs changing out from underneath the developer and how this is a potentially disastrous course for supercomputer programmers. A bit more discussion about CFS’ filesystem software brought him to a description of the “Personal Software Process”. I would have liked a separate talk on this alone, but it was not meant to be.
Lawrence Mandel & Jay Liu (IBM): Choosing an AJAX toolkit. A decent overview of a few different technologies, focussing on DOJO and GWT. It was an interesting overview, but not terribly in-depth and focussed, unsurprisingly on DOJO which is IBM’s favorite horse in this race. I didn’t come out at the end with a working AJAX webapp to amaze my friends with, but it did give me a couple of ideas I’d like to try out.
Chris Blizzard, Red Hat: The One Laptop Per Child Program. This is a fantastic project to create a low-cost laptop for children in developing countries. There’s been a lot of press coverage about this project and it was great to hear Chris talk about the hardware and software going into this neat little machine. They’re putting a lot of thought into the design of the computer and it looks very well thought-out. This was the first glimpse I’d seen of their UI and I must say, it’s pretty impressive. Very simple, iconic, and playful. The mesh computing concept is interesting and I can’t wait to see what this can do in the developing world. There’s a real possibility these machines could be use to bridge ‘the last mile’.
Nathan Yergler, Creative Commons: “Little ’s’ Semantic”. Nathan’s a software engineer working on the next version of the CC licensing web application (version 3) and the MozCC2 extension. This can be used to track metadata enclosed in an RDFa segment within a webpage and can display attributions on links and watermarks on copyrighted images. Cool stuff, but Nathan was plagued by some funny CSS in his presentation. I will be checking out the MozCC2 extension though, and appreciate the great work Creative Commons is doing for copyright and fair use on the web.
Nat Friedman, Novell Corp. Nat tells a fun story of one of the first open source projects — the New English Dictionary — which became the Oxford English Dictionary. The parallels to the world of open source are obvious and pretty funny. Nat’s a great speaker and at the end of his story, he showed off some of what SLED 10 can do. I must say, this is some impressive stuff, complete with eye-candy and iPod connectivity.
This was a great day and, I think, a pretty successful symposium. Big thanks to Dave Humphrey and Bob Boyczuk for putting this on and to the students and staff for running the AV equipment and for technical support. Lastly, I’d like to send a shout-out to Club Moz and all the great people I met yesterday. This was a lot of fun and I hope to do it again next year.
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Posted in General | Comments (3)
October 29th, 2006 at 11:48 am
Hi Rod
It was a very successful symposium; I was planning to meet with you and talk about my Unit Testing project. Maybe next time, I must do so.
October 29th, 2006 at 2:40 pm
hey Paul,
I’m still in town and should be on campus on Tuesday. I’m also hoping to be in a class on Wednesday to do a mock testday demo. Drop me an email if you want to set something up.
November 3rd, 2006 at 4:54 pm
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