Rhonabwy

finally, it's cool

The temperatures finally dropped last night. The house was down to 71 when I woke up this morning - with sections a bit warmer. Fairly humid out though - low clouds and fog shrouded the city this morning. But that's fine - as long as we managed to drop the heat in the house...

I seem to be fighting some tendonitis in my elbow and shoulder - both joints are sore, so I need to take it easy on them for a bit. I think the Whidbey racing was just too much for it, and I stressed them out. Blech.

chaotic night

Well, it was a chaotic night sailing. Yeah, I thought I'd have a little bit of a break, but Ken Chin and his head trimmer Steve offered to come out for the CYC race this evening.

In the end, I think it worked pretty well. We made 2nd of 3 tonight, but the real tidbits were in the discussion and chaos that was churning all around. Actually, I felt like I spent the entire evening being totally confused. Steve has a much different trimming style that I didn't immediately adapt to, and there were a bunch of people calling out when to go and what to do all the time.

Did it help? Well, I think I picked up a few tidbits, but in the end I'd have to say it didn't. What will help is calming down (meaning a definite lack of shouting and screaming), consistency, trust, and time. I think time on the water - just making the mistakes and figuring out what's working towards the future will be the most critical. We just don't have enough experience (any of us) to see the patterns and know the implications of the subtleties of our actions.

Oh - and it's fuckin' hot in the house tonight. Karen's got the windows open and the fan blowing, but it's just plain ole warm. Too warm.

Phil

One of our local folks is hitting the road - Phil Evans. No - don't google for him, cause you'll find either porn or dors (yeah, already tried to see if he had a homepage or something to link to). Phil's a good guy, good at script writing, keeping the data flowing, and keeping track of problems as they wend their way through to completion. I'm sure as hell going to miss him at the office.

I think my biggest question is how are we going to replace him? Yeah, I'm not that dumb - I know we're not going to replace him. At least based on the past two years here. He's just one of those people with a whole lot of "institutional knowledge" that will be a bitch of a loss. I've already told I'll be picking up some of his duties, which are getting spread among 5 or so people.

So where's he going? He wasn't specific - some bio/genetics kind of shop that needs some scripting/integration work down in the Lake Union area.

RSS Feed for Flying Meat

http://flyingmeat.com/journal/rss.xml is the XML link for the FlyingMeat Development Journal. There's still a few quirks to it - like the URL's to the archived articles aren't working 100%, but he's got one up there...

visits and journals

So FlyingMeat Software has a journal now - although I don't know what it's RSS feed is. Come on Gus, spill - wassit?

Speaking of, it appears that Gus may be visitin' ole Seattle again for a little bit in a week or so. I guess it's that time of year. :) Randy had a good time (the pics above are from that visit) - we day hiked around Hurricane Ridge and also spent a little time tidepooling at Port Townsend. The tide was at -2, not quite the low-low tide, but pretty close (The weekend previous was a -3 tide).

Pics? Ok.

Randy wading around in the morning fog of Port Townsend's Beach

heat

I agree with JDD, it's just too freakin' hot. It's 83 degrees in the house at 11:15pm. Up here in Seattle, we don't have any air conditioning. Blech. It only peaked at 90 here today, but that's still plenty warm.

Karen and I hid in a movie theatre most of the evening - finally saw Pirates of the Caribbean. Fun flick - the action sequences were great and the writing of the overall plot was way, way above what I expected.

Tried working for a while on the desktop, but it's just too freakin' warm to sit in front of a computer with a lot of lights and heat.

Olympics

It's not often you get a clear, unimpeded view of the Olympic Mountains from Hurricane Ridge - so...

This small image links to the biggin'... 2.9Mb.

Oh - and looking north (from a bit down the slope):

articles and Wired

Wired has an article: AI Depends On Your Point Of View that looked really interesting from the title. Only it's a blurb snippet piece that doesn't have anything really of value. It's the sort of thing I'd expect to see in a Blog, not in an edited publication. Oh well - they've got other good articles that I read.

You know though, the Wired News website is really getting more and more features of a large Blog. Links to the authors, links to other articles by the author, etc.

That being said, ain't no way I'll ever subscribe to Wired again. They fucked up too many things during my last subscription, including transfering the subscription into my wife's name and then sending me notices that I hadn't paid for the subscription and threatening to send the account to a collection agency. Dorks.

catching up

Sometimes it's a little hard catching up after a week "unplugged". Probably damn good for me, but it's still rough getting back into the groove of my daily routine.

Change is constant, but you never seem to feel it so much as when you're unplugged for a week and then come back to plug back in again. The websites that are in constant churn (say, like Slashdot and CNET) become obvious, and the prolific writers who's blogs I read ... yeah, a full day at least.

I spent most of today just skimming. Anything else just didn't make sense for me - just too much infomation. Taken in it's daily dose, it's easy enough for me to track and resolve - but a week at a time is too much to swallow down. And it's not like I can ask someone "Anything interesting happen?" because my interests are mine - and I don't know anyone who shares a suitably close set to get a decent scoop.

exhausted

I had a great weekend out around the Olympic Penninsula, but I'm just freakin' wiped out exhausted. A week of racing at Whidbey followed by a few long days of driving and hiking, and I'm done.

It was cool having Randy up here - and we didn't even do any intensive hikes or anything, but none the less.

My hands are still recovering - my fingers feel like fat little sausages that are barely moving. I did manage to get my wedding ring back on this morning though. The worst I think are my heels. The skin at the back of them has cracked and is rather painful - I'm putting on ointment regularly, but a week of sun and saltwater has done it's damage.

sailing

The morning after that whole thing (that would be today) has my hands and wrists stiff and slightly swollen, making typing a tad awkward. Catching up on email and trying to figure out where everything stands in the rest of world that I work in.

Sailing is really a heavily team oriented sport. I think that's probably it's biggest appeal for me. The whole thing couldn't come off if everyone wasn't working together, and I suspect our low rankings are at least somewhat due to coordination and communication issues. In terms of the technical details of sailing, we're doing everything else reasonably well. Some could be better - finer points of trim, tactical choices in when to tack, or how we douse the spinnaker on a downwind mark rounding. But really, it was pretty darn smooth - there were a few mistakes, but overall the details of the sailing and working together went really well.

We started out the races doing actually quite well - we had good starts (if you've ever seen or been in a regatta, you might know the starts are one of the craziest things going), and kept in to the middle of the fleet during most of the first leg of the race (each one was upwind in this race). Invariably, we'd loose a lot of ground during the roundings, but probably the most frustrating was that while we were in the fleet, we were just a little slower. To me, it really didn't make sense - we had a new bottom on the boat (VERY smooth), a new rudder, and the sails are pretty crisp - but the rest of the fleet just walked away from us slowly and steadily, and we fell behind.

For the record, I think that morning practices before each race are a bad idea - they just wear people out during what is way more than usual racing where people are getting worn out even more. Tired people make mistakes - Tony's got a great rasberry on his forward where he head butted the steel shrouds. Doug and I accidently beat each other with winch handles several times. I'm sure there were equivilant mistakes on the main and driving which I just wasn't aware of too.

Last thing - we have the most incredible set of competitors out there. Ken Chin and the crew from Kowloon, Jeff, Dave, and the others from Rhumb Rhunner and Rubicon - they were gracious and helpful. I've been in some team sports where the opponents are nasty and unhelpful, and these folks were constantly going out the their way to give advice when asked, come over and help, etc. Ken even lent us one of his trimmers (a fellow named Joe who owns the Tern, a beautiful wood boat moored down in Tacoma) before the races on Monday to help us fix our engine on board (he's a marine mechanic by trade I think).

My ass has been kicked

A week of racing a 30' sailboat (Olson 911 Se for the curious) as a trimmer really does you in. Two races a day from Monday through Thursday. A final race on Friday. Winds varying from 8 to 25 knots. I've got bruises for which I have no idea how I received them. My hands, feet, and face are completely windburned. My shoulders and upper back have tied themselves into something of a permanent knot which I'm hoping a long hot shower will begin to rectify.

For the curious, I was crewing aboard the Manta Ray in class P08. Results through Thursday are available online - Yup, DFL. We beat the next boat up (Jayhawk) a couple of times, but mostly we got whupped. Fortunately, our good friends aboard Kowloon took the #1 spot.

I spect I'll write more later, but my email has finally all been retreived - time to cull and sort.

Midnight at the top of the hill

yeah, still up - browsing the web a little, reading some short stories - generally taking it easy. Karen's long since headed to bed, and didn't even wake up when the neighbor's friends lit off a bunch of fireworks in the street. I was surprised - it certainly jolted me out of the book I was reading.

So in gandering about, I noticed an article on CNet talking about how Amazon was going to implement this electronic payment mechanism through it's accounting systems. The article goes on to talk about how it might be difficult to oust PayPal.

Well, maybe.

But in my opinion, PayPal needs competition quickly and severely! I've never used it, but that is because I've received far too many reports of people getting completely screwed by their system. I'm vastly concerned that there aren't any real protections in there for any money I might want to pass through, and even if it was a relatively insignificant amount, that makes me really nervous. I don't have a debit card for the same reason - there's just no real consumer protection mechanism's in there. Banks tend to be a little more reliable, but certainly aren't trustworthy (at least in my opinion).

Competition, I think, might change that. Plenty of folks that have been burned (or have had friends burned) by the loose fraud rules and 'protections' that PayPal maintains. I rather hope that Amazon will help tighten those up - it is a place where I think Amazon could do it better, and PayPal is doing poorly.

steak and shrimp

Ok, it's admittedly been a while since I've used a grill - basically about three years now. But it didn't suck. How could it? I didn't screw up anything other than some asparagus, and the rest included:

grilled shrimp
top loin steaks
grilled peppers
grilled zuchini

Oh yeah. We ate good tonight. It is a great grill - easy to use, easy to control. A little hotter on the left side than the right, but I think part of that was that I was on not very level ground.

What an evening!

We have grill!

It's up and ready to go. Haven't fired it up yet - saving that for tomorrow. I'd half meant to assemble it last night, but other projects jumped in front of the line, so it waited until today. We wrangled (what am I saying? Karen wrangled) a free cannister of propane from the Lowes folks as well. So now we're all tucked up, filled, attached, and ready to fire it up.

I'll probably fire thing up early tomorrow to verify everything's working properly, but the real innauguration will be tomorrow evening. Steak and prawns is the plan. Yum.

Friday?

damn! Where'd the week go?

I finally got some sleep last night - when I went to bed (at last!) I was able to actually go to sleep instead of staring at the ceiling for hours. I'm still feeling a little drained, but I figure I have the weekend to help alleviate some of that.

So now we're into Friday, and I'm completely lost as to where the week went. The office has been keeping me exceptionally busy with all sorts of small and strange errors cropping up from places that have been quiet for ages. We have a lot of automated systems, but they're not all 100% foolproof (is anything?). I guess this week they've decided to get cranky.

Spent part of the evening chatting with Jeremy about Ruby and VoodooPad. In particular, there's a couple of 'extras' for VoodooPad: a Python Pad (58k) and a Ruby pad (82k) that contain scripts ready to be run directly from the pad.

Oh yeah, and Jeremy was complaining that Gus doesn't have this linked up from his Flyingmeat pages either...

So one of the nifty things is that Gus has enabled any page of the pad to act as a script holder - where you can execute that script with Command-R. That has really gotten to be the place where I stash a huge number of those one-liners, or misc scripts that have otherwise always resided in the ~/bin direry of my account. It just *feels* a lot more accessible this way.

Grill!

Ok. We've got the grill. Need to haul it out of the box and start assembling, but I think that will wait until after we've eaten.

So we got the Weber - a little larger than the first one I was looking at. An additional burner, and more cooking space... in the end, I decided the extra cash was probably worth it. Karen was all excited about a Brinkman grill that was in the same price range, but had a bunch of nifty doo-dads on it. I don't give a shit about side burners, and I don't need it to look fancy - so I was really leaning towards the Weber. Two friends have raved about the customer service Weber provides, and loved their grills. I didn't know anything about a Brinkman - and that is what pretty much sealed the deal.

First gas grill I ever bought. Probably about time.

home today

Karen stopped me as I was walking out the door and told me I should consider working from home today.

You know you're dragging when your spouse is saying "Can you just sort of take it easy today or something? Would working from home be easier?..."

The only particular downside is that my cat has decided that means he gets a LOT more attention today, and it's particularly difficult to issue complex SQL commands when a cat is lying across your arms as you type.

outer space

my head's in outer space tonight. I'm all caught up in computer language esoterica - Interfaces vs. Abstract Base Classes, scope and protection of variables and methods, polymorphism and delegates. Phew - I think it'll be a bit before I come back down to earth on this one.

Kinds of Coders

John Chang has a blog entry up talking about kinds of coders and a reference Computer Programming: What's It Like?.

I've often felt somewhat compelled to break down software engineers into archtypes myself. Tried a couple of times, but I never was satisfied with the results. I've got some different variants from the ones John lists though.

Two that I think he's missing:

the cynical, anal-retentive, large corporate coder

hacker types that are shitty at estimating and often produce buggy code, but get it out fast, fast, fast

XCode

I got my mailing of the Panther preview Beta and XCode yesterday. I've been waiting and hoping around for this one. I'm really curious to dig in and see what all it has to offer.

So - although I've heard the allure for Panther is really high - I'll just be installing that on my iPod's hard drive for testing and goofing when I've really got some time. I use my iBook sort of critically to my day to day life, so I don't want to chance screwing it up with preview software. Well, mostly - because I am installing XCode for Jaguar on it.

sleeping.

I tried. I really did. But sleep didn't come. I was even tired. at 2am I moved to the day bed again and finally fell asleep, but it's left me spaced and drawn out this morning.

This whole insomnia thing just sucks.

sleeping?

Sleeping? Yeah, I should be sleeping.

I've got something internal messed up though - I'm having a hard time going to bed and a hard time waking up. Maybe it's some freakish anxiety thing, I dunno.

At least the evening has cooled back down. There's a light breeze making it's way over the day bed upon which I'm lounging and catching up on email. Current temp is 66 (at 60% humidity) outside. That'd probably freeze my Missouri compatriot's butt's off if they're having a normal Missouri summer - the LOW there tonight will probably be about 67 with 75% humidity. ... and the high today of 74 had me all uncomfortable. Weird how we acclimate.

Ok. Time for bed.

really.

gas grill

So I also kicked around the gas grill we'd received as a hand-me-down tonight. Poked around underneath because at least one of the regulators is shot, and I'd like to have a functional gas grill without TOO much worry of gas leaks and terrible explosions. Maybe I'm more paranoid because I also have a gas forge (yeah, both propane). Who knows.

Well, that paranoia is telling me to sack the current grill and get a new one. John and Nathan both swear by the customer service of Weber - so that seems like a good candidate. Karen and I looked through their online catalog to get a sense of what each of them offered, and we are sort of leaning towards the bottom of the set - the Genesis Silver A. Here's a pic of one if you're really curious.

They seem to start around $350 (Amazon, of all places, has some pricing) and go skyrocketing up from there. I must admit that there was a certain amount of appeal to the stainless steel. Still, an extra $150 or more doesn't seem quite worth it there.

Never have bought a grill a before - well anything more than those tiny apartment-sized compact charcoal brazier thingies. Guess it's about time.

surgery

Got a call from my Grandmother tonight - she'd undergone some surgery and called to inform that all was well. It turned out to be a lot more than I expected, but she seems to be holding up pretty well - a combination of trigger finger (a snapping of the fingers caused by tendons shortened with age), carpal tunnel, and an extrodinarily inflamed nerve in her elbow. So she had a raspy voice, and sounded groggy, but was otherwise in fine spirits. My - uh - Great Aunt? (my grandmother's sister) Louise said she was onery and doing well. I figure if she's being onery, she's probably doing just fine.

MOZILLA!!!

Fantastic!

Mozilla is sporting a fancy new set of duds as well as some new independence as a non-profit. It looks like Open Source as Non-profit - 501(3)(c) - organizations has another player.

AOL spinning this off and supporting it for the initial timeframe sounds good for both groups, plus opens up the options for other corporations (IBM, Sun, HP, etc) who are involved in commoditizing various open source components be involved more directly with a non-profit rather than a potential competitor.

Jabber

At the OSCON, I attended the session Jabber Jazz and it's really stuck around in my head.

I've always been fascinated with Jabber (yeah, from it's inception really) and appreciative of the fact that the folks building it out went to the trouble of making the protocols and interfaces so open. I'd always secretly hoped it would expand to take over the ICQ, AIM, and MSN's of the world - just by some virtue of the fact that I thought it was cool or something.

Well, obviously it hasn't - at least yet. Maybe in the future it'll provide the central mechanism for the baseline messaging - just because it IS open, where the rest of crazed bits of strange TCP and UDP packet sets that have been reverse engineered so that other programs can work within the environment.

One the most compelling pieces to Jabber, however, is the thought and effort that's been put into the idea of presence and message transfer. I was all philosophical about it's potential and possibilities - perhaps because I spend more than a little time keeping an eye on a complex system with the help of a little bit of code to do some of the dirty work of constant monitoring. Seems like there's some possibilities for integration there (or to any IM scheme really) to assist in keeping tabs, notifications, etc.

The downside being that I believe most folks are already running with far too many "disruptions" in their day. There's an aspect to an office that gets you to the point to where you can do more work from home than at the office because of the number of interruptions you receive. From what I've heard, at some places it's a status symbol - the line out your door representing how "cool" or "good" or whatever you are. I've always put up with (actually encouraged) a certain amount of that interruption - with a dynamic group, you can transfer and share information fast and easily. But it has it's downside - if you're in a focus working on a particularly large issue that's requiring your entire braincase to envelope it's "semantic map", then an interuption just completely screws you. You loose track, and you loose time - some anecdotal evidence would say you could loose up to several hours of work. Blech.

Well, I was fascinated enough to pick up a copy of Jabber Developers Handbook, which I've got to admit is a pretty good primer to the whole gig. I've also got a copy of Programming Jabber on my bookshelf - although I'm not programming it at all. God forbid if anyone actually saw the horrific collection of programming books I have stashed in the house, many of which don't even get touched these days. Buying geek books... it's a vice.

consolidation

Well, looks like there's continuing consolidation in the search business.

And while I was catching up on some of my aggregation news, I ran across Scoble talking about Brent Simmons. It's a sort of strange comment, I guess. I would have thought that Microsoft had a dozen or more Brent Simmons like developers support their platform. Maybe I'm just naive, but given the market share, it would seem to encourage it. Then again, maybe there are dozens, but Brent stands out because the group for MacOS X is relatively small.

Recovering...

Yeah, it may seem strange, but I feel like I'm recovering well from the trip to Portland. I loved the conference, but it was also exhausting. The Party on tuesday night was fun, but also really drained my "extrovert batteries". There was another party on Thursday night (basically, there was one just about every night there!), but I retreated to my hotel room for that night instead.

I'm particularly pleased by my experience with note taking using Hydra. I was a little surprised more folks weren't doing it (especially given the high percentage of Apple laptops in the audience).

Someone who wasn't using Apple hardware, but had been prolifically blogging the conference as he attended was Michael Radwin. I sat next to him in the session

Michael's slides on his talk One Year of PHP at Yahoo! are online, and worthwhile if you're into PHP in a server farm.

Oh - and it turns out I've managed to find a copy of Babel-17 by Samuel Delany last night in the U District. Matz refered to it in his presentation on Thursday: The Power and Philosophy of Ruby. Haven't started diving in to reading it yet.

One thing that I'd still sort of like to know - what are the issues associated with providing wireless access to 1800 people at a conference? OReilly definately had some issues with it, and I seem to recall similiar complaints from WWDC. I'd sort of expect a very different set of trouble from your more standard large wireless setup - if nothing else than for the transiency of the connections.

Dashboard

That dynamic information thingy I talked about from Miguel and Matt's talk on Mono - well, it turns out a couple other thought it was cool too - Dashboard, a compelling articulation for realtime contextual information is the one that Tim OReilly is pointing people towards. Turns out his name is Nat, not Matt - my bad.

Home again

After the final sessions of OSCON were wrapped up, Karen and I had some time to kill in Seattle. A bite to eat and a trip to the Zoo finished up our time in Portland beautifully.

I actually think I prefer the Woodland Park Zoo here in Seattle over the Portland Zoo, but it was a nice setup and well worth the visit. The only downside was the temperature (90's today) which I just wasn't used to - and the relatively heavy clothes became uncomfortable all to fast while walking downtown or the Zoo.

The public transit in Portland, by the way, kicks Seattle's ass left and right. Some folks down in Portland that I was chatting with were stunned that we didn't have light rail yet - and after having used the system there, I can understand. I was really usable, combined nicely with buses, and connected outlying facilities with the core of downtown very effectively. Airport to downtown was a breeze, and downtown the train station wasn't exactly difficult either (although that was bus more than tram).

On the train coming back, we had a few problems. Turns out the engine failed on the way back to Seattle, so we got ditched in Tacoma for a bit and a train following us picked us up the final leg home. Some mechanical failure kept invoking the emergency air brakes, so we ended up returning into Seattle about 11:45pm when out expected arrival was 10pm.

Even still, I'll take the train again without too much thought. It was incredibly relaxing, amazingly spacious (by plane standards), and overall was quite easy to deal with. $60 round trip to Portland is way worth it to - it would have been $40 easily to drive it in gas alone. The delay in time was (breakdown aside) relatively insignificant, and public transit on either end served our needs wonderfully. (Actually, that's not fair - we called on Nate to come rescue us from the train station tonight because we were so beat). Hard to believe that tomorrow is Saturday...

final sessions at OSCON

Jeremy Zawodny's talk on MySQL Scaling Pains was very worthwhile. The session again seemed a bit compressed, but the information was good - and I expect that the slides will be available on the web before all that long.

It was, unfortunately, across from another session I really wanted to see that wasn't on the original schedule: a talk by Maciej Ceglowski entitled "Building a Smarter Search Engine: Artificial Stupidity". It was apparently well attended, and after the talk I was able to catch up with him and find out that his talk was going to be put online at http://www.nitle.org/oscon/ somewhere in the near future.

During the final session, I stopped in to check out a session on Single Sign On In Perl. It was interesting to see what other folks were doing, treading the work that we did at MU working under Randy Wiemer back in 1999. They had implemented a cookie passing scheme that is very similiar to one that Gus scribbled down some time back, based roughly on the ticket passing scheme that Kerberos uses. One thing they hadn't resolved worth a darn was the access control lists - where we added on to MERIT's radius server, they still seemed to be floundering trying to work something out. Looking back at it, I realized that Jason Gorden was very correct when he said we were lightyears ahead of what other folks were doing at the time, and perhaps could have productized what we'd done. Maybe we should have. Or maybe we should have tried to drop it into Open Source - although getting the University of Missouri to allow that is an amazing pain in the ass. They're not exactly forward thinking in that respect, regardless of their supposed mission to "support research for the common good of the people of Missouri".

Dyson, Miguel

This morning's keynote "Von Neumann's Universe: Coding (and Engineering) at the IAS, 1945-1956" was by George Dyson (yeah, Dyson sphere guy). It was a brilliant historical overview of what Von Neuman was doing at the IAS (hydrogen bomb lab of the late 40's and 50's - among other sciences). A real impressive history of computing. The notes alone from running the early computers were wonderful. I wish/hope a copy of those pictures gets made available at some point.

The second keynote was Beyond .NET: The Mono Project - which was a typical high-speed Miguel kind of talk. He's still just as fun to watch, and makes the most amazing and outrageous claims that I laugh and snicker through most of this presentation. He did have a particular interesting project he and Matt (?) demo'd in the last 15 minutes of the presentation that showed a sort of associated memory mechanism that relied on having used open source software to instrument front end apps (email, IM, etc) to generate "clues" that it used to populate a dashboard of related information. For a complete re-write over the past 7-8 days, it was a very impressive demo.

Powell's

Powell's bookstore, by the way, is a really fucking HUGE bookstore. City blocks in Portland are small, but it still coveres an entire city block and then has TWO outlier stores supporting sections that they couldn't cram in to their main location. Yeah, we spent money. What do you expect?

BTW: It's kicks ass over Barnes and Noble or Borders. If you ever come through Portland, take a day and visit it.

Chandler

You can bet that given the chance (and I was), I attended the session on Chandler. All the information is, of course, available at their website - including their slides (640K in PDF).

It was a decent overview but nothing really amazing. Although I don't see how they could have done it, it would have been nicer to see more detail on what they were doing under the covers. In particular, there was some interesting discussion and detail (at the overview level) of a dynamic schema mechanism for people to extend and maintain data in a fairly interesting way. It reminds me, actually, of what MIT did with their adenine stuff (link to PDF) in the Haystack project.

It'll be particularly interesting to see how these two projects feed (or IF they feed) off each other. In many respects, they don't seem to be particularly aware of the details of what the other has been doing/is doing. Or maybe they are, and it's just not apparent on the surface.

Jabber

I attended Jabber Jazz and got a really good overview of the Jabber platform and what they've been doing with it as an open source project. The speaker (Dave Smith - also known as Dizzy apparently) was a good presenter, describing the baseline of what's been built and really outlining clearly what Jabber is good at (presence, small and relatively infrequent messages) and where it's not (streaming large amount of binary data). It's easy to get excited about it, just because the technology is so cool.

The most interesting thing was an example of how the Jabber protocol had been embedded into Apple's iChat application which is apparently using it for the rendezvous component of the chatting functionality.

Ruby

Attended the Power and Philosophy of Ruby talk, given by Matz - the author of Ruby. It was a really interesting talk - probably most interesting for me because Matz is a fascinating fellow, and a very entertaining speaker.

I thought about writing more about the talk, but Michael Radwin did a good job, so just look there.

Gus Wins!!!

And now the reason I was able to attend the Open Source Convention - Gus won the MacOS X Innovators Contest, and I was here to receive the award for him.

I hadn't quite clued into the fact that the awards were going to be announced at the keynote this morning though, so it was really stunning. So Gus didn't make a fool of himself - I got to instead.

end of the day, yesterday

I tried to last out the talk on the introduction to the Jakarta Commons
- mostly because I really wanted to get a sense of what had been
extruded from the Apache projects as various commonly methods, objects,
etc. As you can tell from my opening sentence, I didn't make it. The
presenters were mind-numbing in their monotone, even if they did seem
knowledable on the detail. I did get a gist of what was in there, but
clearly I'm going to have to dig through the code myself if I want to
really understand what's in there. I finally gave in and headed back to
the room, where I found my sweetie waiting for me to show up. We had
nice (if slow!) dinner in the hotel restaurant before I headed off to
schmooze at the Stonehenge party and she went exploring in the downtown
for a bit.

Some other interesting comments. While getting some books autographed by
Dave Thomas, I mentioned that I really didn't know all that much about
Ruby, but was hoping to learn some tomorrow (quite a number of sessions
on it here). He said that he'd noticed (anecdotally, of course) that
folks who started in Perl seemed to glom on to Ruby quite well, while
folks who started in Python didn't. He also said that folks seems to
either take a real liking to Ruby, or they just didn't care much about
it at all. It'll be interesting to see where I end up in this setup,
given I started in Perl (yeah, I still code it like it's perl 4) but
have recently been learning how cool and powerful Python really is.

Party

Well, if you ever have a chance to attend a party hosted by Stonehenge
Consulting, I highly recommend it. It seems a fair portion of the Open Source Convention took them up on their offer of such this evening, and we completely took over a night spot called "bar 71" in Portland. Quite the venue, and it was packed.

I spent the evening in the company of two fellows - Oliver and Andrew - who work for a bioinformatics company in Germany. What was amazing (to me) was that the bar was completely open all night long. The loons from Stonehenge even managed to wrangle having three alpaca's for the masses of us to look at and pet at the party. I had hoped to catch up with James Duncan Davidson while I was there, but frankly I never spotted him. In the meantime, I chatted with some folks from State Farm insurance who were using perl in their network administration, Andrew and Oliver from Dresden, Germany who were a perl and python programmer respectively, and a few others folks who's name completely escape me but seemed to be pretty reasonable fellows that I chatted with for a while.

At 11pm, I finally called it quits (I'd been there since 8pm) and walked on back to the hotel - some 12 blocks south. If that sounds far, then you've never seen how short the city blocks are in Portland. That's the rough equivilant of maybe 5 or 6 blocks, Seattle style.

Oh - and downtown here in COMPLETELY flat. Nary a bump. Not too bad walking back at 11pm either. There's definitely homeless here as well, but at least in the area I was walking through, they were far less agressive than I would have expected for a downtown core.

The amusing part of the walk home was some young lady who just couldn't find a bathroom. She was wearing a bakini top and not much of skirt - and what she had was around her ankles as she was relieving herself in front of a fairly large SUV on the side of the street. Nice figure, even if it was an awkward pose for her. Something you just don't quite expect to see while at an Open Source convention (to be fair, the ratio of men to women at the bar was more like 50 to 1).

Getting the most from MySQL and Java

Getting the most from MySQL and Java was a really good session. Lots of good details by the author of Conner/J for MySQL AB, mostly common sense stuff. I've snagged very detailed notes, but more over it was just a good general session.

Microsoft Office XML

I managed to swing into the session Microsoft Office Files Exposed which was bySimon St. Laurent and really gave a good overview of what XML features are in the Microsoft Office betas (and somewhat expected for Office 11, upcoming).

This time, however, I didn't take any notes - just sat and listened - the talk wasn't exactly conducive to lucid notes because most of the talk existed of giving examples and showing XML, which I sure as hell wasn't going to attempt to retype!

The gist of the talk could (outside of some really good detail on what happened internally with the XML) be summarized as: Yep, they're really exporting the data. Yep, it's really a very 1.0 "product", with a bunch of freakishness yet embalmed in there. The spreadsheet XML (spreadsheetML) appears to be "better" than the Word XML (WordML), and it all really amounts to a serialization of the Microsoft DOC/XLS format into XML. So they're not taking advantage of the hierarchical structure to improve Word or Excel, and they're not clear on what products will actually make it to the end users or not (InfoPath being a good example - a Microsoft analog of XDocs, which Microsoft is apparently denying is an Analog).

Book for Jeremy

Jeremy -

got your book - signed and all. Dave Thomas, by the way, was pleased to hear you liked the "no fluff, just stuff" speaking conference in Colorado. Either that or he's a really good ar.

power

One of the problems with taking notes on the iBook during these sessions is battery length. Fortunately, I've found a plug available in my next session (they brought Scripting Mac OS X with Python using AppleEvents
back!) so I'm recharging while I wait.

1 Year of PHP At Yahoo!, Lunch

Sat in on the 1 year of PHP at yahoo talk. It was good, except a tad too long for the time we had available. Michael Radwin was a good presenter and the slides are available online at http://public.yahoo.com/~radwin/.

While I was taking notes with Hydra, another person was in the session: Protecting the Innovation Premium -- Open Source Business Models So connected, we shared the notes. That was pretty damn cool.

This is the first time I've really used Hydra, and it's a very impressive thing while running in collabortive mode with a few other folks. Integrate this sort of functionality into Eclipse, or XCode, or project builder - damn, that'll be a killer development environment.

Lunch is on Microsoft, which must just love getting it's hand slapped for feeding people. The attitude is about what you'd expect in general - a lot of mistrust and lashing out at the "evil corporate giant" because of their comments towards Open Source/GPL. While I'm not personally a fan of GPL (BSD!!!), it's clear that Microsoft's previous marketing messages have offended the great majority base of users here in a sort of "personal" way. Strangely enough, the "unamerican" comment is the most often heard. Either folks being really pissed off or (the germans and brits) sort of laughing and saying "Yep! Definately unamerican!"

Talked to the SUN guys about this java.net thing while I was getting my brown-bag lunch, and asked him what was better about .NET from something like Sourceforge. The response was that Sun was trying to generate a community website LIKE sourceforge but not so "loosy goosy" - they wanted to make sure people's questions got answered, and they're actively outsourcing things they don't know how to do well (RSS feeds, blogs, wiki's, etc) to folks who do (O'Reilly in this case) - interesting tidbit.

Oh - annoyingly, the session Scripting Mac OS X with Python using AppleEvents was cancelled.

Open Source, Collaboration...

Well, Tim has covered quite a bit of territory over his keynote. I'm not really sure there was a single coherent message in there, but there were a number of interesting pieces.

One of his repeating themes was the collaboration was a key component about what was happening today - inside or outside of the open source movement. He spent a good couple of minutes talking about the architecture of software that reaps value out of individual actions - not just volunteerism, but also acts of "self interest" - for example building a software distribution network with Napster, or contributing to the personalization datasets of Amazon when you puchase a book.

Collaboration wasn't the only component of this talk, but it seemed to overlay a lot of the whole deal. I wish I'd written down his "three C's" slide - one of the others was "commodization" of software and how's it's interacting, but I personally didn't get the strong tie-in with commodization and collaboration. I expect the text of the keynote may be up later. Maybe I'll re-read it and see if something else stands out to me.

OSCON

Made it to Portland without any trouble. The train is definately the way to go to get down from Seattle. Portland looks to be a very walkable city (yes, it's my first time here), but to be honest I haven't gotten out there yet.

When I arrived last night, I ran into Kevin Altis, so I ate some dinner while catching a bit with him. He's co-chair of the python track here this year, and has been in Portland since '91.

So at the moment I'm in Tim OReilly's keynote. He's talking the paradigm shift with opening up specifications and software. In one sense, he really seems to be talking about Spolsky's Strategy Letter V, but he's taking a more web-services tack.

He's talking about "easy to use open source" products, and pointing out Amazon, Google, PayPal, etc. He's also tempering it a bit by disclaiming it won't solve every problem, but he's definitely in the midst of that "web services" paradigm thing.

More later...

How about a Nobel Prize for J.K. Rowling?

A good friend of mine in Columbia, MO has tried a couple of interesting online projects. Aside from having one of the first online galleries in Missouri, he's also a writer, artist, etc.

So he has a proposal that I'd like you to look at and consider: Giving a nobel prize to JK Rowling. Even if you disagree with the sentiment (which I think is reasonably good), pass the word along - http://www.nobelprizeforjo.com/.

Granted a lot of the Harry Potter hype is a marketing machine (Warner Bros) gone wild - but since when in the past century have people been lined up to READ A BOOK!

So hey- spread the word...

yet another blog? whoa.

Well,

Looks like I got selected to help betatest the Movable Type folk's latest creation: TypePad. I'm bound by a checkbox not to tell you about it, other than I can say I'm one of the beta testers.

So if you want to see the results of what I'm doing, take a peek at Crow - so named for the squaking, racous critters that inhabit the telephone lines around my house. Haven't a clue what I'll use another blog for, but I figure I'll give it a workout and see what I think.

I've really appreciated MovableType, so I kinda see this as a way to pay them back for the code they've made available.

Portland

Speaking of loving the pacific northwest, it looks like JDD is moving up to Portland. Seems to be quite the desired location for some other geeks as well.

I'll be heading down there for the OSCON tomorrow afternoon, and I'm thinking about trying to look up the mighty Panic offices while I'm in town. Well, they seem friendly anyway.

Speaking of OSCON, it appears that someone's enamored of the free TShirt they're providing. If you've ever seen me, you know I have far, far to many tshirts. I guess it's probably best they don't hand out pants at these conferences though. Still, I've always liked the Apple shirts from WWDC the best.

Tomorrow, the train. This is going to be a blast!

mornings

Usually I'm not awake enough to really enjoy them, but I love mornings like today's. It's right around 60 (F) outside, sunny, and low humidity. Feels sort of "crisp" without being too chilly. Basically, a beautiful morning.

I absolutely destroyed my diet yesterday, but enjoyed it. I figure if you're going to screw up your planned diet, at least get some value out of it. For me, it was some absolutely wonderful single-malt scotches. We sat on Nathan's front porch, had some scotch, and enjoyed the sunset. It just felt like a sort of casual evening, and boy did that work. Karen had curled up inside on the couch, fallen deep into a book, while Nathan and I chatted away the evening. As the sun went down, I recalled again how different the pacific northwest is from the midwest at similiar times - sunset would have been earlier, and the bugs would have eaten us alive sitting there on the porch. I do miss the midwest - my friends most especially - but there's a definite atraction to the climate here.

25,000

After weaving through post-fireworks traffic to sneak back home from the north, I rolled the car into my garage and noticed that the odometer read 25000. How often does THAT sort of round numbering happen?

We'd originally planned to enjoy the Seattle light show, but the opportunity came up to spend the afternoon and evening with some folks we'd never met before. So, since opportunity is the mother of invention, we decided to try it out, meet some new folks, and see what happened.

It was a really wonderful evening. They have a house in the midst of major structural rennovation sitting about 60 feet about the puget sound up near Deception Pass. I'm guess this map is somewhere close - although I didn't exactly get a GPS reading of the locale.

The view was astounding - looking out, you could see Whidbey Island, Hope Island, part of the Swinhomish indian reservation and a huge amount of undeveloped land. When we first got there, the tid was still quite low - so we spent some time walking along the sandy and rocky beach. When we left (about 10pm-ish), the tide was all the way up and we were watching distant fireworks over the water. What a beautiful place. So we met George, Rita, and their daughter Angela. George is a ferryboat captain for the Washington State ferry service, and Rita is a "take care of everything" born-entrepenuer. Born in St. Petersburg, so was the most fanatic hostess I've ever met. Steaks, Shrimp, and Shrooms on the barbeque, I don't know how many bottles of wine (I was designated driver, so I didn't partake there), fresh rasberrys, strawberrys, and a rhubarb crisp for desert. Man, good food, great people.

So that pretty much covers my fourth. Karen's hit the sack, Nathan just took off to head across the downtown section of Seattle to get back home (he lives over in Capitol Hill), and I'm actually a tad bit tired at this point.

Maciej and Dave

Yeah, checking the blogs before I pass out for the evening. And tonight, a real gem: Maciej talking about Dave Winer's and his recent hissy-fit. It's a wonderful piece, really. Gus and I were commenting to each other a day or three ago about how amusing it was to see people ripping Dave Winer to shreds for his emotionally juvenile stunt of "taking his toys and going home" - those toys being his blog. Lots of people have had a say, but I gotta admit Maciej's is really the most amusing to me.

I stopped reading Dave Whiner's (er, Winer's) stuff quite some time ago - he had some good ideas, but as Maciej said: he has the emotional maturity of a hamster. Specifically, a bipolar, sanctimonious hamster with weak technical writing skills

Inrageous off the air...

Well, looks like Inrageous and a few other sites are off the air for a bit. Dunno what happened (I don't monitor them), but there's no ping response and MTR/Traceroute ends at stl-colo-01.primary.net. Only 48ms from Seattle, but that next step is a doozy...

sleep, conference

well, I didn't last very long working at home last night. I worked some from my deskop, my laptop, and even Karen's desktop - trying to stay awake. I finally gave up and crashed, but it feels like it did me a lot of good to get 9 hours of sleep.

After my eyes blurred so badly I couldn't read the monitor anymore, I switched to the high contrast output mechanism for reviewing the upcoming conference sessions (yeah, I printed them out). Still not 100% on what I'm going to go see, but there's some really intriguing ones I'd love to hear about. Jeremy Zawodny is doing a session on MySQL scaling pains. Aside from wanting to actually meet Jeremy (I've been reading his blog for a while), I'm really curious about the topic. I've made plenty of bold faced assertions - it'd be sort of nice to hear some real-live details from someone who's done it.

There's a huge number of python and ruby sessions that are intriguing to me just because I don't know all that much about Ruby, and I've just started digging into Python in my spare time. There's a session on scripting MacOS X with Python. And just for "WTF?!", I want to go see what the OSAF guys are saying about Chandler

and then a miracle occured...

You remember taking those physics courses where the professor would babble out something akin to: "...and it's obvious that..." or "...which leads directly to..." And invariably, that would be right at the point of an intuitive leap that you just hadn't gotten?

Well, I saw a farside or something that once had "...and then a miracle occurs...", and just loved it. Wish I had that pic for today, because it feels like that happened to me.

I'm heading to the OReilly Open Source Convention next week. Last minute whing-bang, oh-my-god sort of thing. I didn't think there'd be a snowball's chance in hell (the hot one, not the Dante lowest level one) of me making it there. It was only made possible because of a huge assist from a buddy of mine.

So now I have a room reserved, registration at the convention, and the tickets for the Amtrak down to Portland next tuesday evening. Amazing! Karen may even be dropping down for a day too...

The next step - well, figuring out what I'm going to sit in on while I'm down there. Any recommendations? I've already got the trip to Powell's on the list...

grasping

Today hasn't been great for getting things done. Don't know why, really - I just don't seem to be able to focus and resolve things that are sitting on my plate. I'm still a little tired from my trip to Iowa, so maybe I'm just running really low on energy today. A couple of scripts have been updated, direries sync'd, and all that configuration goodness kept up to date. Data is flowing nicely, probably better than it has in quite a while to be honest. But it still feels like slogging through molasses today.

WWDC is over, and the OReilly OSCON down in portland is getting set to start up next week. I'm not getting to any conferences this year, so it's really just watching them all from a distance. Looks like there's been some good information shared there too (or in the case of OSCON, there looks to be some really interesting tutorials I would have liked to attend).

cell phone

Having a cell phone came in awfully handy today.

My usual route to work takes me through the intersection at 5th Ave and Denny, right next to the er Plaza. Well, it turns out that the lights were flickering in that intersection, and about less than useless.

The expected results happened - the traffic on Denny decided it would just keep pushing through, and the traffic from 5th Ave got all pissy and started pushing into the intersection at the same time. All the while, I was trying to figure out how to cross without becoming that little green squished frogger icon from that video game.

Well, once I was across I yanked out the cell phone and gave ole 911 a call. Took a few passes to get across the message, but they were really cool once they realized that traffic was getting snarled and accidents were building up to a critical mass.

So - if you're wandering around Seattle, I'd avoid that intersection for a bit. At least until they get those lights fixed.