Gems from OSCON

I'm going through my OSCON notes and compiling my notes and a list of interesting websites. The websites will be found here (using my oscon2005 delicious tag): Yaml - This is the markup language that the Ruby on Rails is using (rather than xml). There are bindings for various languages. The next time I'm thinking about using xml I'll try this. Dojo - Ajax toolkit. Includes interesting features such as graceful browser degradation. Alex Russell (the main dev) gave a presentation on this. CodeZoo - Not just java, now has python components. (And ruby too). Greasemonkey - Attended Aaron's session on Greasemonkey. I've heard of this a bit, but never bothered to check it out previously. There are some pretty cool hacks here. Now the user is really in control of their own web experience (also allows "long tail" feature development). Diveintogreasemonkey - the book. Housingmaps.com - This has also been out for a while, but it's a good example of "Riping, mixing, and burning" the web. Findory - Something mentioned in Tim's(?) keynote, could be a more intelligent way to aggregate blogs since is uses something similar to bayesian filtering to determine blogs/posts you may be interested in. (Organizing the tag soup mess???) Babynamevoyager - This babynamevoyager itself wasn't presented, but Tim used a tool very similar to this to show the growth in python and ruby and the decline in perl (also a jab at larry wall to get perl 6.0 out). Interestingly enough the author of this tool was sitting behind me in the plane home, and says that they are thinking about open sourcing the tool.... Jonathon Schwartz - no link to him, just an interesting note that immediately after he said how dumb open sourcing java would be (same old scared of forks complaint), he said that "Sun will be releasing ALL it's software as open source ..... or free" (he seemed to remember that he just said he wasn't open sourcing java, and then added the "or free" part). I found it humorous. Roml - Semasiology of Open Source Part II. Probably the best talk of the conference (which seemed to include most of the "who's who of open source" in the audience). Very funny, again there aren't any links to the slides, but here is Robert Kaye's report. Roml compared how people of the dark ages learned to read (and that reading was linked to listening, because all reading was oral) to learning to read open source code. He made a funny jab at GPL 3 (because one of the definitions of copyright is to publicly perform, and reading out loud is a public perfomance(or was way back when), exposing web services (on top of gpl'd software) will be participating/running the code, and grounds for releasing source). (Note: I talked with several members of FSF who also confirmed this (they also said that another feature of V3 will be compatibility with the Apache licences (after they convince Apache to change their licence accordingly). The preceeding sentence is serious.) Roml also spoke of the importance of the invention of whitespace, which delighted Guido (who was right in front of me), but also Larry Wall found it quite amusing as well (he was directly behind me). He opined that the only difference between poetry and prose was whitespace... Lang Origami - One of the most fascinating keynotes was Robert Lang, who created TreeMaker to allow him to create complex origami. He showed a few of the very intricate models he had designed from a single piece of paper (such as a rattlesnake with 8000 scales), as well as practical applications (collapsing a 20m lense to fit in a space ship). Nessus, Absinthe, Metasploit, Wikto, Ettercap, whax - Security/hacking tools discussed by Nitesh Dhanjani (who performs security audits form E&Y). Hopefully his slides get on the website (he said they would be) since they contained some interesting info ;) IronPython - This was an interesting talk given by Jim Hugunin. Egged on by Miguel de Icaza, he showed some cool integration between Avalon (vista?) where he displayed an xml gui using python. He then scaled it, then rotated it both 90 and 45 degrees. Then he rotated the individual buttons 45 degrees. Then he bound a text to speech event to each button to create a speak n spell. There was also some really nice debugging support in visual studio, which Miguel claimed should be supported in sharp develop. I talked a little with Jim afterward and I think the main point that he wanted to get across was that you should build ontop of a common vm (clr or java vm) rather than the c python runtime, since you get the benefit of 100s of man years of work. He claimed that without any performance work, IronPython outperformed (c)python in the general use cases. (Guido was hacking away at his new clock during this). Howtoons - Another cool keynote. A few geeks who create educational comics illustrating how to build things such as a marshmellow gun.

tags: oscon  howtoons  greasemonkey  dojo  ironpython  findory  roml  codezoo  yaml  

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