forget it, i'm not calling it a keynote ;-)

the morning session (which started out being a very, very thin crowd -- parties must have been good) started with a data visualization talk by ben fry.  honestly, i wish you could have been here for that.  the demonstrations were awesome.  the visualizations weren't pie charts, etc.  they weren't mashups.  think data meets industrial light and magic, pixar, or your favorite animation/special effect/interactive big-dog.  ben showed a cool visualisation of apache log files that looked like a flower blooming and you could create new 'stems' on it (best i can describe it).  he also showed a cool one demonstrating a correlation between baseball salaries and performance...with the ability to change the point in time in the season -- so you can see who is worth the money...as a baseball fan this was cool (note: yankees don't appear to be getting a good ROI).  he did some other ones with music and images that was just unreal...it was very cool and i hope there are videos online you can search for.

next up is robin hanson on a discussion on 'overcoming bias' which i'm not really jiving this early in the morning -- especially after ben's demonstrations.  maybe it's me, but i want geek stuff.  i think his information is probably interesting, but let's be real, i just woke up -- and half these guys are probably hung over from hanging out with the mozilla party all night.  or maybe i'm just not on the same intellectual plane -- which is a fair assumption.  i'll probably go back to his site later, but for a 15 minute slot it is perhaps too much 'heavy stuff' for such a short discussion.

next up is bill hilf from microsoft.  see here for announcements.  even in the setup there are jabs at the mother ship, etc.

now is rick falkvinge (of the pirate party) with copyright regime vs. civil liberties.  irony that microsoft is wedged between 'overcoming bias' and a discussion on copyrights? ;-)  rick showed that during their last election in sweden, the pirate party yielded 0.63% of the vote...which got their party in the top 10, the youth vote putting them at 4th position.  "poor lady justice has a problem."  rick talks about the threat of losing postal secret as a result of ensuring copyright infringement doesn't exist.  what is the platform?:

• free file sharing and sampling
• shorten copyright time
• ban drm
• abolish patents
• strengthen privacy, due process
• transparent government

i like listening about copyright.  i initially became intrigued at different thought process at a previous presentation at oscon actually by lawrence lessig who has some opinions on the matter.  rick is very passionate about this topic and very well spoken.  i'm enjoying this dialogue.  rick ends by saying that no politicians presentation would be complete without talking about campaign donations -- and notes that donations in sweden are not regulated ;-).

final discussion is entitled 'how to ignore marketing and become irrelevant in two days' with steve yegge.  you may know the name as he is from google and ported the rails framework to javascript.  steve's here talking about branding and does it matter.  i love these conversations as well.  he talks about new coke vs. coke classic, turboc vs. quickc, etc.  great conversation, steve was entertaining and engaging...invite him back for longer times.

overall a good/better mix of opening session content.

at oscon this morning, microsoft unveiled a new web site outlining positions on open source strategy.  the goal is to provide transparency into microsoft's perspective on OSS and a place where evidence and information can be shared.

you can visit the new site here: Open Source at Microsoft.

you might ask, 'what about port25, isn't that what it was supposed to be?' and you'd have a valid question.  port25 is the site for the open source software lab at microsoft.  it will continue to be a source for technical information with the oss technical community versus anything outlining an oss strategy.

so what else is microsoft doing in oss land?

microsoft partnered with SpikeSource in an agreement to certify all the SpikeIgnited solutions on the Windows platform.

what else?  how about microsoft's intention to submit the microsoft shared source licenses to the OSI for approval?  more details will come as the licenses are submitted to the process.  personally i think this is great.  the OSI process is a very open and public process where the licenses are vetted/commented on in open forum with the OSI.  you can read about the shared source licenses here.  this is a good thing for microsoft and the open source community.  i love the microsoft permissive license (Ms-PL) and what it provides for developers as well as certain protection it provides...it's been described as BSD-like, and is pretty good and simple, easy to understand.

so that's what is going on in microsoft open source land...we're looking forward for more to come!  today john lam will be demonstrating and talking about ironruby and the dynamic language runtime at oscon...looking forward to that one!

what?! a session at oscon about generating microsoft office document formats?  has he gone mad?  that is what i wanted to know so i sat in on michael koziarski's session on this topic.

recognize the name?  you should if you are a rails developer...koz is part of the rails core team.  great guy, smart dude.  fun to listen to -- very dynamic.

anyhow, i went to this session as the description read that microsoft developers had been able to generate well formatted office documents for a long time, so why not bring some love to the open source world.  i hopped in about five minutes late to the session and didn't hear the setup, but the gist of it was the problem statement i gathered of needing to generate document formats (word, pdf, odf, xls, etc.) based on data and in the format the user chooses.  oh yeah, and through rails.

michael walked us through the research he did, citing various aspects of choices:

• ms office apis: only on windows, com, they aren't .net developers, complicated api's, no pdf support, design changes may be challenged
• pdf-writer: expensive design experience, no .doc conversion support
• rich text format: archaic meta information, no .doc support, expensive design changes
• LaTeX: see rich text format, oh an no pdf support
• HTML: conversion utilities were horrible
• ODF: open standard, x-plat tools, simplified design lifecycle.

guess which one won -- odf.

michael discussed the two primary problems needing to be resolved with using ODF: creation and conversion.  the creation was the simpler and required understanding of the structure of an ODF document (which is a zip file with manifests and content much like openxml docs from office 2007).  he notes that there is one folder called "Configurations2" that he has no idea what it does, but deleting it did not affect the doc :-).  although the ODF format is xml, it involves over 24 namespaces which presented some challenges in creation (i.e., why didn't they just use Builder in Ruby?) for simple elements (an image requires 4 different namespaces alone). 

after they perfected the creation mechanism, they needed conversion -- on the fly.  this proved to be surprisingly difficult.  why?  well there is no command line output in openoffice (the design tool) for creating the converted documents.  so thus, introduce UNO.  it is a bridge to openoffice for various languages -- essentially a COM interface.  but then came michael's other problem...no ruby bindings.  argh.  but there was a python one.

michael pointed out that he could have taken the time to create/finish a ruby binding, but why.  he merely had to understand the implementation of the python one and make it work.  there were issues with the python one, namely that it required X11...to be running...with a logged in user.  yikes.  because of this they had to do some re-architecting of the solution.  it sounds quite slick and echoed software/services messaging.  basically the odf docs were initially stored in amazon s3 storage.  then using amazon sqs (queuing service) another server would pull them out and do the conversion and put them back in the desired format.  michael articulated one issue with this as the amazon s3 servers are replicated across multiple servers...so when they uploaded an object from new zealand to s3, the server in northern california might request something that isn't replicated yet -- so they had to build in a retry mechanism as well.

at the end of the day their system works.  admittedly michael has some reservations of scale, but it works for the business problem at hand.  i emailed michael afterwards and asked if he considered using the odf converter for openxml that is open sourced to provide interop...not sure if that would help or not.  apparently openoffice is producing an odftoolkit as well that has "conversion" in their diagram that might be beneficial for odf development in the future.

that wrapped up day 1 for me today.  there are a few parties tonight, maybe i'll go, likely not.  stay tuned tomorrow for microsoft news at oscon as bill hilf is a part of the keynote...er i mean general session.

okay, now in a session for php developers -- or maybe rails developers...don't know yet.

this session is from simon minnee from silverstripe, a cms solution provider.  simon quickly adds this disclaimer:

this presentation is not intended to be a language war.  he admits that he is a novice with regard to Rails versus what he's presenting, etc.  de admits, in fact, that his understanding is naive.  he says "i just thought the title would be edgy.  forgive me."

hmm...clever simon, clever -- got me in the door.

he talks about their choice using PHP over Rails:

PHP	Rails
gets the job done	productive framework with lots of cool stuff
language people love to hate	very trendy
variety of hosting options	harder to host
good NZ gov't acceptance	too new for gov't

simon talks first about the use of the PHP5 __call() method...essentially enabling the creation of 'magic methods' that are implicitly defined.  i'm not really getting this as i can't read the code from afar and he's covering it pretty fast.  apparently the decks are available at http://silverstripe.com/rails-envy. 

now we're talking aggregation -- adding versioning to DataObject (as an example -- admittedly criminally oversimplified).

okay, 20 minutes later and he's done with his talk...um, wow.  no envy elimination here.  simon mentioned some stuff with defineMethods functions that i think if i had a deeper understanding of the benefits...i'm not sure this session did a service to other merits of PHP5.

i'm trying to reach out to the author of silverlight tetris.  i don't speak spanish, but tried to post a note on the contact page, but got an error.  if anyone happens to know jose, please have him contact me (in english as i don't speak spanish).