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the build is stable now ;-)  this is a long day summary, but an interesting read...

the official oscon general conference kicked off today.  for some reason i feel compelled to point out the odd times.  0845?  it is just odd in the 15 minute increment zone...seems to throw the rest of the day (and my personal body clock) off!

oscon did a cool thing by putting up an iCal version of their calendar.  with the new features of outlook 2007, i can merge the views and drag/drop sessions i want to attend.  someone else put up http://oscal.quxx.info which is a mashup/share/calendar type app and is pretty slick.  i like the concept (if you create an account) -- see who else is going to the session and what other sessions they are going to -- nice idea for all conferences to follow.

okay, the keynote started (don't get me started on the word again).  what is odd here again is the 'keynote' is really a series of 15 minute vignette presentations.  tim o'reilly went first and talked about five principles for open source that are for the future.  i didn't write them down as i was intently trying to listen and determine if o'reilly was as visionary as people were saying he was...the jury is still out.  his talk was a "C" for me.  he did make reference to the windows live vp as seen below (and in a good way).

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next up was a guy from greenplum, scott yara.  he was doing an analogy to open source and rock and roll.  i think it lost some people.  he showed a few video clips with some f-bombs in it and made references to girls in vegas at one point...i'm not easily offended (nor was i here), but it just struck me as odd to do in such a wide general session -- to someone evaluating that community, is that the first impression you want?  at any rate, his message was simple about open source: keep it real. keep it dangerous. (and dangerous in the sense that it keeps people thinking/innovating.)  this talk: B-

next was anil dash, an evangelist from six apart.  the topic was making web 2.0 suck less.  i liked this guy.  a lot.  he really grabbed my attention in both his style/preparation, but in his message.  that is, until, it turned into a commercial for six apart products.  anil really had some great points that applied to the greater software community and had great comic relief while maintaining valid points.  i wish he would have saved the plug for open jobs and new products for another time...he lost some street cred with me there.  by far though the best session so far for me.  talk: B+ (would have been an A).

i walked out on the last one -- it lost my attention too fast.

afte a little break, my team went to the oscamp area to make good on what we committed to the other day and the session we signed up for:

OCamp MSFT Topic

we had a decent turnout of about 8 people total (not including our team).  we got comments about how appreciative people were that we were there...and of course where we sucked.  was there again and after listening for a while launched a Jair-had on us about the social aspects.  i still have to say, i love his passion.  we added to the oscamp wiki with some raw notes on things discussed was there and filmed the whole thing so hopefully we can put it up on their site soon.  Jair didn't want to be on the video in either audio/video form so we have to edit that part out -- but only by his request...no other areas will be edited.  it is a shame he wants to remain so anonymous...i don't get it.  there were some other people discussing microsoft at oscamp as well.  brandon was doing a great job with oscamp and really made everyone feel comfortable.

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after that i went to the expo hall.  saw companies like google, yahoo, local linux/oss groups, portland state university (and their rockets), ticketmaster was recruiting, and some random sponsors.  we got the guy from google to take a picture of our team (maybe jason will post that).

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i then went to a prototype session by stuart halloway of relevance llc.  it was pretty good.  stuart knows his stuff.  when referring to namespaces, he said: "you have namespaces in c++, java has packages, and c# -- do they have packages or did they pull out a thesaurus when they stole namespaces?" (paraphrasing of course, expect the stole word) ;-)  i smiled.  it's odd that we seem to think that you are only smart if you are the originator of the idea.  but if others recognize a good idea and adopt it, then you're just a loser.  whatever.

i stepped in to stuart's next session on streamlined, but left because it felt too commercial. 

the last one i went to was the rubyclr talk by john lam.  it was good.  he really did a good job explaining his approach.  jimh from the ironpython team was there and nodding his head on why john had to take some approaches he did -- i thought that was great...some validation for john at least.  ironpython is talking tomorrow.

thursday evening we are hosting a dinner for some guys and we'll see how that goes.  during the day tomorrow (thursday), jason will be giving his talk.

Please enjoy some of these other recent posts...

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