Conferences Roundup
I’ve been to a lot of conferences over the past few months, here’s a short summary of them:
May ‘07: Toorcon Seattle (BETA)
I wrote a separate post about this, see here.
July ‘07: Ubuntu Live
I took the train down to Portland with Andy, which is so much more enjoyable than flying, I don’t even know where start. Unfortunately, Amtrak’s trains on the west cost are quite slow, and at least between Seattle and Portland, don’t have priority on the track. The trip home was delayed over two hours because the freight company was using the tracks, so we were stuck in the middle of nowhere for a while.
My happiness with mass transit continued after getting off the train, when I walked a few blocks from the Amtrak station and hopped on Portland’s light rail, which is absolutely wonderful. It dropped me off right in front of my hotel, across the street from the convention center where the conference took place. And best of all, this was all within the free ride zone. Chris and Steve arrived from California by air and also were impressed with the continence of the rail system, which took them from the airport right to the hotel, for under $3.
Fortunately, the first leg of light rail starts operating here in Seattle in 2009, and will eventually stop a block and a half from my apartment. More information on that here.
Onto the conference itself, there were some excellent keynotes, including Mark Shuttleworth (founder of Canonical/Ubuntu) and Eben Moglen (from the SFLC). Eben Moglen’s talked about GPLv3, and also encouraged everyone to shift their thinking from “open source” to “free software”. He had a very positive response from the crowd, which I think is great news.
There was also talk about the effect “web 2.0″ has on software freedom, specifically about how we’ve been moving from proprietary software on the desktop to proprietary software on the web. This time however, we loose control of who controls and has access to our data, not only the file format it’s stored in.
Chris and I are both irritated by all the attention web applications have been getting recently. We both hope developers will start writing great free desktop software again some day soon. The linux desktop should be innovative, NOT just the best shell to the web.
The sessions weren’t as technical as we had hoped, but we all certainly learned something new. Sadly, the BoF I arranged was a non-event, and I was completely blown off by everyone from Canonical.
Someone from OpenMoko had a booth at the vendor area showing off the Neo1978, and I have to say, I don’t like it. It’s rather big and bulky, but more importantly, the screen is inset from the case, which I find to be very unappealing. The lack of EDGE or WiFi is also a big deal breaker, and software is very unintuitive and clunky, but I see there’s good progress being made there.
July ‘07: OSCON
I didn’t pay for any sessions at OSCON, but the exhibition hall was HUGE, and I spent almost half the day there. Intel dominated the floor with people demoing their new Thread Building Blocks framework (which looks very cool), as well as their new Moblin hardware platform (which doesn’t interest me at all).
Mozilla also had a solid presence there. Chris and I had a good chat with someone about XUL, which I still need to follow up on.
Sun was there, but I hope nobody else tried to use any of the computers they had on display, some very pissed off looking woman yelled at me and scared me off. Fortunately, I did manage to get some OpenSolaris DVDs before running away. I need to find time to install Nexenta and see what all the ZFS fuss is about.
July ‘07: Facebook Developer Garage
At work, we developed a Facebook application, so I figured I’d show up and represent.
There were three people from Facebook who talked a bit about the platform and took questions/feedback from the crowd, but were all very careful not to talk about future plans.
The Facebook Platform is interesting to startups because it provides instant access to a huge user base, and has already proven to be a successful way to bootstrap a product.
Overall, most people were extremely excited about the platform, but at the same time, had complaints about functionality and features. The representatives from Facebook acknowledged everything that was brought up, but because of their policy to not speculate on the future, they made no commitments, and I don’t think anyone left feeling confident that specific things would change. I suspect a Windows developer would feel the same way having run into problems or limitations with their proprietary platform.
Although they claim otherwise, Facebook is a closed, proprietary platform, much like Windows or OS X. As a developer for this platform, you’re limited to a small set of functionality that could change underneath you any day, and may not work as documented.
Facebook is about more than social networking, they are creating a new type of operating system, much like Google has been doing with their online web-based applications.
Personally, I’m not ready to loose the freedom to tinker with applications that I use, or have my data stored online (and possibly owned) by a third party. If this is the case, I’ve lost my freedom, and might as well go back to using Windows.
August ‘07: DEFCON
I’ve been saying I’d go to DEFCON for a few years, and this time I actually made it! Just about everyone I know was there, so it would have been a very boring weekend in Seattle had I not. Generally I enjoy the social aspect of conferences more than the talks themselves, and DEFCON offers plenty of other things to do besides attending talks all day. Some friends got second place in the aCTF contest, next year I look forward to being more active in both that and the badge hacking competition.
Categorized as Technology, Conferences, Technology