The opening talk about Processing was really cool. On Sunday, I’d talked with Schwern and Tom Limoncelli about women’s participation in computer science. Schwern mentioned some neat visual programming environments. I think that Processing seemed like something in that direction. I want to play with it!

The overcoming bias talk was pretty boring. The idea was good, but Robert Hanson didn’t really have the crowd with him. He said one thing that stuck out in my notes: “Private advantage but at a social cost”. It was nice that he spoke before the Microsoft guy.

So microsoft is launching an opensource portal/marketing site. Nat’s questions about where microsoft was going with it’s litigation really put him on the spot, and the guy didn’t give a real answer.

The Pirat Partiet guy was awesome! Rick Falkvinge started the Pirate party in sweden to encourage copyright reform. They’re going for 4% of voters in 2009 (i think!). Campaign contributions are unregulated in Sweden, so you can donate here.

Steve Yegge spoke last about branding. Then the keynote sessions were done!
I saw Amy Hoy’s When Interface Design Attacks talk. A great distillation of a lot of UX material. I learned a new word: satisfice. It’s what a user does when they can’t do what they really want to do – use the next best thing or give up.

After that, I went to the Mahara presentation by Penny Leach. Penny is the maintainer of the postgresql port of Moodle. The idea behind Mahara to maintain ePortfolios throughout a student’s education career. For example, there’s hooks for creating a CV and creating/sending cover letters to employers. I like the idea of tracking that type of thing automatically. I learned that my husband’s high school the high school my husband teaches at uses Moodle later. Ton of functionality, seems like a great product. The talk wasn’t well attended – I wonder if fewer university/education folks came to OSCON this year. Penny mentioned mochikit as a good javascript library.

I also saw Larry Wall’s Perl 6 talk – i need to look up implicit list comprehension and DFA/NFA regex syntax. Lots of neat stuff, I wish Perl 6 were coming sooner.

Luke Kanies also gave a talk about Puppet. I thought it was great, but heard some negative stuff about it from someone else. I’m going to give it a try, but cfengine is my fallback plan.

This is from my notes.. no real organization.

First, I saw Tim O’Reilly do his radar talk. It seemed like a re-hash of some ideas about open data I’d heard him talk about before (last year?). His success factors for open source projects were: frictionless distro, collaborative development, freedom to build/adapt/extend and the freedom to fork.

He also mentioned something I’m interested in – getting more people involved in open source. He specifically mentioned mozilla => firefox and said that they “rearchitected for participation”. I imagine that the community took advantage of all four success factors, so that’s what he’s referring to, but I didn’t take any more notes on it.

He also mentioned memcached and hadoop as projects to watch.

The first session I attended was Josh Berkus’ Performance Whack-a-mole. He divided problem databases into three categories – Web (CPU-bound), Online Transaction Processing (CPU and/or I/O bound) and Data Warehousing (I/O bound). He also suggested that basic setup checks and configuration should take about an hour. A lot of common sense advice in one place, with quite a few tool suggestions I’m going to check out.

Next I attended the Open Design talk from the Chandler project. I really enjoyed this talk. I wish they would have had more time to discuss examples of their decision making process. Based on what I saw of Chandler, it seems like their methodology is really working. They have a lead designer (Mimi Yin) who has the final design decision making authority. They really spelled out that consensus is not required to move forward, and that voting is used to get a feel for what the voters think, not to make decisions. In design, I think that’s critical for maintaining a coherent design and direction. They said they may be releasing Chandler at the end of August. I took a lot more notes – I may post separately about this later.

I spent the rest of my time talking with people about women in open source, Perl and PostgreSQL (at the booth). The food was really good and they had beer most of the time in the exhibit hall. Good call organizers!