Today's dispatch from your's truly is about the law of averages. So far, I would have to rank this Open Source Convention as average. Some things have worked well, while others have had all the grace and elegance of dropping a bowling ball into a marble bathtub. Luckily, things turned around for the better today.
Andy Hertzfeld's keynote was fantastic! He showed nearly 120 slides that illustrated how the open source revolution came about. What I really liked about Andy's talk was his honest appraisal of where open source products need to improve in order to succeed. His list included: better GUI design, friendlier and more intuitive programs, solid documentation, and teamwork. Before the keynote ended, however, Tim O'Reilly brought glad tidings from Sun Microsystems in the form of an announcement that the StarOffice suite is being open sourced under the GPL (GNU Public License). Ahhh. Freedom from Microsoft Office at last! You can find out more at the OpenOffice web site.
Despite all the good news, Murphy's Law took its toll on my schedule. I went to O'Reilly CTO Jon Orwant's session titled, "Rebuilding Postapocalyptic Civilization with Perl, Part II," but Larry Wall took up most of the dual presentation time with his keynote. Flustered, I walked up and down the stairs of the conference area searching for something interesting.
One of my BSD friends caught up with me. He asked, "Why are you walking around?" I answered, "It's good exercise, and I'm trying to get a workout." That was a blatant lie. As soon as everyone left, I went to my true destination: A 30-minute massage from the on-site therapy center, which was like listening to that '80s song from Ferris Bueller's Day Off called "Oh, yeah."
Before I could make my way to the computer room, the 11 foot mascot for Jabber.com, a woman on stilts, nearly kicked me in the groin when I accidently walked into her while rounding a corner. I've never been kicked with legs that long, and I can't imagine it's good for having children. Desperate to get lunch, I challenged her to limbo through an eight-foot door to the exhibition hall. It didn't work -- she dragged me by the hand to meet the developers behind her product. Oh well, I guess a little bit of Comdex never hurt anyone.
A quick lunch with Ramsus Lerdorf, inventor of PHP (neat guy), and Jason Hunter, the Java Servlets king (I still hate him because his book is doing so well). Then I was off to meet with Greg Stein, inventor of a cool tool called WebDAV. DAV is an open source tool that stands for "Distributed Authoring and Versioning." It is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol, which allows users to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote web servers. Sound appealing? Did you know that Office 2000 already has limited support for DAV? Neither did I. Consequently, we hope to get an O'Reilly book out on the topic as soon as possible.
Late afternoon brought us to the Bahama Jam in the outside tent. This was a classic O'Reilly-quality party for people of all ages to enjoy. It quickly evolved into a crazy volleyball game with a beachball and a support wire, followed by a limbo competition. Tim O'Reilly, Gina Blaber, and Laura Lewin, all joined in the action from Team O'Reilly, proving once again that we're not all total geeks when we just have the proper amount of alcho...err, I mean, uhh...incentive. I lost the limbo, by the way, falling down on my head, but I still managed to garner some applause, probably out of pity.
By the way, I really want to compliment the creativity of the O'Reilly marketing team for coming up with coasters that read "Tim's Irish Ale," which is brewed to perfection. This is opposed to "Bill's Wicked Bitter," brewed in Redmond, Washington, and known to be unstable. These beer mops were a big hit.
Finally, late night brought us to the Randall Schwartz party on Alvarado Street. This was a classic bar scene, but it was great to meet all the people gathered there. I should publicly thank Simone Paddock from O'Reilly's PR group for not killing me when I came back and won our first pool game (I scratched 5 times). Besides, nothing can get people talking faster than a little cutthroat. We met people from both SAS and Jabber; it was great to see both companies looking into open source tools.
All in all, an average day of talks, but the evening was still great fun. See you tomorrow with a wrap-up from Monterey.
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