Two Weeks of Linux (part 1): Thoughts on OSCON

Two weeks ago today I was in Portland, Oregon, into my second full day of sessions at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference.

I'm not a compulsive blogger, nor am I a good note-taker. While I had my notebook with me during most of the conference, I spent most of my time in IRC sessions with other attendees. So my thoughts here are going to be short on details.

Some comments on the conference logistics:

• Obviously the attendance was greater than expected. The hotel overbooked their rooms (tell me why again that hotels and airlines are allowed to do this?) so many attendees had to stay somewhere else.
  
• Again due to the high attendance, the wireless network was at times virtually unusable. Some Kismet scans I took during the conference showed a grand total of 8 access points with the OSCON ssid. Personally I would have installed more APs, and I certainly would have used some sort of bandwidth throttling at the internet gateway. Check out the conference Wiki 2005 suggestions page for more gripes in this area.
  
• Something that is probably very hard for conference organizers to get right is how to know what size room to book for a session. I attended some sessions that were in rooms much too small, while others were vastly oversized for the number of attendees.
  

The Tuesday night extravaganza was fun. While Larry Wall's State of the Onion was mildly interesting, I was much more taken with Paul Graham's talk on "Great Hackers". If you've read his book Hackers & Painters, some of the things he talked about would be familiar, but to me it was food for thought. I've worked with great hackers, and it's true: they are unique folks and they can be hard to retain in one place for long.

I had not experienced a Damian Conway performance/presentation before. What an entertainer this guy is! Somehow being able to tie together Perl 6, Klingon, and cellular automata togther into a cohesive, laughter-filled speech, well you had to see it to believe it.

There were really only two keynote speakers that I was really impressed with: Tim O'Reilly and David Rumsey. I attended all of the keynotes, but these were the only two that could hold my attention. In a room that big, if the speaker is not dynamic, and doesn't have a compelling presentation to give, you lose me in about 5 minutes. I was really disappointed by the keynote from Weta Digital on Lord of the Rings. That really could have wowed the audience, but it was a real sleeper.

One of the most interesting sessions I attended was with Dan Gillmor from the San Jose Mercury News. He has a new O'Reilly book out called We The Media about grassroots journalism. He had a lot of thought-provoking ideas, and some news sites that are entirely staffed by volunteers. The most compelling site that he showed us was the Center for Cooperative Research and their complete 9/11 timeline. This is a very cool site and you should definitely check it out. A neat feature they have is the ability to view the timeline by theme, allowing you to see in color various aspects of the politics surrounding the news.

Another very good session was called Building A Spam Firewall. It was hosted by someone from Barracuda Networks. They sell a managed solution using these boxes, but it's a completely open-source deal. Basically it's a box running Linux, Postfix, and a package called amavisd, which calls any number of anti-spam and anti-virus programs. Your incoming mail comes into port 25, postfix sends it through amavisd for spam/virus processing, and then out a second postfix port that you define. Then it goes to your real MTA for your organization. Pretty cool.

I totally missed out on the Stonehenge party Wednesday night. Even if I had managed to get one of their neon green shirts to be admitted, I was in need of some rest by the time the O'Reilly author signing was done.

One bonus of being at OSCON was that I finally got to meet my Linux Unwired co-authors: Edd Dumbill and Brian Jepson! It's an amazing world we live in where you can write a book with someone and never meet them in person.

Thursday evening I had a very enjoyable dinner with Edd and 3 people from Novell/Ximian: Miguel de Icaza, Erik Dasque and Sarah Blackman. We went to a restaurant two blocks from the conference called Veritable Quandary. The food was amazing! On Erik's recommendation I had the osso bucco, which is a slow-cooked veal shank. You eat the marrow out of the bone with a special little fork.

My whole impression of Novell has changed. I grew up in Utah and I've had a dislike of that company for years, primarily because I had to support NetWare installations and it was a giant pain from a sysadmin perspective.

The new Novell (SuSE & Ximian) is young, interesting and full of ideas. Plus they throw really good parties! The Free Speech & Free Beer party at the bar in the Marriott was really fun.

I got to spend a while sitting on a couch in the corner of the bar talking to George Dyson. He was just sitting there by himself when I walked by! Maybe people were afraid to talk to him, I don't know. It was a nice conversation. We talked about NASA and why he thinks they're obsolete.

It wasn't until the conference was over and I was on a flight back to Oakland that I had an epiphany. It was a culmination of several memes I picked up from the conference plus some conversations I've had with friends recently. I'm going to have to put that in another entry, though, because it's a whole different topic.

Did you go to OSCON? What did you think?