Is this the sexiest line-up of speakers ever?

My favorite OSCON presentation on wednesday was Brad Fitzpatrick's "Inside LiveJournal's Backend" presentation. This year at OSCON there are a number of presentations that focus on high availability, scalability and growing web sites, and Brad's presentation was the most down to earth presentation. When comparing the story of LiveJournal to the story of TicketMaster, it's clear that LiveJournal has...

New consumer electronics devices leapfrog their predecessors by incorporating new types of functionality that re-define the "problem" their predecessors solved. Just think, for example, how TiVo has re-defined the VCR experience. Well, if the embrace and extend strategy can work for the innovator, then such a strategy can work for the predecessor. Along those lines, I have been ruminating on the question of what would the cordless telephone look like if it were to be re-invented?

Damian Conway managed to hurt my brain tonight. Who else could tie the Game of Life, Klingon, demons and perl together? My mind is still spinning from Damian's "Life, the Universe and Everything" presentation this evening.

I'm starting to worry about Perl -- after hearing tons of interesting stuff about Perl 6 for the last two OSCONs we're still years away from a stable beta of Perl 6. Is perl going to be eclipsed by another faster, more nimble language?

Mark Pilgrim makes the perplexing claim that XML has failed because its developers "missed it" on the encoding issue. As one of them, I disagree.

Time to head to Portland for this year's Open Source Conference -- I can't wait to geek to my heart's content for the next 5 days.

Many great open source GIS tools are available and many of them have a large command line presence. As I share these great tools with friends and colleagues, I wonder how to bridge the gap between these excellent command line interface (CLI) tools and users who were raised on graphical user interfaces (GUI). At risk of entering into the GUI vs CLI wars, I wonder about the advantages of manipulating map data and running various tools. This is especially interesting to consider as some operating systems appear to shove the "command prompt" deeper into the closet.

A topic dear to my heart: open source television

Where HTML went wrong at W3C, and WHAT to do about it