Tag Archives: OSCON

OSCON 2008: Friday Morning Keynotes

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The Friday morning keynotes opened with a video demonstration of the capabilities of Blender. Apparently, it renders scenes using crappy 80s computer-generated music. It’s no Wall-E, but it’s quite pretty.

First up this morning Allison introduced Benjamin Mako Hill of the MIT Center for Future Civic Media. He will be speaking about Advocating Software Freedom by Revealing Errors. He seems to be far too highly caffeinated for the room this morning, and is speaking very quickly, and the sound system is too loud, so I don’t entirely know what’s going on.

The gist of the talk is that, when errors become visible to the user, it exposes something about the underlying technology. He’s provided several obvious examples of ATMs crashing with Windows errors. He runs the Revealing Errors Blog, too.

Next up is Dawn Nafus of Intel, speaking about Three Challenges. Unlike most speakers at OSCON, she is an anthropologist. There is a notion, particularly in the mobile devices industry, is that adding more and more data is equivalent to adding context. This is phenomenally untrue. Data without context is, more often than not, useless.

Her second challenge is the global food crisis in food and water, particularly in the developing world. We Open Source folks are quite good at decentralizing power, just look at how so many of our projects are organized. Technology is fast going mobile, and as these devices become cheaper, they are more easily put into the hands of people in the Third World. There are many applications for this technology, we just need to be creative about how we go about taking advantage of this proliferation in technology.

The third challenge is to strengthen global growth in technology producers, not just consumers. We must better understand where growth is coming from.

Annoyingly, we have another speaker from Microsoft this year, Sam Ramji. He’s, apparently, here to tell us about Open Source Heroes. He’s telling us about platform trends, something we already know about. There’s some slide about applications moving into Internet moving into Web applications over the time frame 1995 through 2005.

Microsoft sees Open Source growing strong over the next decade, but it’s hard to take him seriously, given the company’s history. While he’s talking about Microsoft’s contributions to Open Source projects and the work they’ve done to improve their ability to work on Windows, I’m constantly on edge around Microsoft, wondering what they really have planned. In fact, I may have just answered my own question. Improving the use on Windows, thus attempting to ensure the continual use of Windows. They’re desperate to hold on to the market share they’ve so deceitfully gained.

This talk can be summed up as, Hey look, we’re not evil, look at this boringly enumerated list of Open Source stuff we’ve done.

He’s announced that Microsoft has become a “platinum” sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation. That doesn’t sound good to me. Do people forget the embrace-extend-extinguish history of the company? Should we really trust them so much?

Next up, refreshingly, is Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems, speaking to us about Language Inflection Point. There’s background music, and he’s speaking very quickly. He’s going over slides demonstrating various ways of measuring the popularity of programming languages. From search engines to book sales.

He took a survey of the room. A show of hands for who is using various languages and if we would still use it in an ideal world. Python and Ruby were the only two languages with a positive delta, more people raised their hands to show that they’d use it in an ideal world than those who currently use it.

From there, he launched into a discussion of each language and their benefits and drawback as he sees them. Obviously subjective, but they’re not entirely bad points. He never got to Perl, so I’m a bit disappointed.

Finally, we have Jeremy Ruston of BT Design, who created TiddlyWiki. He’s here to tell us about Learning from Airports.

At airports today, the actual actions of taking off and landing is more a side-show. There are more shops and things like security lines (and waiting), and the actual arrivals and departures are a very short part of anyone’s visit.

Airports do serve as an excellent analogy for technology standards. Single sign-on: passports. Access tokens: boarding passes. Standard documentation: universal signage.

The keynotes wrapped up with a question and answer session with each of the morning’s speakers. The first question, unsurprisingly, was about patents, and what will it take for Microsoft to commit to not using patents against Open Source. The speaker claims that developers should never have to worry about it, but it was unconvincing.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of the questions were directed to the Microsoft representative. They ranged from (and I’m paraphrasing), why Microsoft is evil and patent bashing thinly veiled as questions. Unfortunately, the presence of the Microsoft shill speaker on stage led to a completely wasted question and answer session.

But now it’s break time, so I’m off in search of more coffee. OSCON starts way too early in the morning.

[tags]oscon, oscon08, oscon2008[/tags]

OSCON 2008, Day 5

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Friday morning, and I’m sad the week is over. However, I’m a bit happy, as well. In shortly over 24 hours, I’ll be home. I love attending OSCON, but it takes its toll. For example, one of the things that makes getting to breakfast difficult is all the free beer available to us. One might ask, Why not just avoid partaking of the local nectars and get a good night’s sleep instead. To that I say, Are you crazy? There’s beer! And it’s free! As in beer!

SourceForge held a couple of parties for us last night. One was at the Jupiter Hotel and the other, branded BeerForge, was at a party venue down the block from the hotel. Obviously, we attended both—twice.

Josh and I started out at BeerForge. After a while we got hungry and found Brad, Alice, and Sam over at the SourceForge awards party. As things got too crowded, we all went over to BeerForge. As the venue grew too hot and loud, we ended up back at the SourceForge location, where we could be outside at least. After that venue closed down, Josh and I went back to my hotel room to polish off a growler—a half gallon—of beer I had picked up at Rogue the night before.

I’m now at breakfast, after a whole four hours of sleep, and extremely thankful for the coffee, fruit, and pastries that have been laid out for us. The fresh air and the walk to the convention center helped, too. This week’s festivities make me almost want to take a pass on the Oregon Brewers Festival. I said, almost.

Fortunately, there are only two sessions today, leaving me with only two decisions to make. However, after a more careful review of the schedule, the choices seem obvious.

First, Tim Bunce is giving a talk on Perl and Parrot: Baseless Myths and Startling Realities. I’m not as enthusiastic about Perl 6 as I once was, but I quite enjoy Tim’s sessions. Following Tim, in the same room, is Damian Conway. He’ll be presenting—oh, does it even matter?

I will be faced with a bit of a dilemma tonight. My flight home is scheduled for 6:40am tomorrow morning. However, the MAX light rail ends its service at midnight and doesn’t resume until 4:30am. Several years ago this may have been acceptable, but not in the airports of today. So my options are to get a couple hours of sleep followed by calling a town car, or check out of the hotel tonight and make my way to the airport before the MAX service terminates for the night. Quite honestly, arriving at the airport six and a half hours early is still shorter than some of the layovers I’ve had.

Well, I’m going to finish my breakfast and tag some photos. In just under an hour, the final day of keynotes—and thus of OSCON—get started.

OSCON 2008: State of the Onion

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It’s finally time for the State of the Onion. Larry Wall introduced this year’s theme, Rules That Are Meant to be Broken.

If he had Perl to do all over again, what would he do different? Only two things, nothing, and everything. Perl 6 is the everything part of the answer.

In Perl 5, one of the problems that creeps up is that regular expressions (regexes) are strings. The best example of this is variable interpolation in regexes. In Perl 6, this has been fixed. They are now their own language.

Like cargo-cult programming, parsing has turned into its own cargo-cult. Perl 6 breaks the mold when it comes to copying languages (the old lex/yacc loop), and instead uses polymorphism in its sub-language design.

Both regexes, double quoted strings, and single quoted strings are examples of sub-languages in Perl 6. Each of these sub-languages has its own parsing rules and therefore parsing implementations. This allows is code reuse. Parsers can derive behavior from other parsers, but treat the tokens differently as necessary.

Fundamentally, Perl 6 is very simple. It has no CORE. It has no built-ins and no operators. What Perl 6 has given us (will give us?), in effect, is a just in time lexer. Tokens and their behavior can be defined on the fly, on a per-sub-language basis.

There are quite a few changes to the regularity of regular expressions. Mostly what this means is that Perl 6 regexes are incompatible with those used in Perl 5, and that Perl-compatible regular expressions (PCRE) aren’t (or won’t be).

All languages tend to fall into the One True Syntax trap. Perl 6 has aimed to break out of that trap. By giving the user enough power over the syntax (rope) to design the language that suits them (hang themselves).

I didn’t enjoy the State of the Onion as much as I have in the past. I suppose that’s to be expected. Larry did warn us at the top of the talk that it would be serious and contain only a single joke. For as great a writer as Larry is, his ability as a public speaker is lacking. That’s okay, though. I’d rather he not shift focus away from the design and development of Perl.

[tags]oscon, oscon08, oscon2008, Perl, State of the Onion, Larry Wall[/tags]

OSCON 2008: Perl Lightning Talks

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It’s 4:30pm on Thursday and that means it’s time for the Perl Lightning Talks. The crowd is excitedly gathering, but there are still plenty of seats as I write this.

Sorry guys, these are five minute talks. If I start summarizing, I’ll fall way behind. You’re lucky I even take the time to write this.

If you really want to know what’s going on, there’s a schedule.

For those of you still reading, here’s a bit of stream-of-consciousness for you. Note, if trying to match these up to the schedule, they are in order, but I didn’t comment on all of them.

Testing databases with TAP is cool. You really can test anything with it.

Nice to see The Perl Foundation get some slots in Google’s Summer of Code this year.

It’s interesting to see how much Perl is used to compile USA Today every day. Without Perl, it would be a very empty paper. Though I’m not convinced the content would be much different.

Schwern tells us that, in thirty years, time will wrap.

$time = 2**31 - 1;
print scalar gmtime $time;

Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038

$time = 2**31;
print scalar gmtime $time;

Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901

Wait, that’s not good. But he’s fixed it.

Sweet, Perl on Google App Engine!

Use autodie instead of Fatal. It’s better.

Also, Paul Fenwick is one of the best speakers I’ve seen in ages. I hope he becomes an OSCON staple.

F*ck, the F*cking thing is F*cked had the best slides.

IPv6Experiment.com (warning: there may be porn).

[tags]oscon, oscon08, oscon2008, Perl, lightning talks[/tags]

OSCON 2008: Hacking Wetware for Fun and Profit

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My second mid-afternoon session is Hacking Wetware for Fun and Profit with Paul Fenwick. Andy Lester introduced Paul, and basically said he was awesome and couldn’t figure out how it is he’s never been in this country to speak before.

Paul’s preferred title for this talk is Human Interfaces for Geeks. Most geeks think of things like keyboards, mice, and monitors when it comes to interfaces. But that’s not what this is about. Those are human-computer interfaces. We’re here to talk about human interfaces. Things like aural or visual communication.

Geeks can be quite awkward when it comes to interfacing with other people.

There are normal people out there who do make sense to geeks do make a lot of sense to geeks, Sims. They have wants, fears, and needs. These are easy to see, because they have status bars. Unfortunately, real people don’t have status bars.

One thing learned from the sims, if you want something done, ask a happy person to do it. They will be far more willing to do it and will end up being far more helpful. How do you make people happy? Coffee and chocolate will go a long way towards making people happy and giving a higher priority to your requests.

Even without this kind of base bribery, we can make people happy. By matching one of their goals to one of our needs. Humans, when they’re instantiated, have a set of default goals, and no one ever changes these. One of the best goals for this is a feeling of importance. How can you make someone feel important? Talk about them.

It’s easy to talk about someone. Practice active listening. Essentially, be an Eliza bot. Listen to what someone is saying, then repeat it back to them in the form of a question. If they’ve been on vacation, ask them about it. If they’ve accomplished something, ask them about it. This makes people very happy.

Another way to make someone happy is to make them feel important in front of their peers. If someone submits a patch, recognize that in front of the community. I did this once (because I’ve only ever received one patch for my one and only CPAN module). Someone from Australia submitted a patch and I put his name in the Changes file. I know I feel amazingly good when I’ve done a good job, so I do my best to point out when people have done a good job.

People, particularly in the United States, tend to look at situations in an adversarial way. When someone wants something and someone else is standing in their way, he will want to force his way past. This is rarely an effective method. Instead, those standing in the way are people, too. The best method is to take action to make that other person feel good about themselves. When they are happy and feel good about themselves, they are far more likely to go out of their way to help.

This was a good talk. Geeks rarely read books aimed at management types. A lot of these books place a lot emphasis on the concept of win-win and interpersonal communication. It’s nice to see a geek taking these lessons and putting them into terms other geeks can understand. We definitely need more geeks with people skills.

[tags]oscon, oscon08, oscon2008, people[/tags]

OSCON 2008: Ultimate Perl Code Profiling

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Lunch is over and I’m here to listen to Tim Bunce talk about Ultimate Perl Code Profiling with Devel::NYTProf.

The Devel::DProf module is old and a waste of time and is broken. Stop using it. Take it out and shoot it.

The first obvious distinction between profilers is CPU time versus real time. CPU time tends to be highly granular, but doesn’t include I/O, context switching, or other kinds of blocking. That’s where real time comes in. It’s far more useful in the real world.

Tim, as with many of us, is interested in line-based profiling. It provides a high level of granularity The total subroutine time is not always useful, particularly in larger subroutines.

The NYTProf module is exremely fast, discounting the time taken by profiling overhead, making it quite a bit more useful for real world analysis. It also allows profile times per block, and can be aggregated up to the subroutine level. It’s a module with dual profilers: line-based and subroutine-based.

It gets better, every location that calls the subroutine keeps separate track of the subroutine time. This allows us to determine where the majority of the subroutine calls are coming from. For control flow statements, the decision expression is not taken into account when profiling the block that is executed. This is useful if the loop control itself takes time that should be discounted.

And that’s it for the description. Now we have half an hour to play with it.

The HTML-based reporting is inspired by Devel::Cover‘s reporting. Reported for each file are the number of statements executed, the time spent in the source file and the line, block, and subroutine reports. The subroutine reports include the amount of time spent within the subroutine and the amount of time spent in other called subroutines. The coloring of each line of the report—red, orange, yellow, and green—give a relative measure of deviation from the norm. Very impressive.

Even more impressive, Devel::NYTProf is capable of reporting exactly what a subroutine reference is called, even when it’s an anonymous subroutine compiled within an eval. With a handy link also provided, the called code can be easily inspected.

In summary, Devel::NYTProf is awesome. Use it. I know I will.

Tim Bunce is even more impressive than most people think he is. He is the only presenter I’ve seen so far who has managed to use IRC while giving his talk. Well, he didn’t actually type on IRC, but he had Colloquy running in the background. This particular IRC client uses Apple’s Growl feature to display notifications when you are mentioned in a channel. After he’s opened up the session to questions, one of those notifications pops up on the projected display:

<sirhc> Adam Kennedy (to Tim Bunce): Why are you so awesome?

It got a laugh, and Tim seemed to take it all in stride, even joking that he was not looking very professional on his screen cast. Important safety tip for session presenters, don’t leave your IRC client open.

[tags]oscon, oscon08, oscon2008, Perl, programming, profiling[/tags]

OSCON 2008: Perl for Political Campaigns

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There was nothing interesting for me scheduled for the second session today, so I ended up in Perl for Political Campaigns, presented by Chris “Pudge” Nandor. I’m not entirely sure why I’m here, but it likely has something to do with Perl in the title and Pudge as the presenter. I must be in the right place, though. Both Damian Conway and Adam Kennedy are present.

Pudge is, quite famously, a Republican, so he wants poor people to die, he asserts his right to shoot people who jaywalk, and he hates puppies. Now that we have that out of the way, this will not be a political talk. Instead, it will be a talk that just happens to use politics as the problem domain for which Perl was the solution (but isn’t it always?). Pudge happens to volunteer for the Republican party in Snohomish county, Washington. I actually know the area fairly well, as my grandmother happens to live there.

Winning elections is all about knowledge. And blackmail. But, mostly knowledge.

This session is essentially about data mining. There are a number of disparate data sources available with information about voters. From registration and voting history to contact information and preferences—can or can they not be contacted. This data is not always easy to access. For example, there is something called the Voter Vault, which is a super secret database of voter information controlled by the Republican party (there’s an NDA involved, so we won’t see any of it).

Essentially, Voter Vault is a really crummy Web application that only works for IE (hence the crummy part). That’s where WWW::Mechanize comes in. Using this brilliant module, data on any Web site can be retrieved, even if it requires a certain amount of user interaction to access. This, along with other sites, like the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission, provide all the raw data Pudge needs.

However, raw data is, by itself, not useful to anyone. This is the reason behind Pudge’s efforts. He uses Perl (and some JavaScript) to collect and aggregate all of this data. Then, once it’s all compiled, he can use a bit of Perl glue to use the data in Apple’s Address Book and Mail applications. But, more importantly, he can visualize it.

For the visualization, Pudge uses everyone’s favorite new tool, Google Maps. Using the Ajax API provided by Google, he can embed a map in his own Web application and, next to it, provide controls to enable and disable different views of the data on the map. For example, candidate donations by city and how much each candidate received.

It gets better. With the Google Earth APIs available to Google Maps, KML files can be generated (again, with Perl) to provide even better data visualizations. For example, precinct boundaries can be imported and colored based on voting history.

Initially, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about this talk, but I ended up enjoying it. It was an excellent presentation on how to take data and display it to users in a useful manner.

[tags]oscon, oscon08, oscon2008, Perl, politics, visualization[/tags]

OSCON 2008: Stick a fork() in It

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First session of the day and I’m in room F150 (brought to you by Ford). The F wing, bereft of wifi. I’m here for Stick a fork() in It: Parallel and Distributed Perl with Eric Wilhelm of Scratch Computing. It’s great to see how popular Perl still is. It’s standing room only in here.

A computer once referred to a human worker who would perform calculations. This was a fairly easy thing to cluster and “run” several computers in parallel. As time progressed, more and faster work was desired. Enter the electronic computer, and specifically for this talk, the Cray. As with anything, the inner workings of the Crays of old can be recreated in Perl. Just use the Cray module, no problem (if only it existed).

After the history lesson, we move into high level overviews of parallelism and pipelineing, and a note about Amdahl’s Law. This was followed up with an example for detecting prime numbers by partitioning the work.

The slide presentation was over in under 20 minutes. Instead, we’re jumping straight into code examples. Awesome.

Or so I thought. Unfortunately, he’s been interrupted by multiple people in the audience, who keep wanting to move off into tangential conversations. Eric is having difficulty bringing the talk under his own control—it’s no longer his talk, but that of the somewhat rude fellow in the front row. Neither is Eric as eloquent when he switches from a prepared talk to demonstrating and explaining real code. It’s become far more difficult to pay attention to this session, and I find myself looking at the clock to see how much time we have until the next session.

For real fun, be sure to check out Brad’s post on Schwern’s session about skimmable code.

[tags]oscon, oscon08, oscon2008, Perl, programming[/tags]

OSCON 2008: Thursday Morning Keynotes

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Thursday morning, the conference is more than half way over. It’s once again time for some keynotes. They opened with an open content video from REM. I don’t know why. It wasn’t very good.

Our first speaker this morning is Keith Bergelt of the Open Invention Network, speaking about Open Invention Network and Its Role in Open Source and Linux. He’s speaking about patents and intellectual property in Open Source, the realities of it today and where he sees it going tomorrow. He’s big on the buzzwords, and this is not the right audience for it. In fact, a game of Buzzword Bingo has already broken out in the IRC channel.

In summary, “Blah blah patent blah blah buzzword blah blah we care blah blah.”

Oh wait, he droned his way to a point. One of the things the Open Invention Network does, and I should have known because I’ve seen this before, is to buy up patents and keep Open Source safe from them. At least, until their funding dries up and they turn to their patent portfolios to squeeze money out of everyone.

I seem cynical this morning. Maybe I didn’t get enough sleep. Or maybe the first keynote today is boring. The back-channel conversation on IRC is actually quite entertaining, though. I need to whip up a quick IRC log file analyzer to correlate IRC traffic to keynote speaker. Then I can use it as a tool to rate speakers.

The pain is finally over, and the program chair has caught buzzworditis from the last speaker. Next up is Peter H. Salus to speak to us about Anniversaries. I’m told by Nat Torkington that Peter is an Unix historian. He’s started off by showing us a picture of the first transistor, which is about 20cm and a bit more than that around. It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come in 60 years—how many iPhones can fit in the same volume?

Anniversaries, in this case, are major milestones in computer history. The first electronic computer; the first time-sharing system; the first Unix paper by Ritchie and Thompson; the GNU project. One of the interesting things to learn is that history repeats itself. Back in the days of ARPANET, there was an issue involving the exhaustion of address space on the network. Short-sighted problems like that would never happen today, right?

I enjoyed this keynote speech, but probably because I really enjoy history.

Next up, Supporting the Open Web with David Recordon of Six Apart. It’s not just the open nature of the software or the platform that matters, but the openness of the data. Without open data, the Open Web can’t work. Interoperability and open specifications are vital to moving forward with the technology. The Web must be accessible, not just available on one device or another.

The majority of the talk is dedicated to talking about the various organizations doing work to keep everything free and open, including the Open Source Initiative, Creative Commons, and the Apache Foundation. There are also quite a few people donating a lot of their time to help.

He’s announcing the formation of the Open Web Foundation. They don’t necessarily want to form their own foundation, but they have had little luck finding an existing one to do what they’ve asked.

The Open Web Foundation will focus on four areas: incubation, licensing, copyright, and community. Many companies, such as Google and Yahoo have already shown support for this new foundation.

Following David is Danese Cooper of the Open Source Initiative and Intel Corporation to speak about Why Whinging Doesn’t Work. A catchy title, and she introduced her talk with a funny video of a choir of Finnish women singing about all of the complaints they have (search YouTube for “complaints choir“).

She’s making a very good point. There are so few women in Open Source. Geek are often intimidated by women and women are so often objectified. It’s true, there is a huge gender imbalance in the geek community. Of all the geeks I know, I can name very few women. I’m having a daughter soon, and you know what, she’s going to learn to code.

However, the feminist angle is merely a way of personally relating to the main point of her talk. People complain. I do it, you do it, the guy sitting next to you does it. But whinging doesn’t help. Mostly, all whinging does is beget more whinging. That energy used to complain needs to be channeled into something constructive.

For seven years, Danese was the only female member of the Open Source Initiative’s board. Now 30% of the board members are female. Progress.

Finally, Nathan Torkington, former OSCON program chair and recently of He Hononga Software, Limited and his keynote, fork() && exec(): Spawning the Next Generation of Hackers. Thank goodness, this talk is not about geeks having sex.

I’ve been looking forward to this keynote for a couple of reasons. First, I’ve missed hearing Nat speak this year. Second, I’m expecting my first child in a couple of months. Not only that, two other members of my local Linux User Group are either recent or expecting fathers. Suddenly, topics involving children are much more interesting to me.

Nat recently moved his family back to New Zealand. One of the things he does now is to help teach children about computing. In his school district, the computing infrastructure was awful—and used Windows. So he got a handful of Macs and became the Bastard Operator from Hell for his kids’ school. Then he started teaching the schoolchildren. Quickly, he discovered that the teachers needed teaching as well.

One more thing he wanted to do was to teach programming. He feels it’s a very important skill. But it has to be done right. Avoid the frustration that so many of us experience with computing and programming, but something consistent, easy-to-learn, but still powerful. Nat’s introduced Scratch. The kids loved it.

Lessons learned:

  • Lectures suck (you have two minutes to say what you want)
  • The gender gap is not what you think (girls are smarter and more focused than boys)
  • Keyboards are a challenge
  • Not a lot of experience with math
  • Robots are lame

So please, volunteer in schools. Perhaps remove Windows and bring the joy of Linux to their lives. Find, or create, good courseware, such as Scratch. Post it on your blog, so everyone can find it. Finally, don’t profit. Do this for the good of the children, our future generation of geeks.

With that, we’re off to the expo hall for the break.

[tags]oscon, oscon08, oscon2008[/tags]

OSCON 2008, Day 4

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Thursday morning and day four of OSCON is sunnier than the last two have been. Though it’s still chilly outside, it’s comfortable inside the convention center, so far. I’m once again having breakfast in the expo hall after getting too little sleep.

Sadly, yesterday during the morning keynotes, Al was called back home abruptly. Hopefully, he made it back to the UK quickly and safely.

After all the sessions were said and done for the day, we found our way to the expo hall, where beer and appetizers were being served. Alas, we did not stay long. We caught wind that Google would be hosting pizza across the river at Old Town Pizza, an event we never made it to. It turned out to be a pizza dinner for Summer of Code participants. We finally ended up at Rogue for dinner, and I finally got myself a growler for my collection—currently being held (safely?) in Brad’s hotel room refrigerator.

After dinner, we swung by the supposed Amazon party. Only, there wasn’t one. It was only held between 8:00pm and 9:00pm. Seriously? This is how Amazon throws a party?

Fortunately, the Sun party was a better this year. First of all, they had no stupid lolspeak flyers. Second, bottled beer instead of kegs, which is difficult for incompetent bartenders to over-prime and serve nothing but head. Third, sumo wrestling! Brad and I also participated; those photos are coming soon, I promise.

However, as I actually enjoy attending the keynote sessions—scheduled far too early in the morning—I was back in my hotel just after 11:00pm. I ran into Dan and his fellow TierraNet colleagues in the hotel bar. Unfortunately, I had missed last call, but I sat down for a bit anyway. We had some laughs with Margaret, the bartender. I tried to get her to slap Tyler, but sadly it never happened.

Today’s session tracks begin with a dilemma. Unfortunately, I’d like to be in three places, simultaneously.

Fortunately, Brad wants to go to Michael Schwern’s talk, so I’ve agreed to attend Eric Wilhelm’s talk. We’ll write summaries and both be happy. The microblogging session was just a curiosity for me anyway.

The rest of the day won’t require quite as much rolling of dice.

The only potential conflict is during the second half of the Perl lightning talks, A Tasting Tour of Haskell (Bryan O’Sullivan).

Just about time for the morning keynotes, and I’m looking forward to seeing Nat Torkington speak. If I can reconnect to the wifi network, I can even post this entry.