OSCON 2005

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2005

Oreilly Open Source Conference

Aug 2, 2005

People are pretty well-dressed for nerds. Only one alternate hair color. Generally heavier than normal. I saw the first public nose-pick within about 2 hours of the start of the conference. I overheard the first loud description of a Simpsons episode about 5 hours after the conference started.

The presenters all seem to be high geeks: well-socialized, self-aware, very intelligent, and well-respected in the community. I haven’t seen any corporate shills masquerading as presenters yet.

I’m learning how lame I am as a Java developer. That’s not news. But I was beginning to hope that I might be close to productive. I see that I have much further to go than I imagined. At least I was able to understand the references to about half the design patterns that I’ve heard. The other patterns, I haven’t heard of, but I can tell they are talking about patterns. I think my first task should be to go back and finish my two design patterns books.

A few other next steps would be: get better at using Eclipse complete a tutorial or two on basic java… try to grok the generated code from appfuse or equinox

On the other hand, I don’t feel like I’m so far being a worthy perl programmer. I can understand and appreciate most every point Damian makes about best practices. Well, I don’t really appreciate all the crazy hoops he has to go through to try to enforce encapsulation, but that isn’t his fault, that’s just perl. If encapsulation isn’t enforced by the language, and can’t be enforced, why beat a dead horse trying to enforce it? How many people really want encapsulation in Perl? And how badly?

Still, I suppose it is a noble fight.

Aug 3, 2005

Missed the state of the onion. drat. Who would have thought that the paper schedules would not include the state of the onion? I should have clicked that link on the web to see when Larry would be talking.

Gump for continuous integration of perl and python.

Craig McLanahan gave an amazing comparison of Java frameworks.

The keynotes have been more corporate, but yet they still praise the long tail. Thank goodness for Bob’s entry on the long tail, or I would have had no idea what they were talking about.

Plenty of people are blogging about the conference and posting their pictures. Here’s what I thought was important.

Aug 4, 2005

Richard Stallman’s four freedoms how to design freedom into systems systems now have a life of about 5 years how can you get a system to remain pliable after 30 years? build it like the internet intermodal containerized shipping is a metaphor of the internet spanning layer is useful abstraction for building an internet-like system it produces an hourglass shape complex at the top, complex at the bottom and simple in the middle identifier, format, protocol are the keys that should be defined and nothing else. for IP: IP address, IP packet, IP protocol for email: @ address, RFC 2822, SMTP container shipping: UPC-Barcode, 20 ton box, interchange protocol

Computational origami

Identity 2.0 Ted Baker shirts great powerpoint kung fu

session: you had me at HELO Randal gives a case study of spam fighting procmail, spamassassin, RBL spam down 30% postfix MIRVs are messages that are burst near local delivery amavisd checks before burst can reject in smtp handshake and deny before bounce 5 to 20 million spam-sending zombies currently couldn’t get spamassassin to handle the worm payloads used pf (packetfilter) and traffic shaper added a port 25 filter what happens when a good guy triggers the alarms automatically removed after 2 hours cut email bandwidth by half in each 2 hour window 750 to 1500 IP addresses in each block list packet filter includes passive os fingerprinting traffic shape the mail from windows boxes to the speed of a modem p0f used postfix to block connects from hosts without valid dns had to add a whitelist for big companies with no reverse dns high MX spamtrap postfix listens on each IP address and port returns 450 code on the spamtrap on port 50 blocking 90 messages/hour never a false positive adding them to the block list turned off RBL because it is expensive www.stonehenge.com/pic/rbl.stonehenge.com.txt RBL updated once a minute also published into threatnet http://ali.as/devel/threatnetwork.html

google for site:stonehenge.com spam

trend visualization by Tim O’Reilly Neilsen bookscan simplyhired.com (spiders other job sites) del.icio.us tag volume yahoo search volume google ad word price will predict demand for new books google shut down their spiders, so they can’t get ad word price tech book market has been down for the last four years from 225K in 2003 to 125K in 2005 spike in Jan and Dec java book sales are 25% look for babynamewizard.com name explorer

should install linux on my ipod and get podzilla make magazine has an article about how to do it demo of green laser popping balloons rotary dial cell phone

using webdav I installed apache and it had webdav module installed out of the box I added a config directive to turn it on for a directory. easy. But I don’t see any clients cadaver, sitecopy, neon, dav explorer, subversion, openoffice, koffice evolution wow, it is super easy openoffice can just save stuff to http://server/dav/filename.html now I just need to get it to encrypt over https so my password isn’t in the clear. Need to put all webdav dirs in the https:// server

August 5, 2005

Linux not ready for the desktop migration comfort stability

Open source biology

To evil

howtoons.com reference to: the handy book for handy boys (1910) 10 year old boys all want to build flying skateboards girls want to know what their friends see in their dreams teaching kids to love and expect open source

The sessions and tutorials are so good that I am no longer trying to answer the question: what is the best thing to see now? Instead I’m trying to answer the question: what session will teach me something that I can only learn here.

Plenty of things are relevant and interesting. But a few of the topics appear to contain info that is easily found on the web or elsewhere.

Building and deploying web apps with activegrid activegrid application builder (win, osx, redhat, suse) IDE (just python now, perl (Q4), php (Q3), groovy, ruby (Q1 2006) later) snappy performance for edits mysql, oracle, postgres, db2 support

point to db, get a view of the tables in .xsd build page flows graphically that builds a .bpel file (xml) individual web pages are rendered as .xform

crashy demo adapts to the browser (ajax or html tables) mostly apache, but a few extra modules

Hacking your phone Brian Aker lost lots of time to video problems on ibook/keynote presentation PBX, FXO, FXS, DMARK, PSTN lost a bunch of slides Wildcard $6 on ebay, but they die every year TDM400P sipura 2000 $70 goes between POTS and asterisk avoid h323 when power goes out, phones go out it took a week to figure out Asterisk configuration sipura can replace wildcard SER sip server transfer to blacklist Polycom soundPoint SIP ethernet phone $200 (his favorite) BudgetTone $40 bad sound quality Snow 190 $300 (can do TCP, TLS) SIP = session initiation protocol SJ Phone (software phone) too intimidating for users www.voip-info.org wiki www.asterisk.org no good books yet crow.livejournal.com digium.com polycom.com snom.com sipura.com asterisk at home on a cd doesn’t work yet works well with TDM400 card no good cordless SIP phones

keynote by Miguel de Icaza Linux Desktop at Novell 5500 employees migrating off Office and Windows Office -> OpenOffice done Windows -> Linux 50% done gathering usability data Next release of desktop in October new apps in mono slams osx as a traitor os ipod library, media player, 2-way sync, burn cds photo management app iFolder disconnected filesystem (like coda?) client-server Beagle desktop search — dashboard compositing api debuts in September gnome 2.12 in september suse 10 in October 2005

I’ve been aching to get rid of Yellowdog on my iBook for awhile. After Miguel’s presentation, I’m considering Suse/Novell. But I’d have to wait until October or longer to get the juicy bits he showed off. So I’ll probably switch to Ubuntu in the mean time.