After work I was lucky enough to meet one of my heroes, Eben Moglen.
I talked to him for about 10 minutes. It was a thrilling experience.
I am very predictable when I meet famous people. I typically say something odd. There was no exception today with Eben. I said, "You are one of my heroes!" not once, but 3 times. And then I shouted "Keep up the good work." when I left.
Oh well, I don't care - I hope he does keep up the good work.
I attended this part of OSCON last year as well.
Although it was well worth the time today, I believe that last year was much better. I think I was a lot more "bright eyed" last year - even after attending OSCON for the previous 3 years at the time. I was starting out in a new exciting role and building a new team. I was very thirsty for this type of thing then. This year, the team is in place, it is great & we have already been through a lot together. And we are busy trying to deliver, so maybe it is just a mindset thing.
One thing is for sure - I have had enough of the Web 2.0 crap. I never liked the phrase and I am thoroughly sick of it. I'm with Eben Moglen - 10 years from now, Ajax and Web 2.0 will be "thermal noise".
Last year I was blown away by Tim O'Reilly. This year I wasn't. Don't get me wrong, he is a really bright guy, but this year he just didn't seem to have the same zip (come to think of it, none of the O'Reilly people did). I will say this, Tim was very gracious in talking to Eben Moglen - I could totally see most people flipping out in that situation. Eben admitted that he was intentionally making a spectacle of himself and Tim to draw attention to important issues - you could see that making the receiver (Tim) upset.
Here are some highlights and lowlights from my opinion:
Highlights
It is nice to see Compiere getting back on track.
I noticed last October that they got forked.
I also read this essay by their new CEO (from Oracle).
I found it interesting. It will be interesting to see if an old dog can turn it around. He seems like he has done his homework.
They are two people I respect - debate == good.
Couple quotes:
Eben: I was reading you last week - talking about we need to revisit what freedom means. (this is what has Eben really hot)
Eben: Gave 10 year licensing opportunity to have conversation in public policy concern and not licensing concern." "Go back to rights and responsibilities.
Eben: We gave you 10 years - I just bought you enough time so that we can fix.
Eben: We are going to have some social charters and ecological rules of the road
Basically, Eben is pissed because he believes Tim is a self-promoter (Web 2.0) and that he is making money on the back of OSS and is now talking about how we need to focus more on freedom.
Interesting conversation to say the least.
I'll post my thoughts from the briefing.
I'm so buried with work this year that I decided to skip the rest of the conference. I could have used a really good geek out as I am rather fried, but maybe next year. The rest of the team is there so I'll just catch up with them.
If you haven't heard of Rocky you should give him a listen. He is dang good. He is even better live.
AIR (the proper name for Apollo) looks quite promising
It does break your head a bit to see JavaScript accessing the file system, however.
AIR looks simple to get started with - and it will run on Winders, OS X, and Linux. That is great - there really aren't great options today in doing this. You need a special class of develooper that knows a lot of stuff to do this well today.
AIR is cool because it uses technology that developers are already familiar with - this will make it approachable.
AIR could really be big if Adobe executes well on it.
If you are interested, please see the job req..
Here are a couple of the traits we are looking for:
Specifically around forms (think about the printed policy you get from your insurance company).
You may just get this in the mail and laugh that it is still often in ALL CAPS.
But this stuff is enormously complex.
I'm trying to figure out the core document formats. I figure if you make good choices there, you might get it right with the details. If possible I'd like to use open standards, but I'll settle for published friendly standards - there are many 100% proprietary options out there that frighten me (who wants to be beholden to one vendor forever with no way out short of complete re-implementation?).
There are two types of file formats that have my interest right now:
With form file format a couple options are perhaps:
With archival storage format options could be:
PDF/A, ODF, OOXML (gasp), more TIFF and AFP.
As I learn more / develop opinions I'll try to share. If you already have some, please do to the same :)
Dan is an impressive dude.
But then again, Dan is from Grand Rapids, MI. People from there in general are pretty impressive.
Now I have been known to bash WS-*. But CXF (XFire) does more than that. And Dan is a pretty thoughtful dude who just stays above the fray and slings solid code.
Anyhoo, congratulations Dan.
Everybody buy Dan a beer at OSCON.
Updated to "CXF" from "CFX" 04-JUL
I saw this on Dan Creswell's delicious.
Good stuff - I have lived similar pain - who hasn't. Anyhoo, I want to try it - I want to do a million other things, but I just can't work any harder w/o snapping! I wish there were more hours in the day, I must find more ways to get more done.
Anyhoo, this link sucked me into Rockstarprogrammer blog. Nice blog and what not.
Hey look, it isn't just me, Hibernate is hard. Rockstar dude (Dustin) explains it exactly. But it is too late, his project is likely over committed to it and he'll just have to fight to the death on the next project to avoid it.
As if you didn't know, I think OR tools are awful. I think they open Pandoras Box on anything but simple projects. You want a cache? Get a cache! You want object to relational? Suck it up and write SQL. Don't mix these concerns.
