Portrait of Edd Dumbill, taken by Giles Turnbull

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What I make

expectnation
a conference management web application


XTech Conference
a European web technology conference

Landed in Portland

I've arrived in Portland for OSCON. What a journey! Storms kept me in Chicago for three hours more than necessary. In total, I spent about 22 hours travelling from the UK to Portland.

I'm excited to find that GPRS roaming works here. I'm on Vodafone in the UK, and GPRS roaming works great with T-Mobile here in the US. I have no idea how much it's costing me, but at least it meant I could get online while I was stuck in Chicago.

IRC hiccups

At the weekend Dave Beckett and I set up a community coverage site for OSCON, similar to the one we did for WWW2003. The idea is that content is generated from IRC by means of chatlogs and the chump bot. We're using Freenode.

Turns out I made two errors here. The first was not telling the Freenode folks we were doing this: it caused some problems with restrictions the have on number of users from a particular IP. The second was in forking the number of #oscon channels. There's another IRC network, irc.develooper.com, dedicated to OSCON coverage. Although this was mentioned on the OSCON wiki, there was no indication it was official, and Dave and I inadvertently made a competing channel. Turns out irc.develooper.com is the official place to be. Nat Torkington rapped me on the knuckles over this and challenged me to a duel with XML parsers at 20 paces. Oops.

Overload

Now I've got back online and I'm right into information overload. Travelling doesn't mean I escape the regular commitments, such as publishing XML.com. Happily Kendall Clark's been doing great work there and saving me from embarrassment, as he often does.

My inbox is swollen with urgent mail, and I'm on about 9 IRC channels, catching up with the various projects I'm involved in. Also I keep bumping into old friends, and want to catch up with them.

I had time for a brief chat with Miguel de Icaza, Ximian's CTO and general Mono nut. He's infectiously enthuasistic about Mono. I get a good gut feeling about Mono. I've not time to think about verbalizing it yet but I hope to do that soon. Miguel also said that there was good news on the horizon for Mono on PowerPC.

Tim O'Reilly's keynote was pretty much on the same subject as his most recent talks, entitled "The Open Source Paradigm Shift." It was notable to me for having more mentions of Microsoft and Amazon than of Perl and Linux. His basic point was that software's gone commodity, the value's in the data and interaction via web services. I still need to find time to write a response to his network-aware piece, I'd like to present my perspective on just how some of the points he mentions there can by achieved.

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