Edd Dumbill's Weblog: 'oreilly' articles

My OSCON 2008 picks

Edd Dumbill — 2008-06-26T11:49:56Z

In just under a month, the tenth O'Reilly Open Source Convention will get underway in Portland.

Over ten years OSCON has developed—along with the world of open source—into an intense, exciting, informative, diverse and exhausting event. This year I've the privilege of being co-chair, along with Alison Randall. We've packed so much into the show, it's a difficult job even being able to comprehend it as a whole!

Fortunately, there's a way to start making sense of things before you arrive there, thanks to the personal scheduler. Just mark the sessions you want to go to with a star, and you'll be able to plan out your time in advance.

I wanted to list a few sessions from my own personal schedule that particularly piqued my interest. Then at the bottom of this post I'll share a discount code which can give readers of this blog 15% off OSCON registration. There's bribery for you.

Practical Erlang Programming

Largely thanks to XMPP enthusiasts and ejabberd, I've been hearing increasing amounts about Erlang, and I'd like to know enough about it to be dangerous. This three hour tutorial looks just the ticket.

Open Source Virtualization Hacks

This is one of several sessions we have on virtualization, something I'm particularly pleased about. Virtualization may be "done" at the kernel level, but I think we're only just starting out on its application. This session is by my friend and sometime co-author, Niel Bornstein, who works for Novell on just this sort of thing.

Using Puppet: Real World Configuration Management

Puppet is the piece of open source software that is most exciting to me at the moment. As a developer, it enables me to manage my machines like I'd manage my code libraries. A must-see if you've not used Puppet yet.

These are just 3 out of the 300 or so confirmed sessions. Don't forget there's a large number of events and parties happening around OSCON too.

And finally, the discount code. Use the code os08pgm when you're registering, and you'll get 15% off the ticket price.

See you in Portland!

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First post!

Edd Dumbill — 2008-01-08T00:35:19Z

I've just posted my first article over at the O'Reilly Radar blog. I'll be blogging over there on and off, making my small contribution, covering my favourite themes of open data and open source.

My first article takes a look at Shelf, an OS X implementation of Nat Friedman's GNOME Dashboard concept.

The main reason I've joined the Radar crew is that I've the honour of being co-chair of this year's O'Reilly Open Source Convention, with Allison Randal.

We've now opened the OSCON call for participation, so please head over and consider what you might submit for this year's conference.

(And if you're really observant, you'll see that O'Reilly are now using Expectnation, something about which I'm totally thrilled!)

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My preview of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2007

Edd Dumbill — 2007-03-09T10:36:45Z

I was honoured to be on the ETech 07 programme committee. Alas, I can't get there this year due to the very enjoyable reason of recent parenthood. Nevertheless, here are some of the talks I'd earmarked to attend.

Creating Addictive User Experiences (Kathy Sierra)

Is it possible to say too many good things about Kathy Sierra? Any project or product built with attention to her advice about empowering users gets a huge head start to popularity and success. I was fortunate enough to spend a day with Kathy last year on a training course, and it was great to see the passion and commitment from her writing runs through her as a person, even behind the scenes.

Applied Web Heresies (Avi Bryant)

I'd go to this one out of insatiable curiosity. I believe that web conventions enable rapid application design (c.f. REST in Rails) but here's an argument that not following them also reaps rewards. Attend this talk prepared for involvement. I've never met a Squeaker without attitude.

Making Offline Web Applications a Reality (Zimbra)

A short product talk, but taking web apps offline is an area to watch. Even if you don't think offline is that important to you, many of the same principles apply to application mobility. Take that key app data off onto your phone, watch or memory stick.

Collective Intelligence, Indeterminacy, and the Illusion of Control (Charles Armstrong)

More user-facing stuff. How do you give a user of a large nondeterministic piece of social software the idea that they're in control? This is an important topic to me: note how many pieces of social software fall by the wayside right away. For some, it's lack of utility, but that's influenced too by the degree of engagement and control a user feels.

No Program Left Behind: Liberating TV from the Tyranny of the Ephemeral (Tom Loosemore)

There is no good reason not to listen to Tom Loosemore. Especially when he feels strongly about something. The idea of this talk is a "vision of a cheap consumer device sitting under your TV that will capture, store, and share all TV, forever." The TV industry sure needs its visionaries.

Patterns: From Fabrics to Fabrication (Dale Dougherty)

Dale was responsible for getting my XML career off the ground, and you can find him at work behind some of the smartest things O'Reilly's done over the years. Make magazine was one of those, and now he's moving on to Craft. Design patterns for, er, real designs.

RFID Guardian: A Personal Platform for RFID Privacy Management (Melanie Rieback)

Jamming bad RFIDs. Having just taken delivery of an RFID-enabled passport, this is starting to come home to me.

Super Ninja Privacy Techniques for Web App Developers (Marc Hedlund)

Despite the cute title, lots of good stuff here. Expectnation is going to end up with a truck load of user registrations, and their privacy is important to me. I imagine there'll be some good debate in the Q&A session for this talk.

JavaScript: It's Happening All Over Again! (James A. Duncan)

I've recently got the JS bug, thanks to JQuery. It's actually a fun and malleable language to work in. I'd go to this talk looking for fellow travellers and hints, though I'm a bit skeptical about Zimki itself.

ETech 2007 registration

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EuroFoo reflections

Edd Dumbill — 2006-09-19T23:02:49Z

I got an enormous amount out of the just-finished European FooCamp, with lots of thoughts sparking off and interesting things to consider.

Jon Mountjoy proposed a theory to me that Web 2.0 and the enterprise weren't in fact as far apart as a naive observe might imagine. He reckons that mashups, tagging and the like do happen within the enterprise, and in fact are often solving harder problems than found in the wilds of the web. There is a lot in common between Web 2.0 and SOA (even aside from buzzword compliance factors). This is a theme I'd like to follow through. Who are the hackers on the inside of companies, and what stories do they have to tell?

Gavin Starks from Global Cool really opened our eyes again to the problem of the environment, and introduced the interesting position that Global Cool are taking. If you want to do anything real right now to avoid catastrophic consequences, it's too late to wait for government initiatives to bear fruit. Private citizens must act too. And that's the aim of Global Cool: educating and lobbying the individual, not the government.

I was struck, as were others, by the unfortunate irony that conferences have a big environmental cost in the travel involved, as we sat there among people from many countries. I want to now investigate how XTech could be better in this regard, through carbon offsetting and similar schemes. I guess being in Paris is already a good start, as trains are apparently only 25% as polluting as planes, though this still seems like a lot!

Claus Dahl led an interesting and wide-ranging discussion about Second Life as a prototyping space for real life invention. Too many themes there to summarise neatly, but we did have an entertaining side discussion about Second Life's potential environmental impact due to CPU consumption and data centers. One suggestion was that objects and activities could be annotated in-world with their environmental cost.

Simon Willison energetically explained OpenID, a decentralized identity system proposed by SixApart and already live in systems such as LiveJournal. It attempts to solve the problem of a username and password pair for every site you visit, without the controversy of centralisation suffered by projects such as Microsoft's passport. Simon demonstrated a proof of concept that I think will be a very neat answer to site providers who ask "why should I support OpenID?" (Sneak preview: because if you don't, it's going to be astonishingly easy for a middleman to provide it, and you wouldn't want that.)

I also took time to learn about something I'd been interested in but not known much about, 3D printing and "fabbing". Simon Wardley led a great overview of current systems for 3D printing and their various attributes, and indicated where the current trends were going. It doesn't seem so unrealistic that there'll soon be affordable 3D printing bureaux similar to walk-in reprographic facilities like Kinkos.

Plenty more went on that I've not got time to transcribe, but I think will flavour my thinking over the months to come. I was fortunate to be among some incredibly intelligent and welcoming people. My thanks to O'Reilly for putting this on, and to everyone else who went for being inspiring companions.

Oh, one more thing. Belgians are excellent at confectionery.

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Euro(star|FOO|OSCON)

Edd Dumbill — 2006-09-16T21:15:16Z

Today I'm travelling to Belgium to take my part in the orgy of elitist conspiracy that is O'Reilly's European Foo Camp and open source convention. I've elected to undertake the journey by train.

It is difficult to overemphasize how magnificent a thing the Eurostar service is. Were it left to our drab and utilitarian government alone, such a thing would never exist.

Instead, in two and a half hours of clean, comfortable carriages and more than tolerable coffee I will be in Brussels, just a short tram ride away from my hotel. With the increasing difficulty and odiousness of air travel, things could hardly be more of a contrast.

The price seems to me insanely cheap. My journey to Brussels and back costs under £60, less than my journey down to London from York in the first place.

It almost makes you wish for the heady days of the Major government's flirtation with Europe. Life seemed simpler then. (We even had a prime minister who understood cricket, but that's another story.)

EuroFOO

Foo Camp is an event where O'Reilly Media invite a bunch of people to create an ad-hoc conference. For O'Reilly, it's a great way to take the pulse of earlier-than-thou early adopters and mad inventors, which in turn feeds their business. For the invitees, it's a great way to meet others, put your ideas out there, and get your mind expanded. For those outside the fold, exclusion has taken on an importance far out of proportion to its actual significance, which appears sadly inevitable.

Although I was present at the US Foo a few weeks ago, illness meant I missed the bulk of it while recovering in a darkened room. So, I'm looking forward this time to playing a bigger part.

One of the themes I'm seeing developing, and for which we intend to focus on at XTech 2007, is that of the increasing connectivity and blurring of distinction between the web and the world. Things to watch include Second Life, Thinglink, mobile, geotagging, ubiquitous computing.

I'm also looking forward to hearing the low-down on Railsconf Europe from those who went. Sadly pressure of time meant I couldn't go, but the write-ups I've been seeing make it sound like an excellent event, and a great progression from the Chicago one.

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