Currently:
2003-07-08»
tuesday oscon»
I'd tell you about the monster State
of The Unions speeches, but I spent most of them either ferrying a
cranky child around, or background-coding a blosxom moblogger for quinn and I to picture-o-gram the rest of
OSCON. It's in no
fit state to show anyone, but if you're interested, the program is really just
a punched-up version of stripmime,
some old code that ripped attachments out of mail so you could IMAP or POP
them faster. I don't multi-task welll, so I'm going to have fun refactoring it
later to remove all the lines that say $copyfiletolarrywallsbeingquitefunny =
$doesadaneedachange++ and so forth. (Yoz has been doing the same sort of thing
with Moveable Type if you want proper code from a proper
programmer).
Larry Wall was funny (and Ada, generally speaking, did need a
change). I'm always unsure what new technical details one can pick out of
these talks when so much is available online. I listen mainly for the personal
stories, the emotional inflections you would otherwise miss. Wall, in his
gentle way, touched on how he'd sacrificed a fair bit of his career and his
mortgage to work on Perl 6. He's just come out of hospital for ulcer
treatment and it doesn't sound unrelated. He wasn't asking for pity, but he seemed relieved to announce that
Damian and he had largely finished the Perl6 core language design.
I'm hoping to find my aha! moment with Perl 6 here. I think a lot of the
Perl mongers are too. I heard a bunch of British Perlies cheering the new name
for the Perl5-on-Parrot compiler, "Ponie". As in the cockney rhyming slang,
"pony and trap". "There are many reasons for calling it Ponie", said Larry,
"none of them good."
Guido mostly replayed his EuroPython keynote, which apart
from the junking of the mooted Python equivalent to C's (a?b:c), was
straightforward, uncontroversial and reliably, Pythonically, dull. Guido said
he'd strip down the language even more, if he knew how. Lots of pictures of
his new son, which seemed to me to be perfectly in order.
We ran away from the talk with a klaxxonning Ada after Guido, and only
skipped back in to hear the final talk on the State of Linux from Ted T'so. A
fair bit of discussion about how 2.5 is more Java-friendly, although the Linux
guys still insist it's all Sun's fault for their approach to threads (and T'so
did manage to slip in a comment about "Write once, run screaming"). A bit of
snippiness, too, aimed at Eric Raymond's CML2 venture.
I'm actually meeting up with esr tomorrow. If he doesn't shoot me dead in
the first five minutes, I'll hazard asking him about that.
2003-07-07»
getting too old for this sort of thing»
We didn't make it to Damian Conway's talk. Ada was fine, but had
sufficiently tortured her dear mother by rising early that by 4AM it was all
we could do to slide into a motel just halfway up the six hundred miles.
We ended up pulling into Oregon around seven this evening.
At least being out of of the Net gave me a chance to catch up on some
writing. It's also a good way of keeping me from my usual
procrastination-through-overresearching gig. For instance, I have recently
been ploughing through a huge pile of academic economics
research on ebay which I'm belatedly realising
won't quite fit into a 1500 word how-to-sell-online-for-novices piece. Worth
it if you're looking for a few white papers for your pez dispenser futures
consultancy business, though.
As is traditional with long road trips, we listened to too many show-tunes.
2003-07-06»
portland ho»
I'm off to Portland, Oregon in a few hours. We'll be driving through the
night, because Ada (pictured below eating my tie) isn't a great traveller, but
happens to be a member of the US Olympic Sleeping-At-Night Team. We'll
see.
It's for the O'Reilly Open Source
Conference, which I'll try and document as much as I can.
I think this may be my last O'Reilly conf for a while, because I'm
beginning to feel like a Deadhead, following them around like this.
Also, it's really about time I settled down and did something,
instead of zooming around talking to other people about the somethings that
they're doing. Or at least I should write much longer things about other
people doing something. Stuff with indexes. Because if you don't write things
that have indexes, you're nowhere.
Part of that search for a something is leading me to arrive, unshaven and
sleep-deprived, having spent ten hours in the echo-chamber of my daughter's
screams, to head straight for Damian
Conway's 8.45am Monday talk, "Inside
~damian/bin".
I have this crazy idea for a book, and Damian's bin directory is just the
thing to convince me it's a stupid undertaking. Or get me far too excited
about it, one of the two.
After that, I'm just praying I don't collapse and sleep through the rest of
the week, and miss Ward
Cunningham's talk on the unit-testing for users, fit.
The rest of the time, I think I'll be moving in an unstructured haze
between talks, ADHDing my way through the conference as usual. At Emerging
Tech, I jumped around like this, but had this terribly embarassing experience
of leaving every talk just as Tim O'Reilly was dropping in, leading him to
deduce I'm sure that I was spending my time melodramatically storming out of
every event. It didn't help, I don't think, that on the one occasion I was
stable and sitting down when he entered, I'd just stolen Jeff Bezos' chair.
Like Jeff Bezos needs a chair.
Anyway, anyway, come up and say hello if you're there. I'm the taller,
dorky-looking gentleman above.
2003-07-05»
july 4th resolutions»
I'm sorry I've been so grudging in dumping stuff here. Partly, it's mental
constipation. I have four interlinked essays that I've been mulling over for
an eternity, and they've become so intertwined with everything that I am
considering right now that I've been apprehensive about pre-empting any of
them by blogging a single smaller thought.
Which isn't the way to do things on blogs, of course. I should just dump
material here willy-nilly, and tidy it up later. Tidy it up, and sell
it, too.
I say all this, because I've just made a set of resolutions to myself for
the next three months. One of them involves blogging daily, which I felt I
should warn you about. But to understand them all, I'd have to explain that
I've just gorged myself with a great deal of Ben Franklinabilia, and it has,
as ever, made me very excited and determined. And I've never adequately
explained to anyone why reading about Franklin would make me behave in such a
way, except in a very long essay. Which you haven't read because I haven't
written it. Yet.
Perhaps blogging daily will help. But I suspect Paul Ford's extract from
Franklin's autobiography and this
anecdote might help more. If all else fails, lean hard on your
links.
petit disclaimer:
My employer has enough opinions of its own, without having to have mine too.
