that’s whacked

OSCON Day 2

Monday, Jul 28. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Songbird

Thursday was our second day in the booth. We had the usual booth traffic, answering lots of question re: Songbird, talking to folks who were pretty familiar with Songbird but were just waiting for a few more features before they would consider it 1.0. From the people I talked to, by far the biggest feature was smart playlists, followed by watch folders, and CD rip/burn.

Thursday was also the first day I actually went to some of the sessions; per my usual routine, I swung by the “State of” lightning talks, and as usual, they were MC’d by the excellent Josh Burkus, showing no signs of his sumo beat-down from the night before. I watched Mark Shuttleworth give his 5 minute overview of Bazaar (I had no idea he was into Bzr, go figure), followed by Brian King and his Mozdev summary which was great to hear. I continually think Mozdev is a fantastic resource for Mozilla application and add-on developers, but is under-marketed. Glynn gave an excellent round-up of OpenSolaris - the launch of the OpenSolaris distro and the continuing migration to Mercurial being the two big notable points. His slides were excellent and did a great job of not being text-heavy, and just illustrating his points. Those 3 lightning talks made me realise that one of the key elements to my public speaking that I lack is an Imperial accent (Mark, Brian, and Glynn posessing S. African, Irish, and Irish/Kiwi respectively). Sigh. The best part of the lightning talks were when Ken Drachnik (from Sun) was AWOL from his Glassfish talk (IIRC, due to a family emergency?), and Josh picked a random person (who happened to be Karl Fogel) to give the talk. Fogel did an amazing lightning talk… probably the best lightning talk I’ve ever seen, and it happened to be for a topic he knew nothing about! Ken’s slides were… well, quite frankly, awful. One of them had the usual Sun corporate slide footer proclaiming “Sun confidential/internal use only”, but that aside - they were just full of buzzwords and way way way too text heavy. Fogel did a hilarious job picking them apart.

Following that I had my 50 minute session on Songbird. I focused mostly on the idea of building media/web mashups, incorporating dynamic web content into media player add-ons to deliver really cool contextual information. I showed my usual mashTape, and Flickr add-ons. To show webpage integrations I showed my music explorr page, and ian’s wicked cool Google Maps mashup. Lastly I showed some cool Media Views (one of our new features since FOSDEM which was the last big event I demo’d Songbird at) including pvh’s cool new Bubbles view, as well as his Metrics view. I think I had about 25ish people in the audience, of which about 6 or 7 got engaged and asked questions during or after the talk, so I’m reasonably happy with that turnout.

After my talk, we did some more booth duty, and then had some really good hallway discussion about the state of XULRunner with some Mozdev, ActiveState/Komodo, and MailCo guys.

By this point I was already pretty exhausted, having spent most of my morning fretting about my talk. I wandered back by our booth which was already packed up (thanks to Allyson for steadfastly holding down the fort!), and met up with some of my fellow OpenSolaris folks (my fellow OGB members gman, alanc, and plocher, and comay) where we headed out for a quick bite to eat and some ruminating upon the state of OpenSolaris and its community. After a very pleasant (or so I thought at the time) dinner, we headed over to the Bossanova Ballroom for our grand fiesta: the Beerforge Party.

Beerforge was the bash we (Songbird, Mozilla, OpenSourcery, Jive, Vidoop, & OSL) had been planning for the past few months. It was great to finally meet Ulili & Thomas from Mozilla & OpenSourcery, and as far as I can tell - the party was a success. It seemed like people enjoyed the scene, the food, and certainly the drinks (shout out to Vidoop for the open bar!).

Post-Beerforge, the OpenSourcery guys clearly hadn’t had enough, and hosted their own after-after-after party at their office around the corner. Much drinking and Spy Hunter playing commenced.

Tags: oscon08