that’s whacked

OSDC.tw: making conferences fun again

Sunday, Apr 19. 2009  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Songbird, Travel

I spent yesterday at OSDC.tw (Open Source Developers Conference, Taiwan), organised by Hsin-Chan Chien.  I presented Songbird, giving an intro to the app, talking about the ways it could be extended, and demo’ing the app and some of the extensions/Feathers available.  (If you look at the slides, there are a good number that I included that I didn’t get to speak to as I was trying to plan for the contingency of not having Internet and needing to fill in the demo time).

What struck me about the conference was the community feel.  This is easily up there with FISL and FOSDEM as one of the best conferences I’ve been to.  It was grass-roots organised, staffed by volunteers, and though it had some corporate sponsors, it didn’t feel corporate in any way.  There were (IIRC) 230 attendees, with two talks going on any given time over the 2 day weekend (with in-depth tutorials on Friday).  While this is a far cry from the thousands of people at OSCON and multitudes of talks going on at any given time… but IMHO, it was far far better.  Having only two talks at a time ensures that each talk has a good # of attendees (avoiding the OSCON scenario of talks with only 5 or 10 attendees which sucks).  OSDC.tw also really fostered more of a community feel; I saw people chatting and meeting new people, hanging out and discussing technology and having Q&A over tea-time.  Having the regularly scheduled tea-time breaks in one central area really fosters a nice sense of community as well.

In addition to my talk Sunday morning, I got to meet Tim and Bob of the Mozilla Taiwan Community, and went to lunch with clkao, gugod, obra, and a few other folks.  During the afternoon I had a discussion in IRC (#osdc.tw on Freenode) with some folks on ZFS, and ended up giving a lightning talk in conjunction with in2.  She gave some quick slides and introduced ZFS in Chinese, and I followed up with a rapid-fire 5 minute demo (managed to throw up a Virtualbox install of OpenSolaris (snv_101b) quickly) of snapshots, cloning, rollbacks, sends and receives.  My demo was particularly well-illustrated when I accidentally rm -rf’d an SVN directory before snapshotting. 

I also saw Rasmus’s talk on PHP performance and scaling… his example of profiling and optimising Laconica was particularly interesting given our use of Laconica for Songbird’s murmuration project.  But the best talk of the day, by far, was Yusuke Kawasaki’s talk on JSAR (Javascript Augmented Reality).  I can’t even begin to describe his demo of Air Xiaolongbao and Air Pudding, but it was very akin to his hilarious Air Yakiniku video on YouTube.

After the conference we had a great speaker dinner… I can’t think of any other conference where every speaker could get together afterwards and have a big dinner.  I got to chat some more with obra, xdite and met Paul Bakaus (the undisputed and renowned jQuery UI world expert ).

I’m really hoping I’ll be able to attend OSDC.tw 2010 next year, and I’d certainly encourage anyone organising conferences to pursue this sort of community grass-roots feel.  It was a far far cry from the huge corporate conference feel, and if anything felt more like a huge user-group get-together.

Update: Photos from Yusuke’s talk here, and photos from dinner here

i <3 mountain view

Tuesday, Dec 2. 2008  –  Category: OpenSource, Songbird

well, <3 may be a strong wordemoticon. but it’s certainly an alright place to spend a few days… which is what i’ll be doing for the next week or so.

this friday & saturday i’ll be at FOSSCamp. as with any unconference there isn’t a set agenda…

next wednesday i’ll be dropping by the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Jaunty Jackalope planning along with preed. i’m looking forward to seeing Jorge again, and meeting the rest of the Ubuntu MozillaTeam. hopefully we’ll make some progress on the packaging of Songbird in Ubuntu.

wednesday evening, since i’m down in mountain view anyway, i plan on swinging by the Mozilla Open House at the MoCo offices.

and lastly, on thursday i’ll be at Add-on-Con. should be a cool extremely-focused conference (on cross-browser add-on development), and i’m looking forward to quite a few of the talks.

seoul photos, now with new and improved context

Friday, Nov 24. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Photos

I finally got around to captioning and describing all my photos from my trip to Seoul for Tech Days from two weeks ago.

the seoul shuffle

Monday, Nov 6. 2006  –  Category: Photos, Travel

had a fun day exploring seoul yesterday with my buddy raghu, who coincidentally happened to be out in seoul this very same week.

the day was gorgeous out (thankfully the weather forecast lied and it was completely sunny and warm). i’m a huge war buff, so we headed out to the Seodaemun Prison History Hall to see some exhibits on the Korean independence movement, and to learn a little more about the Korean War. along the way, we saw the requisite bit of engrish, and ended up walking around seoul for the rest of the day asking each other “didn’t you see my panty?”.

we wandered around the Insadong street shopping area, and had lunch at a place famous for its “doughy potato noodles” (they taste amazingly better than they sound), and an oyster pancake (also better than it sounds).

the famous hammering man statue was well… a hammering man. slightly underwhelming, and not worth the 2km walk.

we saw a street vendor with some pokemon puppets that were bouncing up and down to music. it was amazing. raghu and i stared and stared and could not for the life of us figure out how the thing worked. we plunked down 3000 won to buy one and see how it worked. after what seemed like an eternity of watching (though really probably about 10 minutes), we finally saw the tiniest thread of string running horizontally between the two speakers. the pokemon puppets were then attached to the string, which went into the speaker, and i presume were attached to the actual cone. so as the music played, the cone would vibrate, which sent waves through the string… which in turn caused the puppets to bounce.

amazing. and totally better than the hammering man.

stores/malls seem to have parking lots which have these little booths at the exits with cute girls in them. the girls wear a headset and have a huge speaker system, from which they bow and thank every car that leaves the parking lot. wow. i mean… just wow.

we also saw a really cool performance of an electronica/techno classical violinist in a metro station. he was accompanied by a gaggle of hot russian girls. go figure.

in the evening around dusk, we headed to seoul tower where we got some incredible 360° views of the city in the evening. we took the fun cable car ride up and down. on the way back, we wandered around the Myeong-dong subway station area trying to find this specific restaurant mentioned in the Lonely Planet that serves samgyetang (korean ginseng chicken soup). it was mentioned as being on the second floor, with no korean or english sign – but only chinese lettering. i can’t even begin to tell you how impossible it was to find this place. after 30 minutes of wandering around trying to map an out of scale map against the streets – we actually finally found the place.

the soup was amazing. totally worth the hunt.