Linux.conf.au, Part 2
Wednesday I went to Denise and Mark’s talk about Dreamwidth’s developer community. They outlined a lot of ways that it’s been a success at bringing in people from diverse backgrounds. Yay! They do rock and it’s a pleasure to work with their hosted dev env (Dreamhacks) and the wiki that very clearly explains what to do to start contributing to the project!
Selena Deckelmann gave a talk that was a great overview of open source database projects. I didn’t realize there were so many – there are over 50 active free/open source database platforms. I liked her ways to organize thinking about what kinds of databases there are – how can we classify them and their features? What are they good for? So it wasn’t just “a list of some software” but taught me ways to think about databases and what they do. Useful and exciting.
Onwards to Claudine Chioh’s talk on open source humanities collaboration. She showed us stuff like Old Bailey Online, Valley of the Shadow, Perseus Digital Library, Index Thomisticus from 1946 that analyzed and processed text, and her own project built in Drupal, Founders and Survivors. After that, a keysigning, and the inspiring “Teaching FOSS at Universities” talk by Bob Edwards and Andrew Tridgell. It was great to think this will become more common over the next few years. At some point I thought, “Huh. Not only could I ace such a graduate course, I could make a curriculum for it and teach it quite well.” It would be a blast.
At some point as we talked about arguing on the Internet, braille input and screen readers, and Bob Brandon’s inferentialist theory of meaning, Jason sent me the David Sternlight FAQ, good for a laugh!
Angie Byron’s tutorial on Drupal had 30 or 40 people all guiltily and eagerly installing Drupal 7 alpha. It was easy to install on a Mac with MAMP – give it a try! The menus and the posting interface are much cleaner. We went through the steps to build a module to take input from users and turn it into pirate speak. Yarrr matey! P.S. We will replace you with CCK and Views. Also? Don’t. Hack. Core!!!!!!
Jon Cruz talked about Adaptive UIs. I upset a lot of people on Twitter by linking to the vi version of Clippy. From “what is adaptive ui anyway” we went pretty fast into specific ideas about coding architecture, datamodels, event driven asynchronous approaches to interfaces. I liked the bit about naming stuff after what it’s doing, not on what triggered it, and thought about that for a while, missing the rest of the talk.
Oh also! Geek Girl Dinner! OMG! It was nice! This and Haecksen meant that I never felt lonely at the conference. The hive vagina is mighty! Oh, how many gentle beardy men we mildly horrified and amused by using the phrase “hive vagina”! The lulz!
The best bit was getting to meet up with the tail end of the night of Arduino hacking. People who had gone to the Arduino miniconference on Monday were finishing up their Aiko/Pebble/Arduino kits at the U-Stay hostel (which I didn’t stay at because it was up a giant hill). There were no kits left but a wild haired dude sat next to me and threw out little bits of information which I flailed around to keep up with. It was a clever bit of social engineering on his part, so that just as a batch of people finished up their soldering, I was there to say “And here is how you install the stuff to tell it to turn on a blinky light.” Armed with this crucial knowledge and spreading it around, I felt wise and popular instead of out of place and like I had to quickly prove right away that I know how to solder, which I totally do so anyone who makes assumptions can suck it. What? A chip on my shoulder?
Arjen and I then figured out further how to flash the Aiko software into his Arduino and blink its lights, a moment which might sound trivial but when it works, you will LOVE THE WORLD.
Page 2 of 3 | Previous page | Next page