Burning Chrome

OSCON 2005: Wow!

I remarked yesterday about the session I spoke at. Now let me comment about how the OSCON went overall for me.

First off, I walked out of there with good introductions to Eclipse, Bacula and Subversion. (Subversion I'd been exposed to at ManyOne, but I now know I was doing a lot of things wrong.) Good stuff, though I was a little underwhelmed at Eclipse. Its XML capabilities leave a bit to be desired, and I'll be looking into Axel Hecht's Solid extension for it shortly. As for Bacula: open-source backup system for Windows. I need that.

I also got introduced to XSLT in such a way that I started to understand it. The last time I attempted to learn XSLT, I was buried under it because I had to learn XPath as well. I've got a good grip on XPath now, so the XSLT tutorial made a little sense to me.

I attended a couple Mozilla talks and learned a few things. For instance, I'd been opposed to Greasemonkey on the grounds of editorial control -- but I learned that wasn't what it was about at all. I even walked out of that talk with a bit more knowledge: a little known method of XPCComponentsUtils called "evalInSandbox"... I need to play with that one!

At another Mozilla talk, I was introduced to xpistubs. Being a big fan of the makexpi.pl toolkit, I think this might be something to look into as well.

On Wednesday, I attended a session on "Writing, Reviewing, and Instigating O'Reilly Books". Having written one book before, I wouldn't mind another opportunity. With the Firefox 1.5 release coming up, I'd say books.mozdev.org is due for a second edition... Ian? MozDevGroup? What do you think? :)

On Thursday morning I was introduced to a really cool idea, the JavaScript Archive Network. The t-shirt on the back says something like "CPAN".replace(/CP/, "JS"). This should've been done years ago, and I'll try to send them a couple gems I've drawn up.

Asa Dotzler gave his keynote this morning on "Linux In Search Of The Desktop", and I thought it went very well. He was right on target, and echoed a few reasons why I still develop on Windows myself.

That's all I can think of right now. Last year when I went to OSCON to speak, I attended every Mozilla session I could think of and was bored out of my mind. Not that it was boring, just that there was nothing I wasn't really familiar with. This year, I diversified, I picked up a lot, and I had a blast. Strangely enough, I passed up on the Ruby on Rails sessions entirely. I just didn't have any interest in that this year, a decision I may come to regret in the next several months for some odd reason.

Thank you, O'Reilly & Associates!

Posted by WeirdAl at August 5, 2005 4:40 PM