One of the biggest shockers for me at OSCON happened during the first day. I was sitting in the second row of the Rails session and I looked behind me to see what type of laptops people were using. I would guess that 80% were PowerBooks. Of the x86 laptops …

Up above Silicon Valley, IBM has a big research facility. One of the big projects they are working on over there at Almaden is called Web Fountain. Think of it as Google on steroids. A search engine that can determine sentiment (can determine what ambiguous terms on pages actually mean …

Having Ruby on Rails pounded into me for 5 straight days (it seemed to be a theme of OSCON) caused me to try out Django tonight.

I've only finished the 2nd tutorial but it's pretty impressive what's in there. The only thing that seems a little wierd is that you …

I'm going through my OSCON notes and compiling my notes and a list of interesting websites. The websites will be found here (using my oscon2005 delicious tag):

Yaml

This is the markup language that the Ruby on Rails is using (rather than xml). There are bindings for various languages. The …

I'm back from OSCON and had a great time. It was fun to meet and talk with so many interesting people. One of the most interesting I met after the conference en route home.

While in the airport standing in the queue to get on the plane Rob Kaye was …

I'm up at OSCON and have attended 4 sessions in the past two days. My favorite so far was the Rails talk.

David Hainemeier Hansson (the creator of Rails) did a great job presenting, and I was very impressed by the framework he has implemented. The main gist of Rails …

Argghh, Windows keeps coming back to bite me. (Or rather me being a "nerd" means I give free support to my friends, who sadly all run some variant of windows)

While having dinner with some friends tonight (who happen to be another uninformed computer user that I blogged about while …

From my experience commercial testing of software consists of manual qa (grunt labor). Little is automated. I personally feel that even with a slight investment by developers to create unit tests, that effort would pay off later (especially in the crunch time before a big release where fixing a bug …

Last week Alex presented to a pretty big crowd for a baypiggies meeting at google. His talk was originally entitled "Black Magic", but to avoid the bad connotation, he renamed it "Descriptors, Decorators and Metaclasses". A pdf version of his slides can be found here. If you are interested in …

I guess I should followup to the ICFP programming competition which held the second and final phase a little over a week ago. The gist of the competition this year was that you implement a project in 3 days, then two weeks later the specs change and you are given …