A lot of people who want to switch from Safari choose Firefox. There are some great reasons to do that, like the web developer toolbar. But ironically, I think a lot of Firefox’s Mac mindshare is a side effect of the gains it’s making (for good reasons) on Windows IE. Clearly it’s the best choice for most Windows users and most Linux/Unix desktops as well. But on the Mac there are other good ones.
It’s possible that there’s still some guy doing laps around the Oregon Convention Center on a Segway with security chasing after him, but as of 1:30PM today OSCON 2005 was officially over.
This was my first time attending the conference, and I had a great time. I learned a lot, had some excellent discussions and unexpected laughs, and got myself fired up again about being part of the open source anti-massacree movement.
I have to admit that I carry big shield of skepticism when I circulate exhibit halls. Luckily a fellow attendee tipped me off to OpenLaszlo, an extremely spiffy system for server-side, declarative generation of Flash content. What this means for somebody like me – someone who, despite a lot of background in visual design, would really prefer to work directly with code – is that very sweet Flash-based interfaces can be constructed via XML. Their XML dialect, LZX, impressed me with its elegance and (for XML) relative lack of verbosity. The generation code is Java, which you can either run live on your server or run offline to generate standalone .swf files. They offer a nifty playground/demo for you to check it out.
The PDX Ruby Brigade (“PDX” is the airport code for Portland) is hosting a sort of alternative/extended OSCON called FOSCON. It’s being held at Freegeek.
Several of us in Portland got into OSCON free the last couple of years by volunteering. When we found out that there would be no volunteer opportunities this year we decided to see if any of the Ruby speakers would like to practice their OSCON talks on us local Rubyists - thus FOSCON (or as Lennon calls it: OSCANT) was born.
O’Reilly has been running CodeZoo for a few months now. Today they announced CodeZoo subsites for Python and Ruby. CodeZoo is very slick – you can track changes to a particular app or component via a special RSS feed, for instance. Downloads are fast and simple, even for Sourceforge-hosted projects. And they’ve got this new thing called DOAP (why do you think they call it DOAP?), an XML schema for component information. (Tangent: I’m thinking that DOAP could be a nice standard upon which to build phone-home version checking features.)