OSCON was a huge success, we had a full room for the presentation followed by lots of very positive feedback. It appears that one person was taking notes during our presentation and does a pretty good rough overview which can be read here. Another place to read some interesting reactions of this years OSCON is here at Michael Kimsals Blog. He also interviewed Mikeal and I at the conference for Web Dev Radio at some point in the future. I will let you know when that is available for your listening pleasure. I felt that the conference was very well done, with lots of interesting content. The OSAF presence there was important and in some ways expected. I didn't get to as many talks as I would have liked but the ones I went to were for the most part informative and interesting. A common sentiment that I heard from people was that nothing blew them away, but each talk did have a piece of new information you could take away with you. The 'Open Design, Not by Committee' talk given by Ted Leung and Mimi Yin did a good job at giving people a sense of what OSAF has done well, struggled with and solutions and decisions that have brought Chandler to it's current state. There are a lot of things that OSAF has dealt with that the rest of the Open Source community hasn't run into yet, and it's important that everyone learns from one another. Hopefully some of this information made it into ears that can save other projects some time and heartache. I wanted to hear Katie but unfortunately the Windmill talk was at exactly the same time. As a first timer to OSCON I really enjoyed all the industry people I had a chance to talk to, as well as the ability to get first hand looks at where some of our favorite Open Source projects are headed.

When I returned home after my day of camping and R&R up at the Russian River, I happily found that people had already descended upon #windmill on freenode and had written some of the docs I had planned on writing Monday. What a treat! I love Open Source. Currently we are gearing up on our 0.2 release release, which has some bug fixes and new features that people will be excited about and can be viewed in the Windmill Roadmap. I hope people continue to show up and help find bugs and other issues to get Windmill ready to be a competitive solution in the AJAX Web UI Automation world.

On another note, Cosmo (Now called Chandler Server) is turning into a very impressive web based PIM, that everyone should check out. We have a testing server online that I keep updated to the latest build, so please come use it and log lots of bugs! With preview right around the corner we are working like mad to get as many bugs fixed as we can so that the release really shows off the product, and gets people excited about what it will be able to do in the future.

There was an interesting Mozilla Zine Post by Mitchell Baker of Mozilla about their current situation with Thunderbird and the development of Open Source email software. What made this even more interesting was the response post by our General Manager and VP of Engineering, Katie Capps Parlante about the possibilities of OSAF collaborating or working with Mozilla on an open source mail solution. It would make a lot of logical sense because Mozilla doesn't really want to start another company just to work on T-Bird, but the world knows that there is a need for something there. OSAF has spent 5 years working on Chandler and with a little more in the way of resources and public attention could get the email functionality up to snuff and become a serious competitor. Mitch Kapor is on the board of both organizations (maybe he could consolidate his board meetings) and gain more momentum for both projects. I see a lot of parallels in the feature needs and projects between the organizations, so this could turn into a very interesting situation after preview is released.

My next post was going to be a detailed review of all the talks I attended, but I think Matt is already working on doing that himself, so I may just add my two cents and then link to it.. considering he went to more talks that I did and all the ones I went to he was at as well.


Cheers!

As some of you may know, I am currently at OSCON in Portland. This morning we did a talk about our Web UI Testing Framework called Windmill which you can check out at the Windmill Home Page.

I have attended quite a few talks including "Why you should learn compilers", "Debugging Javascript", and am currently in a talk by the Mozilla guys about "Localizing your application".

I will be giving a more thorough review of all of this when I get back. Last night we mixed dinner, and preparation with a party with Mozilla/Creative Commons followed by a free beer party thrown by Sun, lots of really smart people.

Tonight there are many social activities taking place, we shall see if I have any energy left after my last couple crazy busy days.

I am well overdue for an update, so i'll get back to ya!

On to my second topic, which was my trip to Boston that I just returned home from. I would like to give a shout out to my family back east, thanks for all the hospitality, lobsters, Samuel Adam's and good company. We had a great time tooling around the city, from the Historic downtown and water front, to the Sam Adams Brewery out the orange line.. we enjoyed all the sights.

We spent an afternoon at a lobster bake down on the outside of Cape Cod in Falmouth with a view of Marthas Vineyard and ate ourselves in to heaven. The big fireworks day that actually blew my mind was the 3rd on the Beach in Humarock which had gigantic bon fires, and countless amounts of fireworks. Plus I got a chance to hang out with two of my favorite ladies, my sister from down in LA and Miss Megan.

Anywhoo, I posted a TON of pictures on picasa so that you all can go see what your missing out on the other side of the continent.

Go check out Photos!!!

I just spent ten days on vacation in Boston. It's a very nice city and lots of fun and interesting things to see and do there. However, while I was there the infamous iPhone was released - no I don't own one.. yet? The media went crazy and the phones went flying off the shelves, I wasn't in line because I am not completely convinced that the iPhone is ready for me.

First off, I want to preface this by saying that I did get a chance to look at Mikeals and it is true that the interface is stunning, and the things it does.. well it does better than it has ever been done before. One thing I was super impressed with was the Google Maps application. The edge speed was plenty fast, and the interface was extremely intuitive and frankly very helpful when trying to get where you are going. The web browser was the first browser I have used on a phone that actually makes it reasonable to browse the web. Core animation makes the UI effects smooth, crisp and responsive.

Like ever other blogger out there, I can sit here and mention how expensive it is, and that no one REALLY needs all those features.. but frankly I went out and spent $400 dollars on an HTC 8525 because I simply couldn't wait until the iPhone came out to be doing all of that on my phone. And honestly, my phone does the job.. the windows mobile interface is clunky, the Google Maps app is a bit hacky and frustrating to use with your fingers. But it gets the job done for me in those departments, but just wait here comes my inner battle over phone devices.

You all know you want an iPhone, they are slick and they work the way a really nice internet enabled phone should work.. ALMOST. My HTC 8525 allows me to idle on instant messaging and irc servers, it will do exchange, and frankly it's a pretty slick little device on it's own. The main point here that I realized traveling is that if I want to be constantly up to date with my peers and work, I can communicate online with my device the way I would sitting at a computer but if I run in to any problems getting online wherever I am I can tether my Mac and get on the internet via bluetooth.. which these last 10 days was a gift from above. In a perfect world, I would have bigger pockets literally and metaphorically so I could afford both devices, and have room to hold them both in my pocket. I will probably get an iPhone eventually, especially if they add a bunch of the projected features that I really wanted to begin with.. but in the immediate future I will be using my 8525 with a smile, and enjoy installing all the hacks on it to make it feel more finger friendly.

However today I went to the first day of the iPhone Bar Camp development conference at Adobe in the city, and I'm tempted to write some web applications for the iPhone just for fun, even though I don't have one sitting here to test it on.

Last weekend Martin, Jacob an I cruised up to Santa Rosa for the yearly Cigar BQ. Now some of you may think that this is a ridiculous idea, to pay $150 dollars to spend the weekend drinking all the wine you can get your hands on, and try some of the highest quality cigars around. However, I went out of the goodness of my heart. This event is a charitable fund raiser for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.

As usual, we lacked the foresight to book any kind of accommodations. This always makes things just that much more interesting, because your lodgings have to find you and can be the most unlikely places you never would have foreseen. Unfortunately after a few hours of hanging out in the suite of Cigar BQ master himself (Hans Dippel) we wound up back at the good ol Sandman model for a wrestles night of incoherent banter. Fortunately, by the time we reached the Sandman we had experienced hours of free top shelf Sanoma wines, cigars and copious amounts of delicious foods.

The event was held at Saralee's Vineyard about 10 minutes out of downtown Santa Rosa. The venue is amazing, and as you walk in you are greeted by a tent of people handing you cool trinkets and filling your glass with champagne. You proceed to an area with around 16 tents each side of each tent spots a different vineyard serving their wines, brandy's, ports and sparkling wines OR a cigar representative for their respective company handing out free cigars. They give you a book of tickets in the hopes that it will limit your visits to each tent, however that didn't stop me from returning to chat and collect more and more cigars.

Honestly it was pretty hot out there, but it was a good time. I did learn my lesson though, my body really dislikes the idea of more than a couple cigars a week. I have no idea how many I puffed on over the weekend, but it lead to three days of being sick and feeling fatigued... I wonder why? :)

However, as taxing as the whole experience was I had a great time hanging out with the guys and it forced me to take some time and not be staring at a computer. My body thanked me for that part of it all so all in all I probably came out about even except for my massive SCORE on cigars. Someone please tell me how I could have scored more cigars for 150 bucks?




For those who are wondering, OSAF is cranking down as we get closer to preview. Windmill trunk is in progress and I should be done with the new UI this week. Cosmo is really shaping up, should be a very exciting release. I will keep everyone up to date as we get closer to preview.