Very excited to be attending the upcoming OSCMS Con to be held at Yahoo! HQ. I was in Vancouver for the last one, and have learned a whole lot more since then.

Don’t know about it? Read up: http://2007.oscms-summit.org/

Now I just have to work on my session proposal(s).

Google has a great number of employees working on OSS. Yesterday, I talked with two Subversion maintainers who work at Google. And now, Greg Stein is building the excitement for the new service.

Two rejected ideas — things that the OSS community needs:

1. A dating service for geeks
2. Fitness trainers

[Polite laughter]

Google Code is the new project, its a host for OSS projects. Will be using Subversion on Bigtable. Looking for clean interface, big scalability and a new way to do issue tracking.

An orchestrated release hit Slashdot 2 minutes after the session started.

No project approval process, but they are reserving existing project names.

For developers, using the repository requires a gmail account.

They realize that there are missing pieces, especially a tarball downloader. The plan is to integrate with Gmail, Blogger, and Google Groups.

In between sessions, just a few quick notes for later.

1. The Django framework for Python has stirred up interest since the project went Open-Source last year. Tim O’Reilly mentioned Django in the same context as Ruby on Rails in terms of a rapid development platform. I spent last night with the Django guys, who are rightfully excited.
2. Sat for the Haxe walkthrough. Haxe is code ties together JavaScript, Flash, and Niko (a server script written in C) through one language. Haxe then compiles the necessary files in the language you need. It’s an interesting idea and worth playing around with.
3. Everyone’s favorite, Google, is about to announce some big OSS web framework. Possibly open search? The Google guys I met wouldn’t say.
4. Plagger is a feed aggregator on steroids. Written in Perl and run from the command-line, it rips (and creates) RSS/XML/ATOM/OPML with infinite variety. There are some real obvious uses for it.

I’m gonna run now so I can be sure to get a seat at the Google presentation.

Well, after a long day of sitting on airplanes, I’m in Portland for OSCON.

Nothing to report there, since I don’t go to the con until tomorrow. But I am playing around with my new phone.

I found a nice little Japanese restaurant a couple of blocks away — Steve would approve. The Koji Osakaya. I managed to order two things I’d never seen before: sweet bean curd nigiri and pickled daikon sushi roll. The daikon was fine, and the bean curd was a real find. I also had a bowl of nokutori (?) udon — beef and egg with noodles in broth. I love udon.

Stupid me, I forgot that I had a camera phone until I had finished eating. But some pics are attached.