5 Cool Things I Learned At OSCON
My job at OSCON this year was to represent the Portland State Aerospace Society (open tech amateur rockets! whoohoo!) and thanks to the kind folks at IBM and OSGeo, I was able to do exactly that. While I didn’t attend the sessions, I did spend two days checking out the Expo Hall.
In no particular order, here are five cool things about the Expo Hall this year.
1) Best (unsubstantiated?) statistic: Microsoft’s Vista is the least pirated software ever. That’s right - it’s so bad, people don’t even want to *steal* it. I heard about this over lunch (thanks, Google!) on Thursday, and had a good laugh.
2) LinuxFest Northwest 2009 is going to be awesome. The more I hear and see about this event, the more I can’t wait for April 24th, 2009. I’m already registered to participate with the Portland State Aerospace Society, so I’m very excited - and it’s still months away. I chatted with the guys in the LinuxFest NW booth a couple of times, and these are *great* guys who have an engaging interactive event. Check out their site for more info, then sign up and join me there!
3) Miro is actually pretty cool. There are so many excellent vidcasts on the web, and surfing for each and every one of them all the time just isn’t effective time management. (Also, it’s just plain dumb.) Enter Miro. I’ve been looking for something like this application for a long time, and the only thing that comes close to what I want is DRM-evil. Shawn Powers, Associate Editor of the Linux Journal, mentioned this app to me, and I’m pretty happy with it so far. Anyone using anything else that might be cooler?
4) Contact microphones pick up a hell of a lot more noise than I thought. Over at the ON Gallery booth, there were several gadgets that had an interactive component. I really, *really* want to see the specs of the gizmo that played different audio notes based on where I hit a wooden board with a plastic hammer. Who’s got ‘em? I thought I overheard that someone from DorkbotPDX was involved, but I could be mistaken. Someone email me the proper info.
5) There are always a bunch of killer apps and distros around, but this year my interest level was beyond last year’s hunt for a decent synchronized calendar app. All of these items require a second look:
- Kablink’s open collaboration software
- PC-BSD, which just might steal me from my DesktopBSD decision
- Project Wonderful, which I heard about even though they weren’t in attendance;
- Drupal and Ruby programming (not apps, but cool anyway)
- openSUSE 11.0 looks *great* and I can’t wait to load it up
More from me this weekend about the many geeky women I met at OSCON.
Related posts:
- OSCON Expo Hall: First Report From The Floor
- The Women Of OSCON 2008
- Women of OSCON 2010
- RailsConf 2008 starts today in PDX
- W-Tech 2009: Major Site Update
July 26th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Yeah, that wooden board with the contact mics thing was built by Collin Oldham, who, like pretty much everybody else who had a piece at the OnGallery booth, is a member of DorkbotPDX. You can get more info about him here: http://dorkbotpdx.org/node/148