onfocus

Some interesting points from the conference so far today:

• Developing countries equate software and Microsoft. They don't know about alternatives.
• Bradley Kuhn noted that most of the world isn't using computers yet—which means they haven't chosen an operating system yet. He argues that free software needs to expand to developing countries.
• Technologies like VXML (Voice-XML that powers automated phone systems) are more critical in non-literate societies.
• 33% of eBay's listings come in through their API. (That's millions of listings.)
• There's an analogy between the Domain Name System and current Web Services. Users and developers need to guard against lock-in points like the DNS government-granted monopoly to NetSol.
• Tim quoting Lao-Tzu: "Losing the way of life, men rely on goodness. Losing goodness, men rely on laws." Licensing agreements change. Company's strategies change. Since we're not following The Way, how do we hold on to the current Web Services goodness?
• The business case keeps the goodness according to Amazon and eBay. Both companies feel the economic pain when their developers fail, so they want to keep the developers successful. (Unlike traditional software platforms.) [My note: Though traditional software vendors do feel the pain of developer failures in the form of lost future revenue—unless you're a monopoly. But those are illegal anyway. heh.]
• Google declined to participate in the Web Services Bill of Rights talk.

This afternoon you can probably find me at:

• Emerging Topics Lightning Talks
• Open Source and Open Standards
• Amazon Web Services: Past, Present, Future
• Transforming XML for Web and Print

whew!

I had a great afternoon at the conference. As someone who codes in isolation for days/weeks/months on end, it's nice to see powerpoint slides that show real live code by other people. Though the Filtering Email with Perl session turned into a bit of a code-critique by the audience. (Tough crowd.) It was still fun to hear a bunch of Perl hackers discussing how to best optimize the script in the presentation. In fact, they could turn that into a session: Let the OSCon Audience Optimize Your Script. You could get five minutes on stage: one minute to show/explain your script, four minutes to hear people fight about how they would improve it. That would be quality geeky entertainment.

I'm here at OSCon in Portland enjoying the wireless access. I just overheard a reporter talking on his cell phone with his editor (I presume) about how there's nothing "mind shattering" at the conference yet—and stories are hard to come by. He did say he was going to put together a story about the fact that Microsoft is buying lunch for everyone at the conference. You can't buy press like that. Oh wait...

This conference is quite a bit bigger than those I've regularly attended in the past: eTech, SXSW, etc. There are eight sessions or so going on in each time slot, and the trade show has around 25 vendors. I missed the sessions I wanted to see this morning, but I'm hoping to make up for it this afternoon. If you're here I'll probably see you at one or more of the following:

• Intro to Web Services with PHP
• Perl Lightning Talks
• MS Office Files Exposed
• XML Security Standards
• What the X is XQuery?
• Filtering Email with Perl

It should be a mind shattering afternoon. ;)

Highway near Philomath

Barn at the Finley Wildlife Refuge

The weblog landscape is about to change: AOL Blogs. (A preview by Jeff Jarvis.)

I'm looking forward to the Open Source Convention in Portland next week. I primarily use Microsoft tools for development, so this should be a good overview of what's happening in the land of the free. I have been working with Perl quite a bit lately and I hope to catch some advice from the experts. The conference seems to include a discussion of open systems rather than exclusively "open source" software, and open systems are something I'm very interested in. The Emerging Topics track looks great, especially Bill of Rights for Web Services on Thursday.

I'm playing around with Google's new AdSense ads on the snapGallery page. You can follow along by watching the "Ad Stats" box directly underneath the vertical ad banner on the right-hand side of the page. It's updated every two hours with the latest statistics for that banner. Since I added the Google ads on June 24th, they've been clicked 31 times and I've made $3.70. We'll see how it goes.

Of course any profits from this experiment will go toward onfocus infrastructure maintenance/improvement—with the savings passed on to you!

An Amazon developer is keeping a weblog about what it's like to be an Amazon developer. [via Anil] I wonder what sort of weblog policies they have, and how closely this is monitored before/after publishing. What if Amazon gave every employee a weblog on Amazon.com?

Slashdot: Amazon Hacks For Fun and Money. [via Erik Benson]

Google's API is down which makes Google Smackdown down. That's a lot of down. This is the first problem I've experienced with Google's API. Update: back up, smack up!