OSCON Day 1-2

The first couple of days of OSCON are mostly tutorials. I didn't have time to attend any of these this year; my friends who did gave them mixed reviews as usual. OSCON proper kicked off tonight as usual…

There were five main components to the evening's festivities:

• The O'Reilly/Google Open Source Awards. All five awardees seemed to be worthy; I will refer you to Google to find a list of names and accomplishments.
• Larry Wall's State of the Onion. This year his theme was "family". His talk is always nice. I didn't buy the part about the maturing of Perl, though. Perl 6.0 is supposedly going to be finally vaguely ready for prime time around the end of this year. I'll believe it when I see it. Also, I'm not convinced it will solve Perl's fundamental problems. Hopefully I'm wrong.
• The "Golden Camel" awards for Perl developers. Randall Schwartz got one, but didn't attend the ceremony. I thought he still lived in Portland? I'm probably wrong.
• Kathy Sierra filled in at the last minute for Paul Graham, giving a quite interesting talk on the psychology of users focused on inspiring "passion". Lots to ponder there; hopefully slides will be available.
• Damian Conway put on a giant production, as usual. This year he did a multimedia sendup entitled The Da Vinci Codebase. Apparently he told someone he puts about 150 hours into preparing these things—it shows. Some really hilarious moments, although one of the best was spoiled by a surprisingly inept person at the Powerpoint controls. Damian should clearly have advanced his own slides in a talk like this.

I'm exhausted and have to get up at 5:30AM in the morning tomorrow for a busy day. I hope I'll survive the week. (B)