[Phoenix-pm] OSCON Review

[Craig Frooninckx]

Brock asked that I give a overview of the OSCON, which may be rather
hard since work kept getting in the way during my trip.  This was my
first OSCON and from what I've heard, it's been a rather large
success.  I was able to meet and speak with many members of the Perl
community.

Larry's State of the Onion was humerous as he related Perl to a spy
board game that he was working on with his kids.  Damian gave a
keynote on dead programming languages, that had everyone rolling on
the floor.

Damian's new book, Perl Best Practices was a hit and they had trouble
keeping it in stock.  He was definitly a conference favorite. 
Incedently he remembers us, as he said "I always remember the crazy
ones"  He also mentioned that the closest he would be to Phoenix in
the short term was SLC, Utah and that we shouldn't drive to see him
there.

I spent a lot of time with Josh McAdms of Perlcast, as we work for the
same company and occsionally on the same project.

One of the highlights was the Stonehenge party with  brian d foy and
Randal Swartz.  They rented out an arcade and provided beer and pizza.
 I haven't played 1942 and pinball in a long time.

Novell demo'd the new SuSE distro that will be coming out in the fall,
which has me planning to install.  It appears that they took some
ideas from the Mac OS Tiger and add a couple of nice utilities for
managing the Web.

ActiveState released Komodo for the Macintosh at the conference, which
took a couple of guys five minutes to discover a flaw.  Some Perl
coders figured out a way to lock up the machine by just typing some
code into a BEGIN block.

I caught a presentation on Ruby on Rails and was really impressed with
it, to the point that I'm doing more research on that.

I met with some of the folks from The Perl Foundation, which quickly
reminded me that I haven't been giving back to the OS community like I
should be.  I made a donation while at the conference and would like
to try and help them raise more money.

<ask_for_money>
On that note, I ended up with an extra copy of the Perl Best Practices
and a Programming Perl books and would like to know if a pm auction
for those books be okay with the group.  The proceeds from the books
would be donated to the Perl Foundation.  Let me know your thoughts on
that.
</ask_for_money>

I also learned that the Mac Powerbook was the computer to have at
OSCON, they were everywhere.  So if anyone has a spare one that they
don't want, I'm accepting donations.

Sorry that I really am not reporting too much on specifics, but my
brain is still spinning from everything that went on last week.  I
definitly felt it was a great conference to atttend and am working on
how to return next year.

-Craig

<scott>
Peter Scott asked about you during the first night I was there.  I
told him that you were doing well and was coding circles around me. 
He wanted me to say hi to you.
</scott>