OSCON 2007 Recap

Just finished up my 2007 ‘OSCON Experience‘ I attended the conference on Tuesday and Wednesday and we had our PDXPHP both in the exhibit hall as last year, but in addition I helped to organize the OSCamp room.

Spent most of my time in the exhibit hall this year. I only made it to one OSCON session + 2-3 OSCamp sessions. Still had a good time though. I was able to catch up with folks I typically only see at OSCON in addition to hanging out with local friends. There were no shortage of after parties this year. It seemed you had your pick of 3-4 parties a night. People were really zombiefied by the end of Thursday (I know I was).

OSL was nice enough to give a demo of the OLPC to the OSCAMP crowd. Getting the device (and Brad from OSL) out of the loud, crowded exhibit hall enabled the OSCamp’s to get a real close look at it and ask all the questions they wanted.

360Flex Comming to Seattle

Flex seems to be on fire as of late. I really like the theme behind the efforts over at 360Conferences.

For more info on the event, visit www.360flex.com

“The gist is, we’re bringing together the best Flex has to offer, in a community setting where developers can hang out, share ideas, share problems, in general come together and leave with more knowledge and more contacts and friends than when they arrived. Our last event in San Jose was a phenomenal success, this one is shaping up to be better than that.

Additionally we keep the price low, at 360.00 for 3 days, so that even those developers and engineers without an expense account can attend.“

OSCamp 2007

I sort of just fell into organizing the camp this year but it is really starting to shape up. Didn’t take too much effort and O’Reilly was extremely easy to work with. They were nice enough to kick in for grub, projector rental, and brainstorm / collaboration type office supplies (and those are not cheap when you have to purchase them from the Convention Center $$$)

So what is OSCamp:

OSCAMP is in the spirit of BarCamp and other Unconferences. This clip from BarCamp SF provides a great video summary of the spirit of a BarCamp. This year it will be held on July 25-26 as part of O’Reilly’s OSCon2007.

Be sure to head over to oscamp.org and register (if you have not already registered for OSCON). OSCamp is free and open to the public (After you register

Explanation of Open Source (for the non-geek)

I gave this presentation to a local Portland Tech Requiting firm. They see more and more demand for applicants with skills in various open source technologies so they wanted a better understanding of its origins and current trends with an emphasis on PHP.

Slides (pdf)


This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Building Administration Interfaces with XUL

I’m starting to work with mozilla and XUL again. I’ll be posting that work soon, But in the meantime I found this presentation I did back in 2005. [original post] I remember that is when I first stumbled across this strange but useful XmlHTTPRequest object and wondered if it’s use would find its way to the mainstream.

Took a traditional HTML admin interface for a PHP web application and transformed it into a Mozilla XUL interface. Goal is to demonstrate the benefits of using XUL to create Rich Client Application interfaces into your web apps when you have the ability to mandate the browser used (such as an admin interface).

Links and resources:

• Working Demo (mozilla browsers only)
• Documentation and Source Code (didn’t go too crazy on the docs, but you can see all the source code by viewing the files section of the tree on the left).