Personal schedule for Mark J. Levitt
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Overview of App Engine and its major components, including an overview of the APIs the SDK provides, the underlying technologies App Engine is built on. Tutorial is a hands on event where we will build multiple applications over three hours exploring many of features and APIs in App Engine.
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As evidenced by Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaign, we have clearly entered the age of the social web. This developer-oriented workshop will emphasize the use and application of free, open building blocks for enabling social networking features on your site or service, and provide illuminating insights from some of the key figures creating these technologies.
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Few applications are architecturally simple. As soon as you grow, you find yourself using multiple subsystems and machines to scale, creating new headaches in configuration management. Help is at hand! This tutorial introduces Chef, a modern Ruby-based open source approach to systems integration. Chef lets you manage your servers by writing code, not running commands.
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Jabber/XMPP technologies are the gold standard for real-time messaging, presence, and collaboration over the Internet. This interactive tutorial provides a fast-paced introduction to XMPP, including many practical guidelines and "gotchas" that will help you get off to a fast start with XMPP-based software projects.
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Dojo is an industrial strength JavaScript toolkit that drastically simplifies the effort it takes to develop an application for the open web. This 3 hour tutorial provides an intense introduction to all of the "good parts" of the toolkit and includes a number of demonstrations built in real time (as opposed to primarily being a lecture) in the spirit of a "labs style" environment.
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For programmers raised on open source who want to delve into lower-level mechanics of C programming, this tutorial gives a complete overview of what it takes to jump into the innards of your favorite open source projects.
From MySQL to Perl 5 to the Linux core, C is the foundation of many of the most widely used open source packages. Learn the language, learn the tools, and start contributing.
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Drupal is a highly modular, Open Source Content Management System with a wealth of powerful add-on modules. Learn to harness it all and build dynamic websites with Drupal from authors of the book, Using Drupal.
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Linux
Location: Ballroom A1
Now that everyone and their dog has some sort
of a digital camera, what are you supposed to
do with it, and how? What real solutions are
out there that aren't just for the subfenestrated?
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Event
Location: Exhibit Hall 3
If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Would you pitch a project? Launch a web site? Teach a hack? We’re going to find out when we try our first Ignite event at OSCON. Damian Conway is scheduled to end OSCON Ignite in style. Want to present at Ignite?
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People
Location: Meeting Room B2
The new U.S. technology standards for K-12 schools are all about 21st Century Skills - problem solving, collaboration, authentic work. This talk, targeted at FOSS project leaders and community managers, is about getting students to contribute to Open Source software projects and how FOSS projects can help with this effort.
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Software programming has come a long way for students and younger children since the days of Logo. Syntax has been replaced with connecting blocks and the triangle turtle has been replaced with custom artwork children create themselves. Now, multi-threading and event processing are easier to teach children than functions, and this session discusses these ideas as well as so the edge of kid code.
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Steve Souders, author of High Performance Web Sites and creator of YSlow, discusses his new insights into faster web pages including how to load JavaScript asynchronously, optimizing CSS, and sharding resources across multiple domains.
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Video lovers of the world unite. Shay will present the world's first full open source video solution stack (used by Wikipedia and 27,000 other publishers), and demo several self-hosted video applications. He’ll walk through technicalities of setting up an online video platform, discuss pros and cons of self-hosted versus SaaS, and even dive into some code.
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wiiMote headtracking demos are a YouTube sensation and the technology is making its way from demos to production games and scientific visualization. Learn the theory behind wiiMote headtracking, see it in action, and imagine what you might do with it.
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Over the last few years, developments in the use of Open Source for creating efficient, verifiable, and trustworthy voting systems present viable approaches to solving technical problems in elections systems. The next wave of development will build on these recent achievements in the field by integrating them into the real, often messy, world of election administration and law.
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People
Location: Exhibit Hall 3
A pervasive elitism hovers in the background of collaborative software development: everyone secretly wants to be seen as a genius. In this talk, we discuss how to avoid this trap and gracefully exchange personal ego for personal growth and super-charged collaboration. We'll also examine how software tools affect social behaviors, and how to successfully manage the growth of new ideas.
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In the Year 2020 the user interface will look completely different from today. What will that be and how can FOSS lead the way?
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Stressing out about meeting deadlines for delivering software? A good development process can make a world of difference to the quality of your work and work environment. I'd like to share my experiences and tell you about the process that I use to manage my development teams at Message Systems.
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Panel of movers and shakers in the movement to open government using the principals of Open Source.
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Web 2.0, Ajax, usability, and thoughtful graphic design are now commonplace, but open source web applications are lagging behind. Learn techniques that will make your project easier to use, more productive, less prone to user-frustration, and more successful.
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Why do we trust our most personal diary entries with only our closest friends -- and distant machines of a faceless social networking service? Why do you hand over to Amazon files and passwords that you wouldn't tell your own mother? EFF's Danny O'Brien explains why innovation still comes from the edge of our networks -- and how the next generation of free software will help.
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Open source shares critical values with government and public education that make them function in the ideal; meritocracy of ideas, transparency, collaboration. But where is the sweet spot in the confluence of these social, technical, and public policy ideals? And where is the opportunity for the citizen developer to get involved?
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Sex and Design Axioms describes the minimal rule set for designing interfaces: the foundational concepts that are required knowledge for designers and engineers to create usable and elegant interfaces.
It is the analog for The Elements of Style by Strunk and White on user interface that encompasses layout, interaction, visual design, and prototyping tenets.
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Have you ever had a manager or legal department slow down your project why they try to figure out software licensing issues? This session will arm you with all the key information you need to join the conversation and recognize when your lawyer is trying to pull a fast one, versus when you’re facing a legitimate challenge.
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This talk provides a humorous description of an argument in favor of free and open source software based on what I call "antifeatures:" functionality that technology developers charge users to not include. From DRM to crippled OSes to digital cameras, I will show off many of the most egregious antifeatures and describe how open source both makes them impossible and helps users work around them.
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The age of Big Data demands open-source tools that move beyond storage towards analytics: tools to turn terabytes into insights. R is an open-source language for statistical computing and graphics, and an extensible, embeddable tool for the analysis of large data sets. In this session, I showcase R's power by building predictive models for Brazilian soybean harvests and baseball slugger salaries.
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Mobile
Location: Meeting Room J3
Released in early 2008 under the GPL, and downloaded over 100,000 times, the offline Wikipedia reader for the iPhone was one of the most popular pre-SDK apps. Now available in 17 languages for the iPhone/OLPC, it's the main means of browsing Wikipedia for those without internet access. This talk explains the techniques and challenges involved in efficiently storing Wikipedia on a mobile device.
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This panel will discuss accessing open government initiatives and creating new services around existing government data on the internet. The idea is to get a point of view from each step of the process for open government initiatives, from producer and publisher, to standards advocate, to consumer and user, and to elected representative.
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Event
Location: Exhibit Hall 2
Have a drink and mingle with other OSCON participants, and see the latest products, projects, services, and gadgets from sponsors and exhibitors during the Expo Hall Reception. The OSCON Author Meet and Greet will be held there as well at the same time.
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What's it like to be a woman in an open source project that's 99% men? What's it like to be a woman in a project that's 75%... women? Kirrily Robert, who has worked on both kinds of projects, will talk about the differences, and what we can learn from majority-female open source projects.
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Keynote by Simon Wardley, Canoncial Ltd.
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The era of traditional journalism is giving way to something else. We think that something else is Computational Journalism. CJ recognizes the need for internal production and for public-facing news delivery innovations. What journalists provide in terms of services, interfaces, and business models are in flux. To settle things, smart experiments (often using Open Source APIs) are critical.
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Everybody wants innovation. Innovation is believed to be magical unicorn which will lead the way to success and riches, but this is easier said than done. In this talk I'll discuss lessons learned from two years driving innovation on eBay's Disruptive Innovation team; which strategies worked and which didn't, and what questions you should start asking first when someone tells you to "go innovate"!
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In today's computing world, it can often feel like we are drowning in wave after wave of new trends such as mashups, service oriented architecture and cloud computing. This sea of concepts are simply the manifestation of an underlying change in IT. In this session we will explore what is happening and why open source is the dominant model for the future.
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In this talk, Chris DiBona will bring the audience up to date on recent Google activities in open source. We will specifically cover advances in Android’s open source deployment infrastructure, including the Gerrit and Repo tools, and the directions those tools are taking.
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Email: you see it every day. It's on your desktop. It's in your servers. Through the magic of modern technology, it flows invisibly through the air and into your PDA! Your cellular phone conducts silent and arcane conversations
with distant servers, speaking the ancient language of SMTP and the unknowable dialects of IMAP. Surely all this technology means progress of mankind... or does it?
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Thunderbird 3 is nearing release -- in this developer-oriented talk, David Ascher and Dan Mosedale will talk about what Thunderbird 3 will mean to people who want to take an active role in managing their email lives.
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FreeTUIT is desktop programming with less code. A concise, declarative syntax for widget layout and an expressive API for runtime give you clean and maintainable wxWidgets or Qt cross-platform applications in minutes.
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In this tight economy, are you looking for a way to create a multi-blog portal for your company or organization without spending a zillion dollars? This talk will introduce how you can create a powerful, custom-branded blog portal supporting blogs and podcasts using the open source WordPress MU.
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People
Location: Ballroom A3/A6
Geeks have a special relationship with The Truth. Nothing is more important than correcting a falsehood, no matter how small, and nothing is more odious than not telling The Truth. Unfortunately the meaning is often mangled and the end result is the opposite, a lie. This leads to misunderstanding, mangled interfaces and the myth of the stupid user.
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Ever cringe when you're asked to enter your email address and password to a third party service? This talk will cover how to build and consume services which protect users privacy with OAuth and other techniques.
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We are entering an era when 3D visualization technology will become as standard as 2D web browsers are today. NASA World Wind is standards-based, open source technology oriented to stimulate innovation. Just as public highways built for the common good opened up huge opportunities for society, so too NASA World Wind client *and* server technology provides a public domain 3D highway.
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Know Javascript, HTML, and CSS? Interested in music, and exploring what's possible when you combine the power of Mozilla, add-ons, and music on the web? Songbird, a desktop media player powered by Mozilla's XULRunner/Firefox platform, allows you to build Javascript extensions to create new digital media mashups using open APIs, and media web services.
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An engaging, frank discussion of the job interview, its failings,
and how to make it work for all involved. Effective interviewing
reframes the interview as what it really is: The candidate's first
day on the job. This session, aimed at the specific needs of the
technical professional, shows how manager and candidate must work
together for their common benefit.
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As a freelance developer chances are good you use either many, or no, version control systems for your code. If your mental health has been compromised by index.version080912f-b.inc file naming, or you wish there was more flexibility in how (and when) your files are submitted to data central, it’s possible that Bazaar is the version control system you’ve been waiting for.
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People
Location: Meeting Room J3
Plenty of FOSS projects yearn for visibility, within the tech press or
in the larger world. But few know how to respond when a journalist
indicates interest. These experienced writers and editors will explain
how your project can get attention and present itself in the best
possible light.
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Baroque harpsichordists excelled at taking simple melodies and creating elaborate, beautiful pieces of music. But in their desire to push the boundaries of experimentation, these keyboard virtuosi eventually ornamented the music beyond the limits of good taste, making the composer’s original melody unrecognizable. Something similar happens in web design.
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A pragmatic look at HTML 5 by experimenting with converting a real site to HTML 5 - how does it work? Where it useful and where is it annoying? How is support in current browsers?
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We have embarked on a mission to share more of what we do on the development side of The Times. So far, we’ve done that via conference presentations, open-source software, blog posts and (most recently and probably most importantly) our APIs. We see our site as more than just a source of news and information: it’s a platform on which news and information become building blocks.
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It has been a year since NPR's public API launched (announced at OSCON 2008). This session will explore how the marketplace has changed for media organizations over the last year, how API's have played a role in that change, and what the future looks like for NPR, its API, and other media organizations.
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