Oscon 2008 Day One report

Peter Burkholder — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:03:00 -0700

Outbound: Spotted at least two OSCON attendees at Dulles Airport. One carrying a dynamic OLED keyboard (Optimus Maximus) that can display different character set imaginable (well, 113 different ones at least), another hard at work on her OLPC XO. I’m sure there were others, but better camouflaged. The flight was late, and cramped, and I was keenly aware of United’s 33-inch seat pitch versus the 33 inches one gets on Frontier Airlines.

The keyboard bearer was one convivial Jacob coming in from http://www.thinkgeek.com, and we together figured out the Max light rail in towards the convention center.

Monday: At breakfast I got an inkling that OSCON attendees are more sociable than their USENIX/SAGE counterparts. At least it wasn’t pulling teeth to engage in a conversation. Joel Noble of Caring Family described his group’s project to bring social networking to the elderly via simple pen & paper interfaces. Fred Meyer of USA Today was from my neck of the woods, and a fellow bike commuter, and we ended up walking Portland in the evening. As for the sessions….

Mastering Perl: brian d foy got down to some essentials of his book of the same name. Takeaways: Profiling can be useful, Benchmarking is less useful than one thinks (unless done correctly). Configuration is good. As is logging and persistence.

I then succumbed to my passions instead of my rational side—and jumped into the Arduino tutorial “Making Things Blink”. What a trip! Michael Dory, Adam Simon, and Scott Varland took us on a whirlwind introduction of the remarkably intuitive Arduino microcontroller system. Their kit included the Arduino Diecimila board, a interface shield, microbreadboard, LEDs, potentiometers, wiring, and force transducers. Oh, and a copy of “Making Things Talk” by Tom Igoe. Soon I was tweaking their circuit and code examples to implement my own riffs on their tutorial project, and by the end I had completed their digital ‘Etch-a-Sketch’ project

I’m excited to do more—and not for any practical reason. It’s just somehow exciting to get back to hardware, real transistors, resistors and diodes, after a generation of computing advances have made hardware less and less accessible at any level beyond swapping out whole components.

Peter out.

Ellipsis: Tag arduino

Oscon 2008 Day One report