Mark Roseman's Blog

Post Wrap-Up Ramble.

On flight 2 of 3 on the way home (yuck, but on the plus side, Ted agreed to meet me at the airport for the couple of hours I'm stuck over in Calgary). Wanted to put together a follow-up note, now that the conference has finished up.

I actually didn't go to most of the presentations on the 2nd and 3rd day... it's nothing against the speakers, but I just usually don't have the attention span after the first day at most conferences, and I came to this one overtired, with the timezone change not helping. I did hear good things from people who did attend the talks, so I'm pleased to see that paper quality was generally good. Ron Fox in the post-conference discussion seemed to confirm this as well.

So mostly I was doing "bilateral meetings" (just finished Stephen Lewis' Massey lectures, which is of course heavily UN oriented, and a very engaging and disturbing read), which was the main reason I went to the conference anyway. Had a chance to sit down with Jean-Claude for several hours, Steve for a while, and Mike Doyle (with Steve and Jean-Claude) to talk about the overall Stargus vision/motivation. I've got a much better sense of all that, and a few concrete things I want to work on or keep an eye on over the short term, which in itself makes the conference worthwhile. Lots of other time spent with various others too.. good to see lots of old faces, and meet a number of new ones.

It's a quirky crowd (no surprise), very bright, and with a good number of successful (if incredibly low key) individuals. Richard Hipp continues to amaze me.

I'm still entertained by the technology problems that would never in a million years be faced by normal humans (who don't spend the day before the presentation putting the latest Linux drivers on their laptop and then wonder why it won't project).

Interesting aside that while overall its not a crowd that you'd describe as the picture of health (like most tech crowds), there were a lot more people who'd started exercise and diet programs and were doing well on them ... not something I thought I'd ever have multiple discussions about at this conference. Very good to see, and kudos to everyone who's taking their health more seriously.

I have to confess to still not being used to (or necessarily comfortable with) the recent technical conference model of lots of laptops, wireless everywhere, and people being less engaged with the speaker than at more "traditional" conferences. I understand the reasons for it, but it's somehow less satisfying to me. Not that I'm against side work and digressions (ok, there's some conferences I've been to I've not gone to a single talk), but I prefer them outside the room that presentations are going on in. On the other hand, it's also interesting having the remote attendees via audiocast, with the chat providing a bit of a backchannel. Primitive compared with what real remote presentation tools are doing today, but interesting nonetheless.

More progress on the "don't try to design the correct solution but just do it" front... Joe English is going to try to ramp things up on the repository needs. Had a chance to listen to him about this at the working session on it, and the solution he's got is incremental and really takes into account the social aspects (the real hard part in my mind), whereas a lot of the others focused more on the technical stuff (a lot of the issues seemed like they'll be entirely workable over time). Hope that catches on.

Also talked today about moving the Tcler's Wiki onto ProjectForum eventually (something we've idled about for the last year), and figured out a reasonable go forward strategy to do that.

Still have many hesitations when it comes to long term things, but given I'm not facing any imminent decisions about projects etc. I don't see a real need to dwell on it. I think given any particular projects that come up in the future, the context will make the choices obvious.

Overall, glad I went this year, more so than I expected.

Tcl Conference.

Writing this midway through the Tcl conference/workshop in Portland this year. Timezone changes do have a way of screwing up sleeping schedules, but at least it gives me a chance to catch up on my email etc. before using the fitness center this morning.

Numbers are up over recent years.. around 75 perhaps, which is getting back to about half what we had in the "good old days" (the highpoint was the 1996 one in Monterrey, that Mark D. and I chaired). Brian Griffin brought a fair number of his coworkers from Mentor, it's easier to get to for the California people, and from what I gather last year's one in New Orleans (which I didn't go to) went well, so those all probably helped to encourage people to attend this year. Many of the usual suspects, nice to catch up with people who I hadn't seen for a while, and a good chance to get some needed face time with a few (hi Steve). Was especially glad that Jean-Claude decided last minute to make the trip, and also glad to see Larry McVoy back again (who I still think was the root cause for lighting the fire under our collective asses about Tk two years ago, in ways that people like me whining never did accomplish). Some younger folks, but, it's safe to say the average age, waistline, and hair color probably differs from some other settings.

Joe English, who has done the bulk of the work on Tile (the updated/themeable Tk stuff going into 8.5) has been added to the Tcl Core Team, and also received the ActiveState award for contributions in the last year, which is well deserved. Jeff has been doing a lot of work on improving Tk, and his state of the union talk really emphasized that, and I found out about lots of good stuff going on at ActiveState with respect to that. He was even talking about Tk's "out of box experience" which I've been talking about for a few years as well. There's some real momentum again there, which is fantastic. It's unclear whether that's too late, but I don't think so yet. Once that stuff gets solidified, if we can also help get it rolled out to the Python/Perl/Ruby/etc. people before they all end up adopting GTK or wxWindows (which hasn't fully happened, though the momentum has already shifted heavily that way), I think it's the best chance to get some more young people working on Tcl/Tk again.

Gotten a number of comments about the new website, mostly very positive. While its mostly an outward facing thing, a few of the key inside people are seeing some of the material and the tone as a jumping off point for other stuff. Mostly though its just relief that one level of embarassment has been lifted. Some of course don't know what was wrong with the old one.

Note to self: while poking the hard-core inward facing techies with a stick labelled "marketing issues" may be fun and highly entertaining for self and others, it's ultimately a waste of energy that could be better devoted elsewhere.

The OO stuff went over pretty smooth.. not too surprising, and it had been made known before, and had been discussed, and most people who were going to be won over had been by this point. Kudos to the group behind that, and I'm glad it was run as a skunkworks rather than being dragged through the wide open community from the start. I commented to a few people that that was a great example of some people taking real leadership roles in moving things forward, something which there'd been a bit of a void with earlier (natural growing pains associated with moving to the more collective model we have now).

The projects that Mike Doyle and Eolas are sponsoring are pretty visible, which is also fantastic to see. I've said it before, but that's also breathing a lot of life into the community, so huge kudos again to Mike. There should be more stuff on Stargus later today which will draw together some of the pieces more cohesively, which I'm looking forward to. I've been helping Jean-Claude with Tequla of course which is under that umbrella, but if I get a better sense of the whole thing I may look for more opportunities to get involved there.

Looking over what I've written, an overall theme seems to be that there's a bit more momentum behind some key things, brought on by individuals or small groups who've really taken hold of some things and found ways to run with them, leveraging community support where useful but not getting bogged down by it. Not in any miraculous way, but it's a noticeable uptick compared with the recent past. Great to see.

So that's it after one day anyway!

This is just brilliant.

via SVN

Talking At vs. Talking With.

Blogs, newsgroups, forums, etc. all encourage talking at people rather than talking with people. Because you don't have to listen or truly engage. Everyone gets their own voice, blah blah blah. Conversations and responses are more often knee jerk reactions that not. Pick what you want to respond to. Actual listening and engagement do happen but are rare. You're with us or against us. It's not just online of course; god forbid any political discussions might involve a show of weakness by admitting your opponent isn't pure evil. Examples abound. Are we better off because of all this talking at each other?

Is there a way that for example the design of online tools can influence this dynamic, make listening and engagement more of a public virtue and everyday practice? We might find out most of the nut jobs and extremists that disagree with us are only half as stupid as we think they are. :-)

How you think about problems.

I really liked this from Joel: A very senior Microsoft developer who moved to Google told me that Google works and thinks at a higher level of abstraction than Microsoft. "Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if statement," he said.

Tcl web site.

We released the update to the Tcl/Tk website today... still some stuff to putter on, but the basics are there. Nothing stellar, just a house cleaning so hopefully it shouldn't be quite as embarassing as what was there before.

Blackboard and WebCT Merger.

I suppose this was probably inevitable. Too huge, costly nightmares becoming one, probably even costlier, bigger nightmare. I wonder if this might fuel a resurgence of some of the smaller e-learning companies, or perhaps a boost in fortunes for open source solutions (if combined with effective consultants and other services). Or perhaps, even a change in thinking with more of an emphasis on education rather than management of education. Naah, that'll never happen.

Catching up.

We went up to Blue Mountain for the Thanksgiving weekend, just to relax and do a bit of escarpment hiking. Now finishing getting caught up on many loose ends here, trying to get organized yet again...

Tech Acquisitions.

So the Ranchero acquisition did get made official (definite congrats to Brent and Shiela). Alias also got bought by Autodesk today. Used to know a fair number of people (DGP alumni mainly) who worked there at one point or another. Cool.

Ranchero (NetNewsWire) being bought?

via Scripting News. If so, that would be fantastic for Brent and Sheila, who've worked really hard on a great Mac application and truly deserve to reap the rewards.