Wednesday at OSCON 2002

I didn't get to OSCON until the 4:30 session.  I probably should have flown out earlier, but afterall, it is Pioneer Day!  As it was, I made it in time for Paul Prescod's talk, my goal, with time to spare for the one before it as well.

The first talk I went to was by Matt Sergeant on "Why SOAP Sucks, Why SOAP Rocks."  I enjoyed the comparison of what SOAP has and what it lacks.  Overall, Matt seems to be a fan of REST, but with a healthy respect for the kinds of things one would want to use SOAP for. 

The talk I was particularly interested in hearing today was the one my Paul Prescod.  Paul and I have exchanged some emails on REST and on his WRDL proposal.  Paul's talk was about REST.   He spent some time on Fielding's Thesis and then moved on to the changes to SOAP 1.2 that will allow SOAP and REST to co-exist and even compliment each other.  He promised to post his slides to his REST site, but I don't see them there yet. 

After the talks, I spent some time online (I finally got the WiFi stuff to work) and then went out to the food tent.  There were a lot of people there and a Mexican buffet, but nothing I thought was worth the calories.  What was cool, however, was that the bay was just across the street.  I walked over to the edge of the water and took some pictures and enjoyed the view.  I used to spend quite a bit of time in San Diego when I was in the Navy, but I haven't been here for years.  There were lots of sailboats and helicopters.  The sunset was beautiful.  In fact, I'm using the picture to the right as my new background on my desktop for a while. 

I was headed back to room and noticed a Birds of a Feather (BOF) session on Slash Dot, so I had to go.  I spent a plesant hour listening to Chris, Rob "Cmdr Taco" Malda, and Jeff "Hemos" Bates answer questions about Slash Dot in a very informal atmosphere.  Slash Dot is essentially a blog with multiple authors and 500,000 readers, which makes it unlike any other blog around.  I asked them about RSS feeds and they said they account for about 10% of their pageviews on a good day (which simple math, based on other things they said, would make the absolute number around 200,000/day).  Some of that is dumb programs doing checks every 30 seconds, but much of it is real traffic. 

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Last Modified: Thursday, 13-Jan-2005 16:34:08 MST