chanson

The time is upon us once again — WWDC time!

As I have the past few years, I'll be in San Francisco all week, staying at the Hotel Kabuki in Japantown.

And of course, I'll be around the conference all week — especially in the labs. Come by and say hi, and I'll be happy to help with any questions you have!

Dan Weinreb, one of the founders of Symbolics has posted an excellent summary of OOPSLA 2007 to his weblog.

For anyone who doesn't know, OOPSLA is the ACM SIGPLAN's annual Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications.

I wasn't able to make it to Montréal for OOPSLA 2007, so I've made sure to listen to the OOPSLA 2007 podcast and read what others have written about it. Hopefully I can make it to Nashville for OOPSLA 2008!

If you have anything at all to do with software development, and you didn't make it to Montréal either, I can't encourage you strongly enough to listen to everything in the OOPSLA podcast. Richard Gabriel (conference chair) and his team did an absolutely amazing job of lining up keynote speakers — you'll be very entertained and you'll learn a huge amount too.

Last night I listened to Cameron Sinclair speak at Pop!Tech about Architecture for Humanity. Cameron is an amazingly inspiring speaker and Architecture for Humanity is doing truly inspiring work.

He's also a recipient of a TEDprize, and spoke at TED2006 as well. Here's his Pop!Tech 2005 presentation at IT Conversations, and here's Cameron speaking at TED2006.

Just, wow.

Thanks to Steven D. Levitt for pointing it out on the Freakonomics blog. And he's right — if you don't watch the whole thing, at least go to 16:40.

I wish I could go to TED, but it looks like TED2007 is effectively sold out and exceptionally expensive as well, even by conference standards.

I hope Wil is going again (day 1, day 1.5, day 2, final days), and can report again about the amazing things going on there. And of course there are archives of the talks (including syndication) for those of us who can't make it.

One of the things that I've missed most at anime conventions has been the room parties. At none of Fanime, JTAF, and Anime Overdose were there any room parties; all of the partying was part of the con itself, which meant that things wound down quite a bit at night. At science fiction conventions like Windycon, Capricon, and Baycon, the partying is split between con events (masquerade, dance, con suite) and member-run room parties. And the room parties can be a blast.

Fortunately it looks like Con-X-Treme is going to try bucking that trend; their web site doesn't mention much, but it does mention room parties. It's also going to be held at the DoubleTree San Jose — the same hotel as Baycon — so it's in one of the best con hotels around.

Anyone planning on running a room party should check out the guide to throwing a large room party at a science fiction convention by Teresa Nielsen-Hayden. It's pretty familiar given all of the very well-run and well-attended GT suite parties I've been to over the years, which means that it'd be a good model to emulate.

In particular, let me restate this section:

Be a little wary of partygoers who aren't wearing convention badges, especially if they don't look like convention attendees. They may be perfectly all right, but you need to know who they are, and let them know they've been noticed. Shaking hands and asking their names will usually do it.

My position is that if they don't have a current convention membership, they don't get to join the party. There have been cons in Chicago which got reputations as places for particular social crowds to descend upon and drink and eat and be rowdy and, oh yeah, not contribute anything back — not even a con membership.

In other words, they're not interested in the con, but what the con has that they can consume like locusts. I'd hate to see the same thing happen in the anime community (which has at least a "generational" overlap with the locusts) so the folks running room parties should be pretty strict on badging.

All in all, room parties — and especially the GT suite at Chicago-area cons — are what I've really missed when I moved to the west coast and started attending anime instead of sci-fi cons. I hope they make a comeback.

It's WWDC time again for all of us in the Macintosh universe. I'm going to be up in San Francisco all week — if you've ever wanted to meet me, and you're at WWDC, this is your opportunity!

This year, instead of staying right across the border from Crackville, I'm staying at the Miyako in Japantown where JTAF is traditionally held. It's quite relaxing, though it's far enough out from Moscone West that I'll be taking a cab to the conference.

For a long time, I've resisted putting in any sort of "fan name" in convention badges. I'll just put in Chris, or leave the line on the registration form blank so my first name is used. I've also assiduously avoided using any sort of nicks other than my initials or name in chat systems. The one primary exception has been on Yahoo! chat, where I created a semi-anonymous handle to use in the Chicago-area chat rooms. About the only place where I've used various handles has been in online gaming.

I've realized, though that I do have a succinct, single-word name that I've gone by off and on that can use as a fan name at cons, as a nick on IRC, and as a handle in gaming. Unfortunately, someone has already made it well-known: Eschaton.

A lot of people now know the term eschaton — the theological "end of the divine plan," i.e. the "end of the world" — as the name of a blog by some guy calling himself Atrios. I don't actually read Atrios' blog. I know the term from The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert A. Wilson and Robert Shea, which I read in the early 1990s. In fact, I even used it as a handle in Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament back in 1999-2000.

So I was using it a little bit before Atrios used it as the title of his blog, and shouldn't be that uncomfortable using it. But most people probably think Eschaton is written by someone going by "Eschaton," not someone going by "Atrios." If I use it now, I'm basically screwed: People will either think I'm someone else, or they'll think I'm being totally derivative.

I suppose could use Eschatologist but that can be a bit of a mouthful at cons and when gaming and such.

What to do, what to do... Naming is a hard thing. If I do want to pick a distinct name to go by at cons, and online in games and IRC and so on, I should probably try to be as unique as I can. On the other hand, it's really freaking hard to come up with a good name; a good name is really something that sneaks up on you rather than something you set out to create, and Eschaton did sneak up on me...

Microsoft is hosting BarCamp San Francisco towards the end of the month, June 23 through June 25, at their 1 Market Street offices.

Onsite "camping" (sleeping bagging) is promised. I plan on going! I wonder if the ratio of Apple to off-brand laptops will be as high there as it is down here...

I hope there's another BarCamp Palo Alto soon too. I gather the last one — the original BarCamp — was a great time.

Fanime + BayCon = Crazy Delicious

Evidently my post complaining about DCamp's hours on Friday makes me a discriminator! After all, It's macho — and therefore male — to want a conference to actually run at the hours when I am awake and alert. What's more, if I actually had a life or a family then there's no way I would be interested in hanging out and talking about technical topics I find interesting late into the night. After all, it's something I do to compensate for my pathetic lack of a glorious life like the anonymous commentator has, not a significant aspect of my personality or identity.

What the fuck? I mean, seriously? It's sexist to think hanging out with interesting people late at night and talking about geeky topics is fun? Here's a clue: It's your perception, Mr. or Ms. Anonymous, that this is a gender-specific attitude. I'll promote conferences that are late-night code-fests because late-night code-fests are fun for some people! Perhaps if fewer people like you were complaining loudly and trying to reinforce general stereotypes, more of those people would be women! I don't give a rat's ass what gender or preference or any of that shit the people I'm hanging out with are as long as they're interesting and enjoying themselves.

Think there's a mote in my eye? I suggest you first examine the beam in your own.

(And before I forget, anime conventions tend to be mostly women and also tend to be late-night geek-fests. Hmm...)

Oh, and one more thing: I don't mind anonymity one bit. But I care quite a bit about identity, because it makes it possible to have a conversation. You don't have to get a LiveJournal account, just sign your posts in some fashion — a pseudonym is fine — so I can identify you as a distinct contributor.

I didn't make it to DCamp tonight. I got a late start getting up to Palo Alto, I had enough trouble finding decent parking that I missed the start of the dinner and ate on my own, and then when I showed up a little after 10:30 PM I found out that the conference had already closed down for the evening.

Come on, people — self-abuse is self-respect! Things should be swinging late late late into the night...

Let's see if I can get there bright and early tomorrow morning so I can get a fancy handwritten badge, a fancy T-shirt, and a fancy picture taken.

I should probably also think of something to put on my badge besides my name. Maybe I'll just put my personal web site on there. Brand "me," you know, something Tom Peters would be proud of!

Oh no! The Singularity Summit at Stanford is also on May 13 — the final day of DCamp! What to attend, what to attend...

I'm planning on attending DCamp at SocialText in Palo Alto on May 12-13. It looked like fun. Anyone else thinking of going?

South by Southwest 2006 claims to have podcasts available of this year's Interactive Programming.

I say "claims to" because it doesn't actually have podcasts. It has an RSS feed that has pretty much the same content as the web page, and contains clickable URLs that take you to the session recordings. A podcast, in contrast, contains enclosures pointing to content.

Because the feed from SXSW 2006 isn't actually a podcast, I can't subscribe to it in iTunes. Which means I won't get nifty pause-and-continue support while listening to it on my iPod in the car or while I run. Which means I have to download the files manually, and hand them to iTunes, and (effectively) manage them by hand.

The Carson Workshops Summit on the Future of Web Apps had this problem too, but it had people I wanted to listen to — Joshua, David Hansson — so I created a podcast of my own for it by hand. Fortunately, this has been made moot by Jeremy Keith's podcast.

Hopefully someone will do the same for SXSW.

The first Iron Coder contest has begun!

In the contest, an API is selected and, a day later — so participants can learn the API — an application theme is chosen. The participants have 24 hours to create an application that uses the API and submit it to be judged by Chairman Rentzsch. The winner is likely to be the judge of the next contest. This contest's API and theme? Accessibility and Mardi Gras!

It's very much in the spirit of MacHack and its Hack Show (RIP).

Also, the first CocoaDevHouse is taking place in Dallas right now. It's an event modeled after SuperHappyDevHouse and organized by Blake Burris, the guy behind the great CocoaRadio podcast. It looks like a good time; check out the #cocoadevhouse IRC channel. I wonder how many of the people there are Iron Coders...

I really wish there were another conference like MacHack. It was a convention of Mac developers that was organized along the same lines as a science fiction convention. This is something that a lot of people have been trying to replicate lately with things like "camps" and "unconferences" and "dexes" and "DevHouses" — but all without taking a look at what the science fiction community has been doing for over half a century. MacHack did learn from it, largely because the people involved in its creation were also long-time science fiction fans.

I could see a San Francisco (or Bay Area) CocoaDevHouse turning into something like that, if there was sufficient organization applied and if it was held over a weekend in a small convention hotel. Doing so would probably require a small membership fee — probably on the order of $30 to $50 per member — but that's in line with membership rates for science fiction and anime conventions.

(Please don't look to me to organize something like that. I'd love it but I'm simply not a conrunner type. Hey, I said to stop looking at me...)

Seafood okonomiyaki from Mifune Don.

I need to head up there more often.

I'm headed up to Japantown Anime Faire 3 in San Francisco today. I'm not planning on staying in the city, but I am planning on having a good time nonetheless!

Anyone who happens to read my blog and see me there should say hi. I should be fairly recognizable, what with the big pictures of me and all.

I'm in Las Vegas right now for a technical conference.

I haven't been outside since getting to the hotel. I'm not sure how to go outside.

People can smoke indoors here, most anywhere you go. It's insane.

Food and drink is insanely expensive. I thought that shit was supposed to be cheap as a draw for the casinos.

Everything is really needlessly spread out. I'm staying at the Luxor, the conference is at Mandalay Bay, and the nearest Starbucks — as far as I can tell — is at the fucking MGM Grand.

Also, this city is going to drive me conservative. It's completely and utterly brazen about its goal to separate you from as much of your money as possible while giving you as little as possible in return. There's no equivalent exchange or win-win here, just blatant opportunism and exploitation.

For example, I saw a female cocktail waitress in a casino on my way to the conference this morning, at 7AM — that's right, a cocktail waitress at 7AM — in a costume that I would have expected went out of style in the 1960s. And I'm the kind of guy who has no significant problem with random naked people in San Francisco, even the ones who don't have the body for it...

The coming energy crisis and housing meltdown can't make this city unviable soon enough.

WWDC 2005 is over, and damn was it a great week! Apple made some incredible announcements and shipped some incredible software, I got to see lots of old friends and make a lot of new ones, and I got to talk to lots of developers about things that I'm passionate about: Core Data, unit testing, setting up and streamlining your build process, and creating insanely great software to make users' lives better.

It was a wonderful, wonderful time. Thanks to everyone!

A few months back, I started reading a whole lot of manga. In fact, at the beginning of 2004 I had barely read any.

Yeah, I'm talking about me. Surprising, huh?

To have something to read during a couple plane flights, around the beginning of 2004 I picked up the FLCL adaptations. Cute, fun, but not the same as the anime. Then to have some reading material before my things arrived in California, I bought the first two Megatokyo books. That was it for a while, until I picked up the original Japanese editions of FLCL in September at JTAF. They had furigana, which meant that they were almost like a study aid, right? (Right.)

For some reason, a few months ago I got back into Chobits. I rented it not long after I moved out here, but this time I wanted more. So I picked up the manga. It was a bit deeper than the anime, and made a bit more sense. That's about the same time I started to get in touch with my inner Japanese schoolgirl. (Everyone has an inner Japanese schoolgirl, you know. Everyone.)

So I started looking for more. I didn't actually read the Azumanga Daioh manga (still haven't) but I think asperityq recommended Kare Kano. I rented the anime, I wanted to find out how the damn story ended and then I got hooked.

Now I have several series I'm reading: Kare Kano, Hot Gimmick, Doubt!!, Love Hina, and Saikano. Of them, my favories are Kare Kano, Hot Gimmick and Saikano. Saikano I just started, and it's all wistful and sad so I'm definitely going to be hooked. Doubt!! I'm less sure about. And yes, I like shoujo. A lot. Inner Japanese schoolgirl, remember? But I don't play dating sims, so don't start calling me Piro.

It has nothing to do with the lack of dating sims for Mac OS X. Really.