lesscode.org

Hating myself for missing OSCON, I slipped away for a little R and R. If you have to miss the most important gathering of the year, this is a pretty decent way of doing it:

Standing a staggering 310 feet tall and reaching speeds of a remarkable 93 mph, the $25 million Millennium Force giga-coaster was the tallest and fastest roller coaster in North America when it debuted in May 2000. This steel monster looms over the Cedar Point skyline beckoning guests to take the ride of their lifetime.

Riders travel up the amazing first hill at a 45-degree angle in sleek blue, red or yellow trains that offer tiered seating for optimum viewing. Once at the top of the mammoth structure, passengers zoom down a 300-foot-long drop at an outrageous 80-degree angle - that’s almost straight down! From there, riders encounter overbanked (extremely banked, but not quite inverted) turns, dark tunnels, towering hills and lots of “airtime.” The wild journey covers 13 acres and 1.25 miles of brilliant blue steel tubular track.

Anyway, my first order of business since being back has been to catch up with the conference. The blog coverage has been outstanding; there’s two different aggregators. Matt Raible’s notes are especially well done. He’s covered Dave Thomas’ Facets of Ruby, Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users, and David H. Hansson’s Ruby on Rails - Enjoying the Ride presentations so far and he’s still going strong it seems. David was awarded the Google/O’Reilly “Best Hacker of 2005″ award, which is well-deserved, IMO.

I really hope the Paul Graham Keynote makes its way over to IT conversations and/or into an essay. It seems he has F/OSS / business on his brain and the stuff coming out of his mouth is pure gold:

What business ought to be getting out of open source isn’t the software, but the process.

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Open source (and blogging) has a Darwinian approach to enforcing quality. The audience can communicate with each other and the bad stuff gets ignored.

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On the web, the barrier for publishing your ideas is even lower than spouting them in a bar: you don’t have to buy a drink and they let kids in.

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Business can learn about open source in the same way that the gene pool learns about new conditions: the dumb ones will die.

That’s what I’m saying bro’!