Sessions at Open Source Bridge 2010 with notes and audio on Wednesday 2nd June

Leigh will be discussing hacker spaces, and the culture of DIY spaces for making things around the world.

Apache CouchDB can host HTML5 apps natively, serving them over HTTP. Learn how to write JavaScript CouchApps which run on both the client and the server.

We'll assume you are familiar with jQuery and your command-line shell of choice, and that you have an installed copy of CouchDB (at least version 0.11).

Update: I did a test-run of this hack in an O'Reilly webcast. If you are interested to see it, "the recording is here":http://jchrisa.net/drl/_design/sofa/_show/post/jQuery-Evently-CouchApps-webcast

Note: the below is good background still, but doesn't 100% describe what we'll do in the hack. I'm hoping to maximize the interactivity... I want to make sure we have as many people there replicating data around as we can.

We'll be hacking on Taskr, first I'll show you all how to run it, then we'll collaborate on code. Here's "Taskr":http://github.com/jchris/taskr/

If you want to hack server side Mustache templates, you should install the "latest version of Sofa":http://github.com/jchris/sofa

We can hack on this too.

And hopefully there will be a lot of time for people who've tried writing CouchApps and have questions to work with me and everyone else to learn.

Another goal of mine with this hack: I want to meet people who can pitch in to help with the replicating p2p CouchDB web applications stuff.

The Drizzle Project is a fork of the MySQL 6.0 server, aimed at serving large cloud computing environments. One of the many goals of Drizzle is to enable a large plugin ecosystem by improving, simplifying, and modernizing the application programming interfaces between the kernel and the modules providing services for Drizzle.

Drizzle’s replication system is entirely new and different from MySQL. It uses Google Protobuffer messaging in its application programming interface to communicate changes to the state of one server to another server. Plugins are easy to implement which enable a developer to entirely customize their replication system. This tutorial describes the APIs used in Drizzle’s replication system in depth and walks through the construction of several example plugins demonstrating the flexibility and power of the replication API.

Topics covered include:

• Overview of Google Protobuffers message API
• Overview of the flow of messages through Drizzle’s replication system
• Understanding the Transaction and Statement messages
• Understanding the TransactionReplicator and TransactionApplier APIs
• Overview of Drizzle’s Transaction Log module, which demonstrates an example TransactionApplier plugin
• Walkthrough of the FilteredReplicator plugin
• Walkthrough of the MemcachedApplier plugin

Writing out what you're doing before you do it is super boring. You want to build stuff! Make stuff happen! Set something on fire!

And somewhere towards where we think the 80 percent mark to 'done' is on really big stuff, things start to pop up that we really did not anticipate. Our roadmap suddenly has these looming monsters that go bump in the night, and we have a spray bottle to fight them with and no time to do it in. This is the point where your project manager lights their hair on fire to get things finished.

What's that? There might be a better way? If we think like a pirate, we might not have to light our hair on fire?

Creating functional requirements as a part of the planning process is like creating a treasure map. You want to get compensated for the value your cool built-with-open-source-thing is providing to your clients. Your clients want it to work better than what they originally had in mind. If you do the work upfront, you'll know when you've hit the X marks the spot.

In this longer session, we'll walk through a trial run of functional requirements documentation. You'll have a list of questions to answer before it's complete, you'll have seen it in action, and we'll talk through all of the bajillion things you'll want to consider before your project should start. We'll also cover the 'open source trickery' of functional requirements. There might be a contributed thing that does the things you need, but in order to be really good at it, you have to forget about it in the beginning. Pirates don't just wing it.

h1. Lightning Talks

Lightning talks are short, entertaining talks up to five minutes long. In contrast to sessions, there is no approval or review; rather, speakers are self-selected on a "who wants it most" basis.

h2. Why should I give a lightning talk?

Lightning talks may be for you if:

• your talk proposal got turned down
• you left things to the last minute
• you had a great idea on the plane
• you had a great idea during the conference
• you like to talk

h2. Why should I listen to lightning talks?

See as many talks in a single session as you will at the entire conference.

h2. Logistics

Lightning talks will be held from 10:00 to 11:45 on Wednesday morning.

*A signup sheet will be posted Tuesday at 5:45 PM in the hallway*. Using two projectors, we should have time for at least 16 speakers, plus possible overflows. There's no Q & A - save questions for the hallway track.

You don't even need slides, though make them XXX by XXX if you do use them. Please come prepared to present using your laptop.

h2. More

If you don't get a chance to sign up, don't despair - consider starting a BoF or unconference (Friday) session.

No shilling please; you are welcome to discuss how your company contributes to open source or similar topics, but this is not the space-time to advertise, recruit or jobhunt. Thanks.

For more information, see:
* "Pycon's Lightning Talk Page":http://us.pycon.org/2010/conference/lightning/
* "Lightning talk tips":http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2004/07/30/lightningtalk.html
* contact Pete Fein at pfein@pobox.com

Are you ready if your web site gets popular or goes viral? A site that was happily handling a few thousand page views a day can very suddenly find itself struggling to handle hundreds of thousands of hits. The combination of Pressflow’s enhancements to Drupal and Varnish’s lightning-fast cache provide a free and open source way to exponentially increase the amount of traffic a Drupal-based web site can serve, allowing you to meet the demand without additional expensive hardware. During the session, we will cover the following topics:

• What Pressflow is and how it is different from the Drupal content management system
• What Varnish is and what it can do to help
• Why Pressflow+Varnish may be a good option for your web site
• Tips and tools for tuning and optimizing your configuration to make the most out of your precious server resources
• Lessons learned – what not to do
• Real-world examples from live sites running Pressflow and Varnish

The open source Drupal content management system powers numerous prominent web sites including:
* President Obama’s White House web site
* Linux Journal
* Zappos

Pressflow and Varnish are being used by some of the largest Drupal sites in the world:
* The Economist Online
* NBC Universal Bravo TV
* The Grammy Awards

User groups are a vital part of the open source way. Their regular meetings create local communities of practitioners that meet together to learn, share and have fun.

A group of experienced user group organizers will answer your questions and offer practical advice on starting a group, encouraging participation, branching out into activities like hackfests, and handling problems as they crop up.

Attendees will have the opportunity to get practical knowledge from a variety of user group leaders' perspectives, and leave the session empowered to start their own user group or reinvigorate an existing one.

Participants:
* Audrey Eschright, moderator
* Igal Koshevoy, organizer of the "Portland Ruby Brigade":http://pdxruby.org/ and "Portland Functional Programming Study Group":http://pdxfunc.org/
* Jesse Hallett, organizer of the "Portland JavaScript Admirers":http://pdxjs.com/
* Eric Wilhelm, organizer of the "Portland Perl Mongers":http://portland.pm.org/kwiki/
* Christie Koehler, co-organizer of "Code-n-Splode":http://codeandsplode.org/
* Gabrielle Roth, co-organizer of "Code-n-Splode":http://codeandsplode.org/ and the "Portland PostgreSQL Users Group":http://pugs.postgresql.org/pdx
* Sam Keen, organizer of "PDXPHP":http://pdxphp.org/

Red Hat is admired as a successful business that is an effective catalyst in communities, especially free/libre open source software (FLOSS). People look to learn from Red Hat in how to apply those practices to areas beyond software, such as education, business, and social activism.

However, when we look at the way other people have enacted these practices, many have adopted a subset of Red Hat's methods, but leave out enough to affect their ability to benefit from a purely free/open stance.

Many communities are successful in their domain without any idea of why their methods work. Is it pure luck or art? Or is it really a dose of humanism mixed with a long-practiced, and now well-studied, method of developing communities?

This presentation explores the science behind "communities of practice", then covers a specific set of guidelines included in a new open, community-written guide, "The Open Source Way: Creating and nurturing communities of contributors".

http://theopensourceway.org

This presentation will show how to connect to REST-based web services from an Android application. We'll discuss HTTP programming as well as XML and JSON libraries. This presentation will include a live demo of an Android application.

MongoDB is an open-source, high-performance, schema-free, document-oriented database. The goal of the MongoDB project is to bridge the functionality gap between a key/value store and a traditional RDBMS. This talk will introduce MongoDB and discuss some of the reasons why MongoDB might be the right fit for your project.

We'll introduce MongoDB by explaining how it compares to traditional relational databases as well as some other non-relational systems. This will focus on the gains in scalability and flexiblity that make MongoDB an attractive option, as well as some examples of when MongoDB might not be the best fit. Following this introduction we will discuss some specific use cases for MongoDB. This will include examples of interacting with MongoDB from several different languages. We will review some of the advanced features of MongoDB and discuss how they can be put to good use.

Questions and discussion will be encouraged throughout the presentation. We'll be able to dive deeper into any specific topics of interest to the audience.

Unlike most areas of enterprise IT, open source solutions in the storage industry have remained in the background. In 2010 this situation is going to change dramatically with new open source storage solutions, nex-generation Linux file systems, and emerging cloud offerings making significant inroads. This session will outline the areas where open source storage solutions are well-suited to the enterprise and best practices for implementation. It will explore how open source will play a key role in the adoption of storage virtualization and cloud storage. Also discussed will be the pros and cons of new technologies (highlighting the areas that will have the most impact), and best practices learned from a real-life deployment of a scalable NAS deployment in the healthcare industry.

Managing software is one of the many responsibilities of the system administrator, and not just "server" software like web applications or network servers, but often end-user application software as well. Software packages sometimes make their installation and management a lot harder by thwarting the techniques sysadmins use for large-scale software management. Besides describing ways that software can be hard to manage, I'll discuss the techniques that sysadmins use to do large-scale software management and make constructive recommendations for how to improve software manageability.

Touchscreen is a platform for creating interactive kiosk and dashboard displays. Its built with well known technologies making it easy to create custom content for your own display.

Touchscreen 2.0 powers presentations about the Open Source Lab's data center and the network operations center. It provides our admins and our visitors with graphical representations of real-time data about our network operations.

Come Learn about:
* What touchscreen is, and what it can do for you.
* How version 2.0 was built (and our successes and failures along the way)
* How to implement content plugins for touchscreen including:
** Using Raphael and SVG for graphics and animation
** How to quickly mash up content sources with jquery

From creating remote-sensing CubeSats to analyzing aerogel: how the public is hacking into open source space exploration.

As technology shifts from a means of passive consumption to active creation, people are collaborating on a massive scale. The endeavor of Spacehack.org is to transform that into more of a community, so that space hackers can easily connect and interact.

Amateurs were once considered to be at the crux of scientific discovery, but over time have been put on the sidelines. Despite this, citizen science is witnessing a renaissance. Agencies such as NASA no longer have a monopoly on the global space program and more participatory projects are coming to life to harness the power of open collaboration around exploring space on a faster schedule.

Instead of complaining about where our jetpack is, we can now demand to figure out how to take an elevator to space . And, while you still can’t own a CubeSat as easily as an iPod, you can join a SEDSAT-2 team and learn how to engineer one.

There’s also GalaxyZoo , which opened up a data set containing a million galaxies imaged by a robotic telescope. Why projects such as these are important is because robots are actually kind of dumb. Humans are able to make classifications that well-programmed machines can’t. Currently, 200,000 humans are identifying over 250,000 galaxies.

If tinkering with spacecrafts is more your speed, the Google Lunar X PRIZE is a competition to send robots to the moon. However, you don’t need to be a robotics engineer to participate. Team FREDNET , the first open source competitor, is open for anyone to join.

While the concept of open source has resonated around the world and beyond, there is still much education to be done. NASA and the ESA have made large quantities of their data open, but have yet to facilitate developer communities that allow for active contribution to the code rather than just feedback on finding bugs.

Spacehack.org , a directory of ways to participate in space exploration, was created for this reason, among others. Many of these projects are buried in old government websites or do not clearly communicate how someone can get involved. It is with great hope that it will not only encourage the creation of more participatory space projects, but also urge existing ones to embrace the social web.

The Story:
Blending the right open source software with a sprinkling of custom code was the easy part of moving a university from a brochure web presence into an integrated, flexible, efficient and scalable system. The challenge was to encourage staff not to settle for misfit, off-the-shelf solutions but rather to think creatively about the possibilities, to be demanding about getting their needs met and to embrace change and take ownership of their web domain.

Things We Learned:
- A project management cycle that works.

- How to find and blend the right OS packages (in our case a Joomla and Moodle core with lots of custom extensions) to meet the needs of multiple audiences.

- Training and implementation techniques that do not overwhelm.

Data visualization - telling stories about data using graphics and animation - is a popular technique, and new tools, both proprietary and open source, appear almost daily, as do huge datasets to analyze.

But there's another way to explore large datasets - by mapping the properties of data points into music. This technique is called _*sonification*_, and adds another interesting dimension to exploratory data analysis.

In this presentation, I'll briefly describe the main techniques of sonification, then present some examples where sonification was key in understanding the story behind the data. And, of course, you'll get to hear the music that's in the data.

The Yahoo! Query Language provides a rich and dynamic method for obtaining and manipulating data from any source or API on the internet – with YQL the internet becomes your database. Using the simplified SQL syntax that YQL is based in, YQL seeks to open all data on the web into a standardized format. Manipulating and mashing up sources as if they were tables, YQL becomes a repository for exploring government, event, social and API data on the web.

This talk will cover the core techniques within YQL, including server-side JavaScript with native E4X support for manipulating data, key / value pair data storage and the process of creating your own YQL tables for accessing web based content. Going further with the integration of the open authentication standards defined by OAuth, we’ll delve into advanced authentication techniques using this standard within YQL.

It's easy to find examples of poorly-written Perl code: global variables, punctuation soup, copy and paste code, commented-out functions. Who'd want to read that? Who could maintain it?

Modern Perl code is different. The past decade has produced important new features and powerful new techniques for writing clear, concise, maintainable, and reusable Perl. These new developments build on each other to replace awkward, painful, or difficult to use correctly approaches with simple code.

Learn how to understand context, to embrace lexical scoping, to manage CPAN installations without pain, to perform pain-free automated testing, to embrace the CPAN development model, to adopt new features of Perl 5.10 and 5.12, and to take advantage of the Moose object system.

Learn about the Perl renaissance and rediscover the joy of Perl.

Cassandra is an open source, highly scalable distributed database that's rapidly gaining momentum in the NoSQL community. It brings together Dynamo's fully distributed design and Bigtable's ColumnFamily-based data model to provide a unique data storage solution that is suitable to a wide variety of use cases.

Professor Eric Brewer's CAP theorem states that a distributed system design can offer at most two out of three desirable properties: Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance. So, how do you provide consistency when your distributed system's primary requirements are availability and partition tolerance?

In this talk we'll introduce eventual consistency and the four strategies that Cassandra uses to provide it, while still maintaining high availability:
* Gossip
* Read Repair
* Hinted Hand-off
* Anti-Entropy

The process of reporting a bug starts off with two strikes against it. The user is angry; they're taking time away from doing their work to report a bug. The developers are annoyed; some freeloader is telling them they made a mistake and they have to take time to fix it. Accusations fly. Tempers get heated. Nobody is happy. Nobody wants to help anyone.

Developers often treat bug reports like the user dumped a bag of crap on their doorstep, rang the bell and told them to clean it up. That's not what they are. A bug report is a user walking up to your door, stepping in crap, pointing out maybe it should be cleaned up.

Nobody likes stepping in crap. And nobody likes cleaning it up. So the whole interaction starts off on the wrong foot, perhaps the one covered in crap. Your job, as developer or as reporter, is to deliberately steer it back to being a positive one where the developer wants to fix your bug and the reporter wants to continue to report bugs.

As a user, and as a developer, some simple social hacks will turn bug reporting from a hateful shoutfest into a pleasant collaboration. We'll look at some dos and don'ts when reporting and receiving a bug, how to provide enough information, avoid a hostile tone, make it easy to report and track bugs, and how to keep your head when all you really want to do is bash someone's in.

As a developer, you'll encourage more and better quality feedback from your users and even pick up new developers in the process. As a user, developers will find your reports so delightful they'll enjoy patching it. And you'll both improve the software you use and love.

A review of recent cases, statutes and a look ahead at avoiding legal problems.
The Top 10 most contentious legal issues and how to avoid them.

Text messages have virtually eliminated the need for voicemail, and are a faster way to convey a message than a phone call. In the same way, GPS-based augmented reality could eliminate the need for text messages.

This presentation will highlight the advantages and disadvantages of visual and non-visual augmented reality. We'll cover alternate types of augmented reality techniques and how they have been saving us time in the past few months. We'll demonstrate how we've been merging available technologies with custom programming to create location-aware social networks with custom proximity notification. Finally, we'll describe other uses for location sharing, such as automatically turning off house lights when leaving for work, and wayfinding with piezoelectric buzzers. Privacy and data transparency will also be discussed.

Aaron will also present data visualizations, animations, and a glimpse of the raw data of his two years of to-the-second GPS logs which provide the basis of the location-based augmented reality system. You can see a preview of some of the images here: http://aaronparecki.com/GPS_Visu...

We'll present "Serialist":http://serialist.net, our site for keeping track of the webcomics and stories that we read.

We implemented Serialist entirely in Haskell. Serialist demonstrates functional web-application development, web crawling and scraping, distributed architecture in Haskell, and interesting graph algorithms.

Other sites exist for tracking webcomics updates, but require manual intervention from a moderator or administrator, often involving writing new page-scraping code for each serial. Our graph algorithms let us accept user submissions for new serials to crawl, making them available immediately. Haskell allowed us to concisely express our graph analyses, and run them over a lazy link-graph of the Internet.

Most museums share these traits:

# They have "stuff".
# They want to share their "stuff" with the public.

Beyond that, the similarities seem to end. The "stuff" may be physical objects—anything from quilts to machine guns to postage stamps—or it may be abstract concepts such as genres of music. It may be painstakingly organized and catalogued or a jumbled mess. It may be in spreadsheets, word processor documents, ancient in-house database systems, or expensive third-party museum collection management systems... or only a twinkle in a curator's eye.

Second Story builds custom interactive installations for museums and other cultural institutions. Before we can focus on presenting the content, we have to figure out how to normalize existing content, create and maintain new content, and deliver the content for consumption by whatever presentation technology we plan to use. Fortunately for us, many tools that are designed to solve these problems on the Web are also very suitable for delivering content to kiosks, interactive tables, or more exotic interactive installations.

We have chosen to use the "symfony framework":http://www.symfony-project.org/. Symfony is a full-stack web framework for PHP. One of its features is a powerful system for creating administrative interfaces based on your database model. This system is easy enough to create useful admin tools almost immediately using only yaml-based config files, while remaining flexible enough to allow for significant customization when necessary.

In this session, I provide a high-level overview of symfony and the symfony admin generator in the context of museum installations. Throughout the session I'll use real-world examples of kiosks and interactive tables we've created for museums such as the Walt Disney Family Museum, the GRAMMY Museum, and the Gettysburg National Park Museum and Visitor Center. I'll cover the following topics:

# The often messy world of museum content, and how symfony helps us unify and normalize disparate content sources
# Creating custom admin tools with the symfony admin generator
# Using symfony to create RESTful web services which can deliver content to your presentation layer in a variety of formats

This session will assume some familiarity with object-oriented programming in PHP5, but will be light on code. The focus will be on what the framework can do for you rather than implementation details.

Luckily for developers, agile practices drive or influence much of the work we do. This is good. We get more done, and since our clients are heavily involved in short iterations more of it is right the first time.

These short iterations make quality user experience design challenging. How do you design and test a feature in a single agile iteration? It can easily take more than one iteration just to recruit for a usability test.

I've helped implement agile UX design at a consulting shop and a product company, and I'm here to help you. There's no silver bullet, no out-of-the-box solution, just like there's no One True Way of Agile. Without tying ourselves to any particular brand or sect of agile, we'll talk about successful strategies and tactics for many environments.

We'll define what it means to succeed and then walk through specific processes and techniques that can lead us there. We'll talk about how to apply increasing levels of detail through the lifetime of a feature, and about communicating with the rest of the project team.

With a good team and a good process, it's possible to do really excellent work. I hope that designers, developers, and managers will find something valuable in what we discuss.

Ever wondered what would happen if you could rethink a decade worth of design changes? Drizzle is a fork of the MySQL server targeted at web development and cloud computing. We are looking at how to create database for modern multi-core, large memory databases that fit inside of an overall application framework

The long-awaited move to paid digital distribution of books, magazines, and other text-centric content is finally underway. It's not all smooth, however: below the gadget-lust-inducing surface of devices like the Kindle, iPad, and various other devices lurks a messy, incompatible bunch of standards competing for dominance.

Come learn about the various formats and distribution models for books, magazines, and comics in the Internet age.

"Carol Smith":http://fossygirl.blo... is a member of the Board of Directors for the "Metabrainz Foundation":http://metabrainz.org/ which oversees the "Musicbrainz":http://musicbrainz.org/ project. She will speak about the possible trials and tribulations of starting a foundation in the open source community, whether or not you should consider doing it and even whether or not you should collect licensing fees for your project.

Carol is also a program manager for the Open Source Programs Office at Google and is spearheading its "Summer of Code":http://code.google.com/soc/ effort this year. She'll include some useful tidbits about the program and its mentor organizations.

When the computer receives a packet, it is copied into a kernel buffer by the NIC, then copied by the CPU from the kernel buffer to its actual destination in the receiving process's address space. The same data is transferred over the memory bus THREE times, and the CPU must dumbly read and then write every single byte, even before the application sees it.

RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) lets processes on different machines send data directly into each other's process spaces, resulting in greatly increased efficiency. But, using RDMA is very hard, compared to BSD sockets. This talk will introduce my work on making RDMA usable by mere mortals, from Python!

Adeilton Oliveira, an electronics engineer in Brazil, has written code that allows the Arduino microcontroller platform to use the output from CTI Blocos to control its outputs. CTI Blocos is an open source block based programming environment based on the logo language. Think of Blocos as a very lean version of Scratch that is designed to control a robot (or anything else electro-mechanical that you can think of) rather than multimedia on your computer.

I built a prototype for my (then) 4-year old son to play with. He doesn't know the ins and outs of If-Then-Else statements yet, but he was able to drag-and-drop the motor control blocks and download the programs into the robot within the first hour. I then built a set of 6 robots and taught an after-school class to 4-8 grade students at Faubion in NE Portland.

The software wasn't quite ready for prime time when I started teaching the class, so I was very fortunate that Jim Larson, a software/hardware engineer here in Portland joined in and together we collaborated with others in Brazil to further develop the software to better meet the needs of the students.

What we have is:
- A robot that costs about $40-50 to make
- All open-source software
- Mostly open-source hardware
- Can be used with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux
- Uses Logo based commands
- Simple, easy to assemble command blocks eliminates syntax frustrations
- The software also accepts Cricket Logo, a text based language
- And most importantly: It's just plain FUN to use!

Jim Larson, myself, and others in Brazil continue to gather and develop resources to help others that want to try it themselves or, hopefully, teach classes to kids and introduce them to programming/electronics/robotics.

I am starting to put together resources at the following website:
http://home.teleport.com/~brettn...