LinuxFest 2008 Wrap-Up

This year's LinuxFest looked to be a good 20% bigger than last year's -- the exhibits spilled into a second room, there were 12 parallel tracks over the previous 10, maybe that many more people milling around the room.  Plenty of fun -- I wish I had given myself more time to enjoy the festivities, but between the two talks I gave, table-top time, and the two hours I shared at the border with my fellow Canadians, I didn't have much of a chance to slow down until at that evening's party at the radio museum.

Somewhere along the way Bellingham picked up the tag "City of Subdued Excitement", and you could characterize the 'fest that way as well. Everyone's having a good time, with a mix of professional open-source people, teenagers, skatepunks, and plenty of people from the real world who are looking for solutions, without the hype that a mega-sized convention hall practically demands. Sunday's a lower key day; next year I'll try to hang around for it.

As for my talks, they were both fun to give. The JavaScript/Google-Maps talk is definitely aimed at working web developers, who were in shorter supply at LinuxFest compared to the Open Web conference earlier this year. The Greasemonkey talk went over better, and was more like 30% seminar, 70% lecture, a fine formula. I had scheduled a 60-minute talk, and at noon found I had 30 minutes more in my slot. So the group came up with a project -- replace the images in an HTML file with buttons. When you click the button, the image is then downloaded and displayed. Kind of like the adblock extension, but this could be far more configurable. It was motivated by someone trying to deal with ads clogging his low-bandwidth wireless connection, by the way.

Anyway, the session ended up as a group programming exercise. I sketched out a plan of how to solve the problem with a Greasemonkey script, and then using the JavaScript shell to try out ideas and find methods interactively, we managed to get something working before the bell rang. It's up at  http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25610 but definitely not finished.

Here are the PDFs for my talks:

Download speed-up-javascript.pdf

Download greasemonkey.pdf

Comments

[Adam Monsen]

Thanks for your awesome Greasemonkey talk, Eric! I also really enjoyed the talk where you showed off your Google Maps mashup.

[Eric]

Thanks, Adam. I enjoyed giving both talks as well. Like I've been saying, it's a terrific little conference.