On Thursday I went to another talk by Tim O’Reilly (and Roger
Magoulas too) about data and visualization and stuff like that. A lot
of it was a recap of his keynote from the day before, but some stuff
was new and even surprising. For instance, there are 4 or 5 people
working on this kind of thing there, and they want to grow the group.

My notes say he mentioned that digital video is interesting —
a reminder to me (and Green) to hack on medi8 some more.

He is looking for new sources of data so that he can try to
correlate book sales to other external events. The idea, I think, is
to see what might be useful for predicting what is hot, or how big a
given area is, etc.

Interesting quote: “piracy
is progressive taxation”.

A couple awkward personal moments at this talk: afterward I
suggested gmane as a potential data
source, the idea being that when a mailing list shows up in gmane it
suggests a certain level of interest, and also that you could monitor
traffic volume on the lists. Roger Magoulas (director of Market
Research at O’Reilly and an interesting and entertaining guy) said
that sounded nice but then wrote down something different — I guess
he mis-heard me. Sigh.

Then Bruno tried to introduce me to The Man, but O’Reilly had some
other meeting and was leaving, and anyway I failed to say anything
interesting. I think next time I’ll prepare a bunch of provocative
declarations for moments like this, e.g., “The biggest problem for
Free Java is deciding what to do when we obsolete Sun next year”.
L’espirit de l’escalier, as they say…

These weren’t actually the most awkward personal moments at the
conference — it was full of them, and I made a list in my notes. But
I don’t think I’ll be sharing that. Sorry voyeurs.

dtrace

Cantrill, a kernel hacker from Sun, gave a talk about dtrace.
This was the coolest demo I saw at the conference. It was very
impressive, I was blown away. The night before, Cantrill got together
with a PHP developer and added a dtrace hook to PHP. The result was
that you could run a php program, and with dtrace see php function
calls being made (i.e., it was hooked into the interpreter), then see
it call write, and from there watch the progress through
the kernel, and finally back out into userland and php.

We’ve got SystemTap coming,
hopefully it will do all this same stuff.

Roger Magoulas

I liked hearing Magoulas talk earlier, so I went to a talk he gave
about “building the open warehouse”. This talk was a blunt reminder
that the database world is quite different from the one I ordinarily
inhabit. I barely understood anything he said. I clearly need to do
some reading.

He did mention that exporting database stuff as Excel spreadsheets
is still necessary, and this got me thinking again about the more
general problems of liveness and sharing that current GUI applications
don’t see to address very well. More on that later, I think.