The call for papers for the 2008 edition of the Open Source Developers’ Conference, is open. This year the conference will be held in Sydney, 1-5 December 2008.

No, haven’t got anything to do with this year’s OSDC organisation, although I’m still on the OSDClub’s exec. There’s a specific Sydney team in charge of the conf. Blissful ;-)

But I do intend to submit something as a speaker, will have to ponder what….

Joel Spolsky has another great rant, this time about what he calls Architecture Astronauts.

The hallmark of an “architecture astronaut” is that they don’t solve an actual problem… they solve something that appears to be the template of a lot of problems. Or at least, they try. […]

[…] one sure tip-off to the fact that you’re being assaulted by an Architecture Astronaut: the incredible amount of bombast; the heroic, utopian grandiloquence; the boastfulness; the complete lack of reality. And people buy it! The business press goes wild!

The web 2.0 and Open Source business world still has some of that, and not only with synchronisation (which served as Joel’s key example). And apart from producing stuff people don’t really want/need, many companies operating in this sphere simply do not seem to grasp, is that announcing something is not at all interesting. A press release does not make me want to take a look at your product!

Their delusion of the importance of their foo is induced by the fact that they’ve been working on it for way too long (time to market is key, really), so of course it’s exciting to them! But that’s not the real world. I believe this actually relates to both the product itself, as well as the announcements for it.

Yes, I know that press releases are aimed at the media journos (that’s journalist in good Autralian) and not at the general public, however the general public does get to see it on front pages, rss feeds, and so no. And do the journos want to see this stuff? Probably not.

I am also fully aware that there are different sets of users, and someone hacking in their attic is not the same as a big corporation (although these days the big corp could be based in the attic! ;-). But I do think that fundamentally, times have changed, and neither of the aforementioned target audiences actually cares squat about most announcements, new fancy products, and so on.

What is cool is, as usual, someone else raving about something.

Some time ago a few people lamented the demise of The Swag Report, a cool idea by Mike Hillyer… people would take photos of the swag they collect at conferences and other events, and post it to the site with some comment/rating.

At the 2008 MySQL conference we caught up, and I mentioned that I’d be happy to help revive it. It’s not the world’s next big business venture ;-) but really just a bit of fun and sometimes informative. It just seemed like a pity that it disappeared.

So now, it’s baaack. Very simple setup right now, you just upload your photos to Flickr, add the comment with rating you want, and click on the “add to group” button for the swagreport group. You’ll need to join the group first, which is of course free.
The site currently just picks up the Flickr feed using a bit of Javascript. Of course it can be prettier, but it gets things going again. So please do add your swag and opinions!

There Is Such a Thing as a Free Lunch!
I’m sitting in the AirNZ lounge at Sydney International airport, and just had a very nice lunch. Also wireless Internet. My StarAlliance Gold is valid until April this year (I did way too much travel in 2006 ;-) so I might as well reap all the freebie benefits. On the downside, I completely forgot to use some points to get an upgrade, though I might still be able to do that for the return flight.

Of course I had to empty (that is, drink) the water in my water bottle before going through the security screening. Easily solved by refilling later. Here in the lounge there’s nice cool filtered water. However, next to it is also an impressive array of free serious alcohol. Quite tempting ;-), but too much alcohol just messes with the jetlag later and I do want enough water for the flight….

My iPod nano crashed earlier, but Google came to the rescue. Make sure hold switch is off, then press Menu and middle button for about 10 secs to reboot. No prob. I’d prefer it to not crash though, it’s running the latest firmware.

An update slightly related to my previous post today. Yesterday I was organising something through a site in the US, which uses a rich Flash app somewhere in the process. Didn’t want to work with Mac’s Safari, so I tried Firefox 2. Someone else recommended trying Firefox 3 (beta 4) so I did, and that worked somewhat but not sufficiently for me to complete.

So, I went to another company instead where the equivalent app did work, ordered there, and all done. The first company actually lost my business because of this. I told them of the original problem, got a nice email response this morning, after which I gave them the feedback of how I had to work around it in the end (it was US night time so noone to call – if I could’ve even been bothered… the competitor had similar pricing).

The other company did have one glitch in their payment process, even though the form allowed for overseas billing addresses, it still insisted on me selecting a US state anyway. So in that form I live in Kenmore QLD, CA 4069. Wrote ’em a note about that… minor issue but I hope they fix it.