Scripting News - Latest Comments in An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

Re: An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

IR — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:40:24 -0000

David,

You may want to look at SCALE (www.socallinuxexpo.org) and some of the other community events here in California.

Ilan

Re: An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

stevealgernon — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 03:07:18 -0000

As I mentioned a few months ago, I made a start at a command line, no-UI version of Frontier based on the OPML editor sources. I comment on it here:

http://www.fermiproblem.com...

The basic idea is to separate the interpreter and object database from the UI. What do you care if the UI is in a web browser or a mac or windows or x-windows app? Its completely irrelevant.

Usertalk should be a small library that you could then link into an execution environment - a tool, an outliner, apache, etc. The object database is just a bunch of data in the filesystem.

Base usertalk on the straight posix APIs and let the people that want a UI build one on top of it.

Everytime I mention this approach, you kind of shoot it down, although I don't really think you've considered it. (See my previous comments from disqus.)

--sma

Re: An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

dave — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 22:51:24 -0000

http://sourceforge.net/proj...

There's a mail list and a

Re: An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

Jeff Schiller — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 22:47:26 -0000

Hi Dave,

You know what might help? If you released the source in a publicly accessible repository so that people can download and sync to your trunk. If you don't want ot host the server yourself, there are a variety of sites that will do this (google code, launchpad.net, github).

Barring that, I think it would be critical to fix the broken links here: http://kernel.scripting.com...

Re: An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

dave — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:08:20 -0000

I could be wrong. It's possible that the lower-level routines were
rewritten. By the time I wrote the original code, I had ported lots of
code from UCSD to Apple to IBM PC to Macintosh, so I knew how to
abstract the differences to make porting easier. That said the port to
Windows was a bitch and took a long time. But by then I wasn't working
at that level so I can't really say why.

Re: An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

AndrewBurton — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:58:34 -0000

Ah! I was under the (obviously wrong) impression Frontier had to have had some major updates when Mac OS9 jumped to OSX. I was never able to get any "classic" Mac software to run on OSX when I upgraded my old iMac. Now I am curious why it won't run, and want to go check out the source code.

Re: An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

dave — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:46:15 -0000

It doesn't use any of those -- it was written long before there were
Cocoa libraries. It writes to Quickdraw, and on Windows it uses the
GDI. And the UI code is all abstracted internally, the higher level
code calls the OS routines through its own interfaces, so the porting
work is minimized. There are not OS-specific calls scattered through
the code. You can download it and look for yourself.

Re: An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

AndrewBurton — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:37:21 -0000

My guess, and I am a Frontier newbie, is it's mostly the interface. The Windows version likely does a lot via the WinAPI, while the Mac uses Cocoa libraries. A Linux version of Frontier would have to use different interfaces for both the GUI and socket/network interfaces. That's my guess anyway.

Re: An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

malatmals — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:59:08 -0000

If it runs on OS/X what's left to get it to the other -nixes?

Re: An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

dave — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:46:20 -0000

OK we're cool. Let's move on.

Re: An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

Joshua Francis Whalen — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:36:53 -0000

I'd really love to see Frontier get the kind of attention, portability and just plain-old geek cred that say, python or ruby get. This is an awesome tool, one I used extensively in the 1990's, and learned a lot about programming from using.

2 wishes for the future:
1- I wish there were a printable .pdf manual for learning the current version
2- I wish the o'reilly book had been kept up-to-date.

Needless to say, I'm in no position to do either, but I do like having a book, even if I have to print it myself. I know it's old fashioned, but it's one of the reasons I wasn't able to just jump back in in the 2k's after a long time doing fx, screen writing, and such in LA. The product had changed a lot, and I'd lost my o'reilly book somewhere on the road.

Mind you, I think the online docs are excellent. But the problem (with me, not the docs), is I get lost if I don't finish it all in one session. Finding where I was and resuming is much more difficult (for me, again, with my adhd, etc..) with online docs than with printed docs.

I hope you won't take this as criticism (again, one of the richest and most enjoyable development environments I've ever used), but just as a suggestion for a way to make an already excellent tool even better, and for a possible gotcha! that might holding back adoption. I used "scripting the mac" and the o'reilly book to learn frontier the first time. Can't find either anywhere at any price lately. when I was learning python, on the other hand, I was very unhappy with the o'reilly book, which was very windows-centric, but there was a plethora of downloadable and printable stuff on the python home site. That took care of me.

I hope you get your session dave. I'd love to have customers know the name and have the confidence in it they have in python, perl or php. It should be on every hosting service. It deserves it.

Re: An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

Bob Lee — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:33:11 -0000

"Open source" is such a nebulous and wide-ranging topic for one conference to begin with. I was just trying to say that, in my humble opinion, your proposal isn't as generally applicable and attractive as many other "open source" topics. That probably had more to do with its rejection than you being friends or liked or not being friends or not liked.

For example, I know that several of the people picking sessions for JavaOne like me quite a bit, but they still only accepted one out of my three proposals. I think they were wrong to not accept the other two, but they were just doing what they think's best for the conference. It's up to me to change their perception in time for next year. :-)

Re: An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

dave — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:14:20 -0000

I don't take it personally. You did see the part about "it doesn't
matter" right? I'm sure it was just a matter of limited space. And the
fact that I'm not friends with the people who run it. I'm just stating
a fact Bob, that's all.

Re: An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

dave — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:08:45 -0000

My proposal is on the home page of scripting.com. :-)

Re: An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

Bob Lee — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:08:29 -0000

Did you propose a BoF or a general session? Does OSCON have BoFs? I realize I'm stating the obvious, but conferences have limited space for general sessions, and they have to prioritize those that will attract attendees. I've had talks about own my open source projects turned down by other conferences, but I don't take it personally. It's just a sign that I need to increase my project's exposure in other ways first.

Glad to hear OSCON is in San Jose this year. I've always wanted to go but haven't been able to make the trip.

Re: An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

Selena Deckelmann — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:06:01 -0000

Hi Dave,

Thanks for writing about us, and we'd love to see you join us in Portland. I'm the co-chair of the conference, along with Audrey Eschright.

We're accepting proposals through the end of the month, and we're looking to host hackfests for individual projects.

Please submit a proposal! And I'll contact you as our hackfest plans firm up.

-selena

Re: An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

Selena Deckelmann — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:05:55 -0000

Hi Dave,

Thanks for writing about us, and we'd love to see you join us in Portland. I'm the co-chair of the conference, along with Audrey Eschright.

We're accepting proposals through the end of the month, and we're looking to host hackfests for individual projects.

Please submit a proposal! And I'll contact you as our hackfest plans firm up.

-selena

Re: An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

Jake — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:03:30 -0000

We'll also have a 24-hour hacker lounge on the top floor of the Hilton in downtown Portland for code sprints, bug bashes, project meetups, meet the hackers who write the code, general geekery, whatever.

The unofficial title we use is "the conference for open source world domination".

Hit us up if you'd like to know more. We'd love to hear your proposals for talks; hope you can attend.

Re: An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

dave — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:32:28 -0000

Thanks for the bug report! :-)

I fixed the post...

Re: An alternate OSCON? (Scripting News)

Evan Prodromou — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:26:27 -0000

Dave: I'll be in Portland for OS Bridge; I've already proposed two talks for the event.

One error in your post: you say OSB is "in Portland on June 17-19 at the same time as OSCON." OSB is June 17-19, as you said, but OSCON is July 20-24, nearly a month afterwards. So, no need to choose between the two: I plan on being at both.