Well I’m out here in Portland for the first day of OSCon. {Kimsal} and I arrived yesterday, arriving so early that we couldn’t check in for about an hour. Due to a goof up, we had to stay at an airport hotel the first night. Once we got situated we headed over to the convention center to pick up our registration materials and explored the facilities and surrounding areas. We also went to a Zend/MySQL party at the DoubleTree and ran into the president of Zend (who is good friends with our COO) and Cal Evans. Plus I ran into {Andrew} and his co-worker Dan who I had met at the last TriJUG.
The keynotes were pretty good. Tim got up on stage and gave his usual prognostications. Some guys from Intel put on a little show to announce the open sourcing of their new Threading Building Blocks abstraction layer. It actually sounds quite neat, but as it’s for C++ it might a while before we see the concepts they’re introducing in things like the JDK. An interesting Microsoft researcher gave a presentation on new conceptual ways to deal with parallelism (beyond the 30-year old concept of locks and condition variables) which I thought was very cool. His implementation is only implemented in Haskell, but again I could see the concepts eventually in the JDK. synchronized and waitFor are lame.
