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Wed, 26 Jan 2005
Dinner with Miguel and the Seattle Mono User's Group

Miguel is in town for ECMA meetings, and the Seattle Mono user's group held a dinner in his honor. Since I was already in Seattle for some other meetings, I decided to drop by. We had some interesting dicussions on the quality of the Linux desktop interface, the ability of open source to innovate, and the ongoing rich client versus web client debate. Any one of these is a decent sized post in itself, so maybe I'll have some energy to expanding on this in the future.

I also got to see Lion Kimbro who I've kept passing in the night at various events. He's started a new blog, which I recently discovered, so I was able to ask him a few semi intelligent questions about some of the things that he's been up to, such as an HTTP Pipe plugin for pyblosxom, and of course his labor on Local Names. Lion's name also came up during the Chandler IRC this morning, in reference to his infamous paper notebook tome.

Vikram Dendi from Real Networks gave me the complete scoop on what's going on with the open source Helix player and the Rhapsody music network. This expanded my understanding from his interview with the Gillmor Gang.

There are lots of people in Seattle who are working on cool stuff. It sure seems like it would be a boost if we could get a large number of those folks together somehow so they could cross pollinate. If you're in Seattle, and you like this idea, let me know. I've floated some ideas about this in the past, but it seems that recently I'm running into more an more people. We should do something about this.

[23:52] | [computers/open_source] | # | TB | F | G | 8 Comments | Other blogs commenting on this post
OK, I'm gonna get upset.  Not only did I miss meeting Lion Kimbro one more time, I didn't get to talk to you either.  I did get to see Cher attempt a Vegas production in a hockey rink dubbed an "Event Center" and it was fun except the sound systems are always sucky even when you know every word the headliner has ever sung (which I don't).

I think some forum for developers in the Seattle community would be interesting, although I was just reading "
Lord Palmerston on Programming" in Joel on Software and I don't know what we do about the crevasses between the various toolcrafts.  Even if you focused on open-box development (whether or not truly open-sourced), there are already too many technologies (not to mention the OOP does everything mindset that might intrude, or not).

OK, OK, I'm for it. Don't know what the common ground will be, and I'm for it. If I get my dissertation topic approved, I'd like to find a community interested in raising open-source trustworthiness, too.
Posted by orcmid at Thu Jan 27 11:06:40 2005

I thought of another one for the list of groups to have at a gathering--

The Seattle Robotics Society, meeting monthly in Seattle since 1982.
Posted by Lion Kimbro at Thu Jan 27 17:09:51 2005


Ted -

Thanks for the link. I was thinking about something tied specifically to the ETech conference, but I'd love to see some sort of group meeting on a monthly basis just to talk about cool software projects.

There's a group here in Seattle called
Dorkbot, and their slogan is "people doing strange things with electricity". They meet once a month at a local gallery and usually have three or four presentations (movies, robots, sculpture, etc.) and then lots of chatting, networking. I think there's a huge opening for something like that for software / hacking.

I wouldn't want to see anything too technical, and open source is always nice, but not required - people wouldn't necessarily even have to present code. Just present your project, talk about what it does (why exactly is it so cool?) and how you built it. People can ask questions, and do some give-and-take. The rest of the time is just for people to chat, share ideas and collectively brainstorm / hack.

Being relatively new to the area, I don't really have the connections necessary to put something like this together. But with a little help, I don't think this would be too hard to organize. It definitely warrants further discussion.

Justin
Posted by Justin Martenstein at Sun Jan 30 17:19:07 2005


Other inspiration

http://106miles.org/
Posted by Ted Leung at Wed Feb 2 23:33:16 2005



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