UnGigs · Being a list of some cool events that I’m going to but not speaking at, or not going to but unhappy about. Item: I’m going to both RubyConf and ApacheCon, but I have no attention of climbing on a stage, I’m there to listen and learn and schmooze. Item: I’m not going to QCon San Francisco, even though they invited me in the nicest way and it looks like a great program and good people. Just couldn’t make it work. Item: I’m not going to the Colorado Software Summit (I committed to the Shanghai gig) and this one breaks my heart, it looks like an outstanding program. Item: I’m not going to Grails eXchange 2007 because I’m signed up for that Midwest trip. A pity, that background Groovy buzz isn’t letting up at all; glad to see there’ll be Sun people there.
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Upcoming Gig: Midwest Java Days · I’ll be doing the opening keynotes at the Midwest Java Technology Days in Minneapolis and Chicago on October 16th and 18th respectively. There’s an amusing story behind this one ...
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Upcoming Gig: Shanghai · I’ve signed up to do a couple of presentations at our Tech Days events; the first is in Shanghai, October 23-25. I’ve been to Hong Kong lots but never to the PRC proper; exciting! Obviously I’ll have to pull together some other things to do if I’m going all the way across the Pacific.
May Day in London · It turns out I’ll be in London between the first and fourth of May. Are there any notable geek events going on, or anything else I should try to put on my calendar?
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Upcoming Gig: CANHEIT 2007 · It’ll be back to my old stomping grounds in Waterloo in late May to do a plenary at CANHEIT 2007, which is the Canadian University IT conference. I hope to see one or two of my old compadres.
Upcoming Gig: RailsConf 2007 · I’ll be heading to Portland, Oregon for a keynote at RailsConf 2007, May 17-20. I gather that like most Ruby-related events it sold out more or less instantly. There’s a funny story about how I came to attend ...
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Upcoming Gig: RubyKaigi 2007 · The week of June 10 will find me in Tokyo for RubyKaigi2007, where my title is The World in 30 Minutes. Fortunately, they’ve provided this map. Wish me luck; I’ll need it.
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Upcoming Gig: AEA Seattle ’07 · To be exact, An Event Apart Seattle 2007, way off at the end of June. I don’t know the first thing about it, but with Meyer and Zeldman involved it’s gotta be good. I can feel my inner typographer squirming at the prospect.
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Upcoming Gig: WDW SF ’07 · To be exact, Web Design World San Francisco 2007, March 26-28 at Moscone West in San Francisco. I’m up first thing on Monday morning. I haven’t any idea what I’m going to talk about, but still, it’s been too long since I’ve spent time hanging out with designers; so I’m looking forward to it.
Upcoming Gig: Mashup with Arrington · The Sun marketing person said “We’re doing another startup outreach event, think you could come down on the 19th and pitch in?” I said probably and asked for more info. “This fellow named, uh, Mike Arrington, has agreed to do a panel, do you know who he is?” So I said I’d come. It’s called the Mashup Event and it’s an afternoon thing, basically just Mike and me talking a little bit about Web 2.0 and Venture Capital, followed by cocktails and schmoozing. I’ve never met the ubiquitous Mr. A so I’m looking forward to it. If you’re in the area and can spare an hour, drop by our coolio Menlo Park campus and join in the fun. Our entirely-unhidden agenda: find out what’s going on, & listen.
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That Other Hemisphere · I’m in the wonderful state of Victoria, Australia (currently Melbourne), for the next little while. It’s summer. Communication may be sluggish.
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Upcoming Gig: Second Life · Hey, my first Metaverse appearance. That’s this coming Monday 13th at 1PM Pacific. Jeff Barr tells me to practice my gestures. I’m frankly very nervous.
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Interview, with Snarls · James Gray of Linux Journal has published a lengthy email interview with me. Those who visit ongoing regularly won’t find much to surprise them; but I did take the chance to fulminate about dastardly DRM and Microsoft’s odious Office XML. And now that I think of it, I’ve been stingy with the polemics around here recently, maybe a little bland even; aren’t bloggers supposed to be ruthless attack puppies? It’s having a cute little girl baby around that does it I guess.
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Upcoming Gig: Startup Camp · This should be serious fun; I was in on the initial discussions, but the people at Sun went out and got David Berlind to help and now there’s going to be a Startup Camp Nov. 2-3 in Mountain View, and I’m going. Come along and pitch in!
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Upcoming Gig: Zend PHP Conference · I wonder how many people will attend both a Rails and a PHP conference this year? I’m one of them; I’ll be at the Zend/PHP conference, joining in a session moderated by O’Grady called Panel Discussion: How Do The Stacks Stack Up?; should be fun.
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Upcoming Gig: W-JAX · I thought I might make it through 2006 without crossing an ocean, but I just signed up for a keynote at W-JAX in Munich in November. I’ve never been to this conference, but my Sun colleagues say good things about it.
Upcoming Gig: SEC · This has been booked for months, but I just found out that it’s an open-announcement thing. I’ll be participating in an Interactive Data Roundtable at the US Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington DC on Wednesday Oct. 3rd. The SEC’s Interactive Data initiative is, I think, going to be huge. As an investor, a businessman, and an open-data fan, I’m 100% sure that it’ll pay back the investment many times over.
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Smallthought and Me · I’ve written before about Dabble DB, about being an unabashed fan of the people and company and technology. Since I think transparency is important, this is by way of disclosure: as of today I’m a shareholder in Smallthought Systems. After I’d advised them not to take any investment money, and then advised them that they should probably take the Ventures West offer, I asked if I could have a little piece of the deal, and everyone was fine with that, so today I signed the papers and gave them the cheque. I guess there may have been a little Vancouver home-side boosterism in my wanting to do this but not that much; I think I’m gonna get my money back and then some.
Upcoming Gig: RubyConf · Hey, RubyConf accepted my paper proposal, I18n, M17n, Unicode, and all that. So it looks like I’ll be in Denver October 20-22. See you there!
Upcoming Gig: OSCON · What with the recent family enlargement, it wasn’t clear that I was going to be able to get to OSCON. But the girl’s settling down pretty well, so I decided to go. I reviewed the schedule and was horrified to see nothing about the Atom Publishing Protocol, which I’m increasingly convinced is hot stuff. So I sent a note off to Nat Torkington saying “WTF, no APP?!?” and he wrote back saying “So submit a paper already” and I did and now I’m on the program. I think I can only go for two days, but Portland’s a great town for beer and bookstores, which there’s more to life than, but only moderately. [Update: I’m arriving at PDX at 4PM on Tue 25th. I can’t be the only one, shoot me a line and let’s organize some taxi sharing, it’s a long boring ride in from the airport.]
Contacting Me · I get a lot of email in connection with ongoing, and I enjoy that, so thank-you to everyone who sends it. I just added a Contact section to the “Author” piece; it explains that if you write me, I might decide to publish your email. Which means, first of all, that if you don’t want me to, please say so. And if you don’t mind, include your preferred Web address so that I can throw in a little link love.
Upcoming Gig: JavaOne · Hah, I’m delighted. JavaOne accepted my talk, entitled Sigrid: The simplest possible grid computing platform. See you in San Fran in May!
Upcoming Gig: ETech · Sometime in the March 7-9 window I’ll be talking about “Atom as a Case Study” at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, which is billed as being about “The Attention Economy”. I’m looking forward to this just because I’ve heard good things about ETech, but never been to one before.
Upcoming Gig: OSBC · In San Francisco on February 15, I’ll be at the Open Source Business Conference, on a panel called Open Source Software and Standards Revisited, convened by Andy Updegrove, along with Bob Sutor, Stephen Walli, and Jason Matusow. Yow.
Upcoming Gig: Northern Voice · Now, this is going to be fun. On Saturday February 11th, at Northern Voice 2006, I’m going to be doing a sit-down interview with Dave Sifry and try to entertain the audience for 45 minutes. I think we should engage the whole room in a big argument. Last year was a fun and moving, too.
Upcoming Gig: NYS CTG, Albany · Those acronyms stand for “New York State Center for Technology in Government”, which is under the umbrella of the University at Albany (part of SUNY). On January 25th in Albany they’re having a conclave entitled Thinking Beyond Your Web Site: Lessons from the XML Testbed Project, and I’m really looking forward to being a part of it. Obviously, the intersection of XML and State Government is very, very interesting territory at this moment in history. I’ll try to evangelize of course, but it’s more important that I do some listening; I think most of us in the industry don’t have a good enough understanding of the issues the end-users down in the trenches are facing.
Upcoming Gig: XBRL San Jose · On Wednesday Jan. 18th I’ll be at Adobe in San Jose talking at the XBRL Meeting. XBRL is about something that I’ve long felt is important: standardizing financial reporting. I’ve struggled a whole lot over the years with accounting principles and financial reporting, which are generally speaking a snake-pit. Those of us who’ve dealt with this stuff were less surprised by Enron and friends, because “Generally Accepted Accounting Principles” have historically included lots of latitude for egregious lies. The best answer is transparency, give intelligent investors enough information and they’ll sniff out the bad guys. Getting from the mess we’re now in to complete transparency has two essential steps: first of all, the regulators have to make Generally Accepted Accounting Lies punishable with lots of jail time. Secondly, we need technical infrastructure so we can build some standardized tools to do financial analysis; these exist today, but require a whole lot of hand-tweaking to weed through the GAAP-approved hand-waving and make one company’s numbers comparable to another’s. XBRL isn’t the solution, but’s an important piece of the puzzle, and if there’s anything I can do to help, I’m there.
Upcoming Gig: NetBeans Day at JavaOne · This one looks like real fun: an all-day NetBeans bash in connection with JavaOne. They want me to cover Coyote, but there’s lots of other stuff to talk about too.
Upcoming Gig: Oxford Summer School · I’ll be on the faculty at this year’s XML Summer School, the week of July 24-29 in Oxford. It’s a Sun-sponsored event and I’ve wanted to go for years; there are a few events on the program covering areas I really want to learn about, so I’m really looking forward to this.
Upcoming Gig: May in New York · On May 18th, Jon Udell and I (and a player to be named later, they say) are talking generalities at the IDG Syndicate Conference, which is interesting as it’s the first attempt (that I know of) by an old-line analyst/publishing company to do a traditional old-line conference around this whole blogging/syndication thing. The idea itself is controversial, we’ll see how it goes.
Upcoming Gig: May in Chiba · On May 13th, I’ll be in Chiba, Japan participating in a panel entitled Web Services Considered Harmful? with Jeff Barr of Amazon, prominent RESTafarian Mark Baker, Adam Bosworth of Google, and Jeffrey McManus of EBay, at the 14th International World Wide Web Conference. Should be fun.
Upcoming Gig: April in San Fran · On April 11th I’ll be doing a “Keynote Debate” with Jean Paoli and Jon Udell at the Gilbane Content Management Technologies conference (what a long name). Some of the press coverage is trying to spin this as a “My office XML is better than yours” debate, which seems lame to me, there’s plenty to debate about the right way to put markup to work without getting into boring product specifics.
