OSDC 2008 Earlybird Registration is now open!

Earlybird Registration for The Open Source Developers' Conference 2008 is now open.

OSDC 2008 is a conference run by open source developers, for developers and business people. It covers numerous programming languages across a rangeof operating systems, and related topics such as business processes, licensing, and strategy. Talks vary from introductory pieces through to the deeply technical. This year we have an exciting selection of presenters andkeynote speakers including:

* Larry Wall, the creator of Perl
* Chris DiBona, Open Source Progams Manager for Google
* Andrew Tridgell, Founder, Samba Team
* Anthony Baxter, Python Evangelist
* Pia Waugh, Consultant, Waugh Partners

Check out the draft program: http://www.osdc.com.au/2008/papers/

Please visit http://www.osdc.com.au/2008/registration/ to register.
Earlybird registration closes 27th October, 2008.

For more information about this event, please visit: http://www.osdc.com.au/.

OSDC 2008 - Sydney - Call for Papers

The Open Source Developers' Conference 2008 is a conference run by open source developers, for developers and business people. It covers numerous programming languages across a range of operating systems, and related topics such as business processes, licensing, and strategy. Talks vary from introductory pieces through to the deeply technical. It is a great opportunity to meet, share, and learn with like-minded individuals.

This year, the conference will be held in Sydney, Australia during
the first week of December (1st - 5th). If you are an Open Source
maintainer, developer or user, the organising committee would
encourage you to submit a talk proposal on open source tools,
solutions, languages or technologies you are working with.

For more details and to submit your proposal(s), goto:
http://osdc.com.au/2008/papers/cfp.html

If you have any questions or require assistance with your
submission, please don't hesitate to ask!

We recognise the importance of Open Source
in providing a medium for collaboration between individuals,
researchers, business and government. In recognition of this and
ensure a high standard of presentations, we intend to peer-review
all submitted papers.

OSDC 2008 Sydney (Australia) - Key Program Dates:

30 Jun - Initial proposals (short abstract) due
21 Jul - Proposal acceptance
15 Sep - Accepted paper submissions
13 Oct - Reviews completed
27 Oct - Final paper submission cutoff

For all information, contacts and updates, see the OSDC conference
web site at http://osdc.com.au/2008/

Also if you are interested in sponsoring, please see:
http://www.osdc.com.au/2008/sponsors/opportunities.html

Silverlight 2 SDK, Mac OS X and Mono

John Lam has posted two introductory articles [1],[2] that use the Dynamic Silverlight SDK . It came as no surprise that only Microsoft operating systems are officially supported for the SDK. So after downloading and installing it onto a VMWare image running one of the supported operating systems, I decided to try installing it on my Macbook Pro. I copied the SDK directory structure across, installed the Mono 1.2.6 for OSX, and John's demos. Then in a terminal session, started chirod, the SDK local web server in the flickr_start root directory.

mono ~/Silverlight/v2.0/Tools/Chiron/Chiron.exe /b

and was presented with the following:

Microsoft(R) Silverlight(TM) Development Utility. Version 1.0.0.0
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Chiron serving '/Users/mark/swdev/demos/flickr_start' as http://localhost:2060/
mono(2077,0xa000d000) malloc: *** Deallocation of a pointer not malloced: 0x14f5b4; This could be a double free(), or free() called with the middle of an allocated block; Try setting environment variable MallocHelp to see tools to help debug
23:44:00 200 2,340 /index.html
23:44:00 200 2,397 /assets/stylesheets/error.css
23:44:01 200 552,610 /app.xap


The error didn't affect the functionality of the Silverlight demo.



I then tried the flickr_end demo and discovered what error messages look like under the SDK environment.



This error also occurs under Windows so it would appear that John is using a newer version of Silverlight 2 and/or IronPython that handles the line of python code.

Anyway it looks like I will be able to use my Mac environment for Dynamic Silverlight development.

Google Code SVN interface improvements

I use Google Code Project Hosting for a number of my open source projects. It gave me a common place to store my code under subversion and the integrated wiki allowed easy creation of on-line documentation. The web interface to subversion was rather limited only showing the current version of the repository. So I have tended to use the subversion tools on my computer for viewing revisions etc. In the last couple of weeks I have been working on a new release of my ISAPI handler for WSGI (isapi_wsgi) and was surprised this morning to see the SVN web interface has changed dramatically and for the better.

Now when you access the subversion repository via the Source tab, you goto the Checkout view. This initially looks like the old view, until you notice that the Browse link has moved to a sub-menu and there is a new Changes link. If you select the Browse link, an explorer style interface is displayed. From this you can navigate around the repository. If you select a file, it is displayed with the code syntax coloured, with panels for the details of the last change, revision history and file info. This is a massive improvement over what was there before. Selecting the Changes link shows a view of the revision history. Viewing a revision allows access to either a nice colour diff view or side by side view.

So a big thank you to the Google Code Project hosting team for the improvements.