This is an incredible talk from a Swedish professor which describes how much the third world has changed over the last forty years and how comparatively little our views have changed.
Simon Willison OpenID is an emerging standard that provides simple, decentralised authentication for the Web. OpenID follows the Unix philosophy, solving one small problem rather than attempting to tackle the many larger challenges posed by online identity. This talk will explore the implications of OpenID, and explore the best practices required to take advantage of this new technology while avoiding the potential pitfalls.
Speaker: Simon Willison Simon Willison is a consultant on OpenID and client- and server-side Web development, and a co-creator of the Django Web framework. Before going frelance Simon worked on Yahoo!'s Technology Development team, and prior to that at the Lawrence Journal-World, an award winning local newspaper in Kansas. Simon maintains a popular Web development weblog at http://simonwillison.net/
Merlin Mann, a well known productivity guru and creator of the popular 43 folders website will talk about Getting Things Done, the importance of getting your inbox to zero, and strategies for dealing with high volume email.
Since time immemorial (or the advent of UNIX--pretty much the same thing), the init program has been the first user-space program to run on Unix-like systems. As systems grew more complex, so did system initialization. The responsibilities of init grew multifold and its implementations diverged. Beginning with the "Tiger" version of Mac OS X, Apple introduced a powerful new way of system initialization: launchd. Launchd isn't just an init replacement though--it provides a powerful XML interface for defining when, where, and how programs should be invoked on OS X. In this talk, Dave, who developed launchd, will discuss the rationale behind launchd and how the program came to be. You will also learn about the many options launchd provides for defining the interaction between the operating system and your code, and how your code can be started automatically through launchd.
Speaker: Dave Zarzycki Dave Zarzycki is responsible for helping teams across Apple design and integrate their technologies in the the mainline operating system. As a part of this role, he has developed a technology called "launchd" to aid those developers.
Advogato is a community blog for free software developers, founded in 1999 as a testbed for ideas on attack-resistant trust metrics. The site now has 13k registered users, of whom over 3000 are ranked with one of the "Apprentice", "Journeyer", or "Master" certifications. Though I neglected the maintenance of the site for many years, it has retained an active community, and is seeing significant new life since it was handed over to the new maintainer, Steven Rainwater.
By the exponential-growth standards of the dot-com boom, Advogato has been only a modest success. Yet, the experience of the site over the years contains a number of lessons. First and foremost, attack-resistant trust metrics do work. The site succeeds in being remarkably spam-free, as well as completely open to the worldwide community of free software developers, and achieves these goals without needing a huge amount of manual input to delete spammers.
Thus, the main lesson is that trust metrics do work, but they need to be applied with care. Experience with the site teaches the importance of choosing and implementing the appropriate trust metric for the assumptions at hand. There is widespread "cert inflation," where many users are ranked higher than the guidelines would recommend. The trust metrics also did not bring a flow of very high quality articles to the front page.
Another important lesson is that openness and transparency work. The workings of the trust metric (including the complete source code) is public. Thus, Advogato strongly refutes the prevailing wisdom that secrecy is needed for spam protection. This lesson is similar to the ineffectiveness of "security through obscurity".
Lastly, I'll spend some time discussing why Advogato failed to catch fire in the public's imagination, despite its qualities. Possible factors include lack of promotion, and fact that the trust metrics were never tested against real money.
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