OSCON 2005 was in Portland, Oregon again this year. This time it was held in the cavernous Oregon Convention Center instead of the cramped hotel conference center as in the previous 2 years. That allowed for a proper area for the exhibitors for a change, but the building was too large to maintain a convenient and intimate conference. Wireless worked great for a change.
I lucked out with my hotel this year. I just showed up in town and rented a room at the closest hotel, the Inn At The Convention Center, directly across the street from the OCC. It turned out to be the most convenient and also the cheapest (under $100/nite) in the area. It had wifi thanks to its sister hotel, the Red Lion Hotel Portland Convention Center, across the street, broadcasting a channel. (The official conference hotel, the DoubleTree Hotel & Executive Meeting Center Portland – Lloyd Center, was actually a few blocks from the Center for some reason.) The MySQL guys also picked my hotel. For some reason hotel cable TV had 2 reality shows about tattoo parlors.
There was good attendance with all the usuals there. My favorite talks were PHP and Unicode: A Love At Fifth Sight with ICU (sponsored by Yahoo!), to be in the next point release, and the one on 45 Things to Do with RSS and Atom, which inspired me to add an RSS 2.0 feed to a product I work on before my flight out. I attended a few BOFs, including the one on mod_perl.
In the exhibits area, I asked some postgresql questions at their booth. Apparently the favored replication method is sloany. Cardomain.com was recruiting Perl programmers. Occasionally I saw Jeremy manning the Yahoo! booth. Some company was promoting a graphics application for linux with only a SQL query interface – no programming API. Too bad.
Miguel de Icaza gave a good closing talk on cool things at Novell/Suse. He demoed Mac-like graphical window manager capabilities on X. The winning photo contest entries were chosen from a flickr tag.
The inflatable furniture in the halls was fun to look at and sit in.
Apparently there’s only one major Perl employer in town, Rentrak, an online real estate company. I saw their building near the airport on my way out.
