Open Source Bridge

What OSS database to use is an important decision, but recently languishing in the shadow of the sexier "what framework should I use" talks - or underplayed as though the battle were only SQL v noSQL. If your understanding of data storage tops out at "Mongo is webscale" or "mysql + memcached = win" then this talk is for you.

lua is an extension language that is used in everything from mail filters to World of Warcraft. Learn how you can script C libraries with lua and alien.

An introduction to the cryptocurrency system called Bitcoin. The cryptography, the economics of currency bootstrapping, and the traction its getting today.

See! The Amazing Future of Human-Computer Interaction! Behold! The Awesome Power of Open-Source Libraries and Cheap Video-Game Accessories! Fake Beards!

Lots of attention has been given to GPUs for speeding up certain types of computations. While GPUs are very well suited for vector operations, there are other things they are not so well suited for. FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) are not used as widely yet, but they offer a much more flexible computing fabric than GPUs. You can implement a GPU in an FPGA, for example, or you could implement your own custom processor optimized for very specialized tasks. The barrier to entry can be high for FPGAs: how does a person with a software development background get started using them? And what about HDLs (Hardware Description Langauges) used to program FPGAs? What's the difference between simulation and synthesis? What kinds of tools are freely available? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in this session.

Do you generate, manage, or analyze a lot of data? Do you develop software? Do you like pretty pictures? If your answer was "yes" to zero or more of these questions, this talk is for you.

Open source folks are naturally lazy. Anything mundane task they can automate, they will. So what does an open source developer do when faced with planning, planting, and tediously watering a garden? Automate!

Hear how a distributed team tackled a big project (a book about a large open source project) in our spare time. Along the way, we encountered tools, techniques, and working styles that may be useful to you in your own career—or at least serve as a humorous warning.

Overview of Apache CouchDB, who is using it, and how you can too.

Many geeks are uncomfortable interacting IRL with clients or audiences but you don't have to be. There are some simple physical tricks to keeping an audience (of 1 or 1k) engaged and not undermining your skills and yourself.

From the Browser to node.js all the way to the database you can use and share your JavaScript!

Anyone can show how to save the world. We tell how to receive unsolicited love letters while doing it.

Everything you learned about database modeling is wrong. At least for document databases like CouchDB and MongoDB. Learn about these differences, the trade-offs, the use cases, and put it all in practice in a discussion about a real-life document database problem. Unlearn SQL habits and relax.

See the leading open source GIS desktop systems solve real world problems.

Parrot is an ambitious and long-lived project that aims to be a VM for interoperable dynamic language implementation. We'll take a look at what Parrot's developers have been doing of late, what kind of awesome goodies we've plundered from the OSS world and where we want to go in the next year.

Developing more effective habits isn't just for the good guys. We'll discuss seven methodologies that make trolls more effective---and tell you what you can do about it.

When kids get hands on experience with the source code of a program, they get excited!

As you can see we get a "403 Forbidden" in response to our "POST /integer/5/increment"...can anyone tell me why? It worked when we did "PUT /variable/x/let/integer/5" followed by "POST /variable/x/increment", so why can't we do it directly?

Learn to use simple natural language processing and graph analysis tools in Python and R to explore the structure of the dataverse. From Reddit to the USPTO to Google Books, come try some data hacks!

Why be locked into a cloud vendor? Shouldn't Cloud be Open Cloud and powered by Open Source software? Open Stack is a collection of open source technologies to deliver a cloud operating system. Learn about Open Stack and how to use it to deliver your own Open Source powered clouds.

A holistic approach to design for people through sketching, product blueprints, and team overlap (used by Apple and others).

PSAS is a student aerospace engineering project at Portland State University. We're building ultra-low-cost, open hardware and open source rockets that feature perhaps the most sophisticated amateur rocket avionics systems out there today.

Lots of attention has been given to GPUs for speeding up certain types of computations. While GPUs are very well suited for vector operations, there are other things they are not so well suited for. FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) are not used as widely yet, but they offer a much more flexible computing fabric than GPUs. You can implement a GPU in an FPGA, for example, or you could implement your own custom processor optimized for very specialized tasks. The barrier to entry can be high for FPGAs: how does a person with a software development background get started using them? And what about HDLs (Hardware Description Langauges) used to program FPGAs? What's the difference between simulation and synthesis? What kinds of tools are freely available? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in this session.

Touchscreen is a platform for creating interactive kiosk and dashboard displays. It powers presentations for visitors to the Open Source Lab's data center and the network operations center. Come learn how touchscreen works and how to use it for your own display screens.

"This compression algorithm is of course very inefficient, at least when applied to a small collection of documents. But if you were to apply it to a larger collection, say, all the music ever recorded and all movies ever made, some gains may be realized...

Learn to hack Evently jQuery CouchApps -- p2p web applications that can be deployed anywhere there's a CouchDB.

Print is dead. Well, not dead yet. But it'll be stone dead in a moment.

This is exactly what it looks like: We're going to make you sing. ;)

From creating remote-sensing CubeSats to analyzing aerogel: how the public is hacking into open source space exploration.

As a "software person," I found the hard technologies of building with steel and wood made for a very different creative and hacking process. At the same time, I discovered many parallels to software development, embedded hardware, and even open-source philosophies.

Thomas Jefferson envisioned a nation of self-sufficient citizen farmers; programmers like Alan Kay and Bill Atkinson tried to help us code as easily as we might hang a poster on the wall. What happened to the HyperCard ideal? Have we settled for consumption over creation? I will explore the question through a case study, surveying the state of citizen programming in 2010 — from CouchApps to Shoes to plain-jane HTML5+JS to HyperCard 2.4 — and try to convince all comers that realizing the dream of the citizen coder is vital to continuing the ideals of open source.

During this talk, we will survey real-world implementations of JIT-compiled embedded DSLs and their applications.

I've been looking for an affordable, flexible, easy to learn robotics platform for years that I could use to teach kids the basics of programming/electronics/robotics. Last Fall, I finally found it.

Node.js is one of the most exciting things to happen to server-side development in the last few years. Here you'll find out why Node.js is a perfect fit for your next project and a better fit than existing languages for modern web development.

Augmented Reality and Geolocation have been hot topics this year, but there has often been a confusion between aesthetics vs. practicality, and fantasy vs. reality. This presentation will highlight the advantages and disadvantages of visual and non-visual augmented reality. We'll tell stories from our experiences building location-aware social networks with custom proximity notification.

What kind of database do you need? Thanks to new database projects like CouchDB, TokyoCabinet, Solr and others, there are more non-relational database options available than ever for developers. Yet good information on how to choose what kind of database you need is still scarce. We'll cure that in this talk.

Serialist (http://serialist.net/) provides a way to find, track and read serialized content (e.g., web comics). It's implemented entirely in Haskell and demonstrates functional web application development, crawling, scraping and distributed architecture. Serialist uses interesting graph algorithms to add and step through content lazily.

"Do you watch television? Is your furnace loud? Do you have $2?" My 7-year-old's marketing suggestions aside, building custom gadgets to improve your life is remarkably simple, and I'll prove it by building something on stage that you can duplicate at home.

Location and mapping are making a huge impact on the web and mobile. Open Source is right there. Learn the elements of the geo stack, from mapping APIs to geo databases.

A follow-on to last year's highly popular presentation, Hal Pomeranz returns with another super-size helping of command-line madness!

Markus: Nautilus? I thought you said noodle house! Matt: Wait, wait, I think I see her head!! Markus: Are you sure? Matt: Maybe It's Not Her Head...