Missed communications

Portland, WA -- I'm here at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2005/, in a session where r0ml Lefkowitz is giving the rest of the "Semasiology of Open Source" talk he didn't finish giving here a year ago. In that first session his time ran out, and he abruptly stopped, leaving the audience with a profound sense of anticlimax. So maybe this is the proclimax.

Last night at dinner, r0ml was explaining semasiology, the noun given to the study of meaning. Disinterest in this study is so widespread that today the top result in a Google search for "semasiology" is r0ml's half-talk from last year: http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail169.html

So now r0ml is saying,

The tradtition of literat programming can be regarded as an essayist, whose main concern is with expolsiiton an d excellence of style -- Donald Knuth in Literate Programming (1964)

I just typed that off one of his slides.

Now he's quoting Pope Gregory the Great (540-605), who said something about pictures. I was going to quote it here, but the slide just went away, replaced by one that reads, in Roman type,

Scripta manet, verba volat.

"Strangely enough, this phrase did not mean this when it was first uttered. Beacause in the Middle Ages..."

"The purpose of code, as it is of writing, is to be performed."

"In fact my enthusiasm is so great that I must warn the reader to discount much of what I say as the ravings of a fanatic who has seen great light." r0ml quoting Pope Greg again. I think.

Now r0ml is talking about the Spanish theologian Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636), who praised silent reading too. Isidore was named the patron saint of programmers in 1999. His best known work, was a compiliation ("He was the best compiler who ever lived"). "Etymolygiae" or "Origines" was a best-reader (since books weren't sold for most of the duration) for about a thousand years.

r0ml was explaining this to a bunch of us last night over dinner. After about twenty minutes of this, I finally asked, "How do you know all this shit?"

"I went to a Catholic school", he replied.

"The visually most striking feature of lager carolingian miniscule is the separation of inidividual words using blank space."

"The space did for text what the zero did for mathematics."

Now, what's also amazing here is that r0ml holds the audience in the palm of his hand. He's a brilliant teacher.

I've been here for a day and I haven't taught a thing. Worse, I haven't written a thing, even on my blog, which has a lower threshold of publication than anything else in my writing life. Instead I've careened like a pinball from session to session and acquaintence to acquaintence, looking for a private zone where I could sit and write this SuitWatch while perhaps catching something brilliant by, say, Greg Kroah-Hartman and Andrew Morton, reviewing the State of the Kernel.

I missed that. I also missed everything other than the opening sessions and Dave "dizzyd" Smith talking about Passel, the new open source identity system. It seemed like about a third of the audience -- also the source of all the live comments on Dave's talk -- were authors or advocates of other identity systems, indlucing LID, OpenID, iNames and Sxip. Diz held up pretty well, considering.

The first thing I missed was something Steve Mallet of O'Reilly insisted I should attend: the OSCON Tuesday Night Extravaganza, where, it says here: http://www.osdir.com/Article6677.phtml ,

Google and O'Reilly came together to begin the first of an annual Open Source Awards to honor five open source people whose contributions over the past year have been exceptional in five categories: Communicator, Evangelist, Diplomat, Integrator, and Hacker.

The awards thing started at 7:30. This is when I was still sitting in a meeting with Tim O'Reilly at the Doubletree Hotel, where the converence is taking place. According to the Web site, anyway.

I had figured I'd head upstairs to the Awards with Tim when The Time came. After all, this was his Extravaganza, right?

Wrong. Not just about Tim going to the Extravaganza, but also about the conference happening at the Doubletree.

I found this out when I got tired of watching Tim not move, and sneaked out of the meeting to ask the people at the reception desk where the Portland Ballroom was.

"It's at the Oregon Convention Center," they said.

"Where's that?"

"Across the railroad tracks, about five blocks down and then left."

I went back into the meeting, buttonholed Tim quietly and said, "Am I making a mistake missing this thing that's happening at the Convention Center?"

"Yes. You're winning an award. You'd better hurry over."

So I began running, as best I could on my 58-year-old legs (while carrying a bag with two laptops, four batteries, and other associated hardware), thinking of jokes I'd tell, along with my humble thanks, in my acceptance speech. At length I arrived at what appeared to be a completely deserted Oregon Conference Center, which is large enough to enclose a town. Also a lot harder to navigate.

Inside I ran up and down a series of empty halls and corridors, up and down idle escalators, looking for the Portland Ballroom. I finally found the Oregon Ballroom, thinking "this thing is so big that maybe the Portland Ballroom is in a corner of it".

The Oregon Ballroom actuallly had a couple human beings in it, setting up something-or-other. One of them gave me bad directions to the Portland Ballroom, which I eventually found, with the help of another lost attendee. Took teamwork, it turned out.

As I walked to the front, past a seated audience, people looked at me and murmered. When I arrived at the front row and plopped down, exhausted, Chris DiBona, one of the judges, came over, handed me a plaque in a cardboard shipping box, and whispered in my ear, "You won five grand. Send me an email."

And that was it.

The award was for "Best Communicator". And this is the first thing I've written since.