use Perl

• ARGH! (Score:2)

  by autarch (914)

  
  I've been working on OSCON, sorting out rooms and tracks and trying to drum up proposals. We're on a really tight time budget once the proposals come in, so if you're thinking about submitting something then you should do it sooner rather than later.
  
  
  If the first proposals in get more consideration than later ones, could you please say this in the goddamn CFP! If you just give a deadline, you imply that you won't actually select anything before that deadline has passed. To then go ahead and start assig
  • Re:ARGH! (Score:2)

    by gnat (29)

    That's not what I said. We'll have two days to put together the program. This means that if you're late, you're fucked. So don't be late. Don't put it off to the last minute, get your shit together and do it now.

    Take that Prozac, man.

    --Nat
    • Re:ARGH! (Score:2)

      by autarch (914)

      Oh, I see. I always assumed that it was obvious that if you were late, you were fucked. That's why it's called a deadline, right?
      
      Prozac? That's for depressed people. Not my problem. And I'm too old for Ritalin. I'm not sure what drug I need. Chocolate, probably.
      • Re:ARGH! (Score:2)

        by gnat (29)

        I always assumed it was obvious that if you were late, you were fucked.

        You appear to be in the 1% of people living in the real world. Every year we get a ton of last-minute "hey! I missed the deadline but can you take my proposal anyway?" messages. Normally I say "okay", because it takes us a while to get up to speed on selections. But this year there's no such slack.

        --Nat
        • Re:ARGH! (Score:2)

          by autarch (914)

          Wow, someone accusing me of living in the real world! Scary.
          
          You might want to recant that statement ;)
• software to do this? (Score:1)

  by kellan (905)

  Is there software to do this? Preferably open source?
  
  I'm asking because the main story I'm hearing from friends at WSF this year is how poorly organized the whole conf is, and how its just a couple of volunteers with Word documents trying to do the scheduling.
  
  I feel like if anybody is going to know of an open source solution for conference scheduling it has got to be Oreilly. Software for laying out schedules, and doing rooms assignments, and maybe do what-ifs on crowd size, and send speakers little emb
  • Re:software to do this? (Score:2)

    by gnat (29)

    Unfortunately, no. Anybody who has been on the organizing end of an O'Reilly conference knows what a chaotic hell of databases and CMS our conference system is. A lot of home brewed tools built on an eccentric CMS.

    I know there's considerable interest in it from various open source areas, but I suspect that any implementation would find itself confronted with Not Invented Here syndrome. If we wrote one in Perl, I think the PHP and Python and Ruby and ... folks would want to rewrite it to avoid having th
    • Re:software to do this? (Score:1)

      by kellan (905)

      But once it was written then people would be able to say, "No, you did it wrong, let me fix it for you." People like that, makes then feel superior without realizing that the hard work, the initial version, has already been written. Thats why we see a new PHP CMS get release every Tuesday, Thursday, and alternating Fridays.
      
      Thanks though.
    • Re:software to do this? (Score:1)

      by trachtenberga (3651)

      That's why you should write it in C#. With C# you can alienate all groups equally. -adam