So today was the first day of CodeCon... This (cell phone camera) picture gives you an idea of the atomosphere...

CodeCon is definitely a coder's conference. It starts at noon, which gives the nocturnal hackers (such as myself) a chance to get some decent rest. No presentations are allowed without running code, and the content so far is highly technical.

There's a decent number of ASF folk here. Ben Laurie and David Reid gave a presentation on the new certificate authority that they are working on for the ASF. I paid a decent amount of attention because I'm going to be a user of the system once it goes into production (I also submitted my request for a cert)

I was interested in the talk on the Aura reputation system. I'm going to take a closer look at this -- reputation systems are something that I'm very interested in, so it was good to see that people are out there working on them.

My powerbook decided to crash very hard right at the beginning of the ArX talk, so I only heard parts of the talk, since I spent most of it with CliffClassic doing deep surgery on the machine. Fortunately, Cliff knows his Powerbook kit, and he got me back up and running. It's a mystery to me as to why the machine decided to just lock up and die, but that's what happened. It has been behaving oddly -- the Cylon like sleep LED has been working incorrectly or not at all since December, and I discovered that the keyboard backlight was not working right (although Cliff's Powerbook-fu seems to have gotten that going again). Cliff also thinks that I need a new inverter for my LCD because a portion of the screen is dimmer than the rest -- I'm reluctant to give up the machine to get it repaired -- and of course, I live a goodly distance from an Apple store.

I missed much of the OTR presentation, but the parts that I did hear seemed like they have something really useful (at least if you value your privacy). I'm especially interested in their proxy for iChat. I'll be interested to see the demos tomorrow.

Reusable Proofs of Work (RPOW) seems like an interesting method for doing resource allocation (and/or payment). Unfortunately, it seems like it will be some time before RPOW tokens could be used in the real world.