It appears that this conference will be everything I had hoped. The group is small and refreshingly cross-disciplined. We have folks from large enterprise shops, mid-range consultancies using Java, Ruby, PHP, and Python, and solo developers from several disciplines. There’s even a ColdFusion person!

The OpenSpaces conference format is already fulfilling its promises. We had a full docket of topics before we even had our first break!

In the afternoon session we had a good discussion about Content Management Frameworks/Systems. It’s interesting to me to see Drupal, Wordpress, Plone, and others now being referred as Content Management Frameworks instead of Content Management Systems. I hypothesized that perhaps it was because of issues with clients who expected a CMS to be something akin to off-the-shelf software packages that are just installed and then ready-to-use. With the shift to “framework” instead of “system”, the idea of a need for customization and buildout is more clearly expressed. I gave heavy endorsement to Drupal as a CMS. I have heard that some people were using Wordpress as a CMS, and there were a few folks with clients doing that.

Sheesh, what a day. Went into the office looking forward to having the place to myself, only to find that the entire infrastructure had not yet been brought back up after a weekend of power testing in the facility. In disbelief I booted my workstation anyway, hoping something might pop up. Nope. I went to the LAN room, and the only thing running were the cooling fans of the cabinets. I pondered powering up the backbone and the mail and resource servers myself, but then thought better of it. That would be a pretty cavalier maneuver for someone who is a guest consultant.

In dismay I headed back to the house with the hope of prototyping some Servlet Filter mockups for the security mechanism I have to integrate into our Spring-based application at work. It was then that I discovered that my troubles last week with Eclipse reliably causing the IBM PowerPC 1.4.2 JDK to core dump were not over. I spent hours trying different options to overcome this obstacle; no luck. I did end up filing Eclipse bug reports #97375 and #97378, which will hopefully help the cause.

You know, I am thankful that the woeful tales of those who do corporate blogging have caught the eye of mainstream media. It helps remind me to keep my mouth shut when I am having days like the last 30 or so at work. 8^)