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Author sightings, partner events, and other notable happenings.

Author Appearances

O’Reilly Events

As publishers who think of ourselves as being on the cutting edge, we’re always interested in O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference.

  • Feb 1–3, Strata, Santa Clara, CA
    O’Reilly Strata Conference: “Get control of the new data opportunity at Strata—immerse yourself in three full days of hands-on training, information-rich sessions, and a sponsor pavilion filled with the key players and products. This new O’Reilly conference brings together the people, tools, and technologies you need to make data work.”
  • Feb 14–16, TOC, New York, NY
    O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference: “Join us as we explore this new world of ‘Publishing Without Boundaries’ at the fifth annual O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference.... This premiere event provides an unparalleled opportunity for stakeholders from across the book publishing and tech industries to network, share ideas, engage in lively debate, and consider the many issues we face individually and collectively.”
  • Mar 28–31, TOC, San Francisco, CA
    O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo SF: “The program will spotlight experts, leaders, and under-the-radar innovations, and in the spirit of Web 2.0, there will be ample opportunity for attendees to connect, contribute, and collaborate. Web 2.0 Expo will be a place for creativity, engineering, and innovation.”
  • Apr 11–14, MySQL Conference & Expo, Santa Clara, CA
    MySQL Conference & Expo: “The O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo is committed to spreading the latest and best knowledge on MySQL and related technologies to the global community of DBAs, developers, and managers. You’ll find answers to your questions about MySQL in an independent and inclusive environment. You’ll also find practical guidance to help you add value and manage costs to your project or organization.”
  • Apr 19–21, Where 2.0, Santa Clara, CA
    O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference: “Where 2.0 brings together the people, projects, and issues building the new technological foundations and creating value in the location ecosystem. Join with developers, technologists, CTOs, researchers, geographers, academics, business developers, and entrepreneurs to debate what’s critical now, and what’s pushing the boundaries of the location frontier.”

USENIX Events

What’s coming from our USENIX friends.

  • Feb 15–18, FAST ’11, San Jose, CA
    9th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies: “FAST ’11 brings together storage system researchers and practitioners to explore new directions in the design, implementation, evaluation, and deployment of storage systems.”
  • Mar 29, Hot-ICE ’11, Boston, MA
    Workshop on Hot Topics in Management of Internet, Cloud, and Enterprise Networks and Services: “The first Hot-ICE workshop seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners working on network and service management in the Internet, cloud, and enterprise domains. The scope of Hot-ICE includes all aspects of network and service management.”
  • Mar 29, LEET ’11, Boston, MA
    4th USENIX Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats: “LEET aims to be a true workshop, with the twin goals of fostering the development of preliminary work and helping to unify the broad community of researchers and practitioners who focus on worms, bots, spam, spyware, phishing, DDoS, and the ever-increasing palette of large-scale Internet-based threats.”
  • Mar 30—Apr 1, NSDI ’11, Boston, MA
    8th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation: “NSDI ’11 will focus on the design principles, implementation, and practical evaluation of large-scale networked and distributed systems.”
  • Apr 10–13, EuroSys11, Salzburg, Austria
    European Conference on Computer Systems: “The EuroSys conference series brings together professionals from academia and industry. It has a strong focus on systems research and development: operating systems, data base systems, real-time systems and middleware for networked, distributed, parallel, or embedded computing systems. EuroSys has become a premier forum for discussing various issues of systems software research and development, including implications related to hardware and applications.”

Other Happenings

  • February
    In February, 1986, Richard Stallman published the first official definition of Free Software. In February, 1992, Linus Torvalds first placed Linux under the Gnu Public License. In February, 1998, the Open Source Initiative was founded. And in February, 2001, at The Lodge at Snowbird ski resort in the Wasatch mountains of Utah, seventeen people wrote the Agile Software Development Manifesto.
  • Feb 2
    On this date in 2002, the award-winning anime film “Voices of a Distant Star” is released in Japan. The 25-minute film was created entirely by one person, graphic designer Makoto Shinkai, on a Power Mac G4. [Thanks and a tip of the Pragmo Hat to Chris Adamson.]
  • Feb 4
    Ken Thompson is 68.
  • Feb 5
    Brad Fitzpatrick, author of memcached, is 31.
  • Feb 7
    Leslie Lamport, creator of LaTeX, is 70.
  • Feb 8
    MIT professor Gerald Jay Sussman is 64. Among his other accomplishments, he is a bonded locksmith, so he can stay out till quarter to three and not worry about anyone locking the door.
  • Feb 12
    Phil Zimmerman, author of PGP, is 57.
  • Feb 15
    Niklaus Wirth is 77.
  • Feb 19
    CGDA Hall of Fame game developer Danielle Bunten would have been 62 today.
  • Feb 22
    Bill Jolitz is 54.
  • Feb 24
    The Ruby programming language was conceived on this date in 1993.
  • Feb 27
    Grady Booch is 56.
  • Feb 29
    Seymour Papert would be 83 this year if it were a leap year.
  • March
    Maybe you knew that Edsger Dijkstra’s famous letter “Go To Statement Considered Harmful,” appeared in Communications of the ACM in March of 1968. But maybe you didn’t know that the phrase was not in fact Dijkstra’s, but was attached to the letter by the publication’s editor, Niklaus Wirth.
  • Mar 1
    Yahoo (as a corporation) is 16.
  • Mar 3
    GNOME first came out of its burrow on this date in 1999.
  • Mar 9
    Jef Raskin would have turned 68 today.
  • Mar 11
    J.C.R. Licklider would have turned 96 today.
  • Mar 13
    On this date in 1986, Microsoft went public, creating four billionaires.
  • Mar 15
    A-life pioneer Craig Reynolds, who worked on the first Tron, is 58.
  • Mar 15
    It’s the Ides of March. Beware.
  • Mar 16
    Richard Stallman is 58 and MINIX author Andy Tanenbaum is 67.
  • Mar 24
    It’s Ada Lovelace Day, honoring women in technology and science.
  • Mar 24
    Mac OS X is X today.
  • Mar 25
    On this day in 1995, Wiki went worldwide as Ward Cunningham installed WikiWikiWeb on the Web.
  • Mar 26
    Larry Page is 38.
  • Mar 31
    Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, is 39.
  • Mar 31
    It’s the second anniversary of Steve Wozniak’s last appearance on “Dancing with the Stars.”
  • Apr 4
    Larry Page takes over as Google CEO.
  • Apr 5
    SATAN’s father, Dan Farmer, is 49.
  • Apr 6
    MacOS co-creator Andy Hertzfeld is 58.
  • Apr 5
    Inventor Dean Kamen is 60.
  • Apr 9
    ENIAC co-inventor J. Presper Eckert was born on this date in 1919.
  • Apr 9
    SQLite architect D. Richard Hipp is 50.
  • Apr 14
    Ruby designer Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) is 46.
  • Apr 18
    PUGS project initiator Audrey Tang is 30.
  • Apr 20
    Chief Yahoo David Filo is 45.
  • Apr 22
    Psychedlic ruminant-fancying game designer Jeff Minter (Yak) is 49.
  • Apr 24
    Champion of modelessness Larry Tesler is 66.
  • Apr 28
    Mathematician Kurt Gödel was born on this date in 1906.
  • Apr 30
    Information theory pioneer Claude Shannon was born on this date in 1916.
  • Apr 30
    Colossal Cave Adventure creator Don Woods is 57.
  • Apr 30
    The World Wide Web is 18.