fonz.net weblog

As a long time Thunderbird user I hope they find a funding model that works.

Found this via Bala's blog. Its a website full of videos with math and science tutorials.

Overall, although the exhibition was useful, some of the talk content was interesting, and the event was certainly well put together, I came away feeling that the event was a pretty average show overall. With so much competition in the conference circuit, I would far rather throw my conference dollars at shows such as SoCal Linux Expo, Ohio Linux Fest, or OSCON for open source-focused content or CloudCamp for cloud-related content. Interestingly, although many of these events are led by volunteers, they certainly equal, and in most cases surpass, OpenSourceWorld in terms of content and quality. I do believe IDG could deliver unique value in OpenSourceWorld, but I didn't pick up on it this time, and I genuinely hope that if they have an event next year, it delivers something unique for the demographic of the industry it is targeting.

GovTrack collects congressional data and voting records by crawling the House and Senate websites. Developers can access XML dumps of the data via REST or rsync.

Sunlight Labs offers APIs and open-source libraries for congressional data. Sunlight Foundation was a winner of a Google/Oreilly Open Source Award at OSCON 2009.