I'm speaking at what looks to be one of the best OS X conferences thrown to date: the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference. Full of the rich, creamy goodness we all expect from O'Reilly products, this event has a very open source, free software, tool building/using focus that's desperately needed. The OS X kernel and BSD subsystems are good and fine, but it's all the stuff on top of that (Apache, MySQL, PHP, GNU tools like gcc, etc., etc.) that make OS X an incredible server, workstation, and development platform.
The O'Reilly conferences may, at first glance, look like other events you might have attended where droning voice present canned speeches. Not so, though. The several conferences O'Reilly has launched and repeated in the last couple of years are uniformly considered to be summits not conferences. Let me explain my definition of those: a summit is an event where the leading people in a field gather, speak, listen, and synthesize, leaving with plans of attack that result in tangible changes. A conference features slideshows and an opportunity to ask questions. The Emerging Technology conference is one that I'm still slapping myself for missing; Amazon.com Web Services is one of the things that emerged, in part, because of that event.
You can get 30 percent off through a generous offer by Tim O'Reilly to the Interesting People list, a list run by spectrum guru Dave Farber. Read this post and follow instructions. Everyone should subscribe to the IP list, too: it's the most interesting few pieces of moderated mail I get every day. Because Dave is like unto a god, you get the CEOs and leading academics and veteran Internauts all sending him first-person accounts of events, or stories that might slip through the cracks.