This is gonna be a quick one, because, well… I gotta go spend my Loonies!

I’ll be in Toronto tomorrow for CAST 2008. For those that don’t know, CAST is the Association for Software Testing’s annual conference. On the docket this year is Jerry Weinberg, Cem Kaner, RobSab and many others. I’m excited.

Among the coolness of hanging out with Testing aficionados this week, I get to use the flight from NY to Toronto and back to further my testing history lesson. A few books mentioned to me finally made it to my doorstep, and the flight will give me a great time to read them. So much better than the subway.

What’s also coming out of the pipe (hopefully) soon is a personal project aiming to give a bit of stability to the crazy world of Javascript. I’ve spent the last year writing Javascript for The Open Planning Project, and after a bit of reflection, I feel like I, we, and the collective Javascript writers around the world are back in the relative stone age. Put bluntly and likely inappreciatively, Javascript is the C of browser languages. That’ll change soon, but in the interim — I’d guess four years before it reaches critical mass — we need a bit more stability.

Oh, and let me plug some Obama volunteerism real quick: If you’re interested, a couple volunteers and I are creating voter demographic maps using OpenLayers and Geoserver for Obama’s campaign in North Carolina. You can see a quick (and recent) hack-job here, though it will be password protected soon to accommodate sensitive data. If you’re interested in helping this mapping effort, or you know Obama campaign workers who could benefit from their own instance, feel free to join the OpenPlans project here.

And with that: CASTaways, I will see you tomorrow. Everyone else, goodnight!