OSCON — Day 1
The day started at 7 this morning, which really wasn’t too bad considering that I was up until almost Midnight drinking with a few fellow geeks from Seattle, WA. I got up, and got ready for the first day of my first convention. I headed out the door at 7:30, and I walked into the convention about three minutes later. Yeah, my hotel is THAT close to the convention. Nice, huh?
There was a continental breakfast provided by the conference that wasn’t too bad. It was fruit, pastries, and coffee. I’m a light breakfast eater, so this was perfect. I munched on my breakfast, talked the evils of Java with a few people, and then headed into my first tutorial.
The first tutorial of the day started at 8:30, and was entitled, “You Got JavaScript in My PHP! And…” It was taught by two people: Rasmus Lerdorf, and Thomas Sha. Rasmus is the creator of PHP, and currently works for Yahoo! Thomas also works for Yahoo!, and is the lead JavaScript developer for them. The tutorial was split into two parts, but they were intermingled. Half of the time was spent talking about the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI), and the other half was spent talking about various web vulnerabilities like cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-site reference forgery (XSRF). Rasmus really knew what he was talking about when it came to security, and he showed how to use PHP to help prevent these types of attacks. It was really eye-opening, and now I’m going to have to go back through my open source projects to clean things up. I’m sure that they are wide open to attack. Rasmus was also very personable, outgoing, quite humorous, and seemed like a genuinely good guy. Thomas, on the other hand, was a friggin’ robot. He was dry, focuses, precise, and never wrong. Everything that he said was insightful, educational, and eye-opening. However, he used the least amount of words necessary to convey the most amount of information. He did talk slowly, so during the few moments that I had to take to process what he was talking about, I didn’t get left behind. I have to say that the YUI is a VERY cool set of widgets. I should call them a combination of DHTML/Ajax tools because that is what they are, but Thomas could barely restrain his hatred of those terms when he said them. Out of respect for a man that is much smarter and more talented than me, I’ll use his term: widgets and low-level controls. Fortunately, the YUI is open source and released to the public. I have not checked out the licensing terms that come with it. I hope to be able to use it at work, but that may not be possible. I don’t know. If I can’t, then I’ll probably play around with it on my personal site. I’ve already got a great layout in mind for how I’m going to use it. I can’t wait to find the time to do it.
After the first tutorial, I hit lunch. I ate the free lunch fairly quickly, and I think there was spinach on the chicken sandwich because my mouth itched after I ate it. I’m allergic to spinach, and that is the first signs of a bad reaction in my mouth when I eat spinach. I quickly doused the itch with a dose of Mountain Dew, and I was fine. Either I caught it in time, or my allergy to spinach has gotten less severe over time, or both. After scarfing down lunch, I hustled down to the other end of the very large conference center to the Ubuntu Live! Expo Hall. I was hoping that there would be tons of vendors and cool stuff there. There were about 10 vendors. Thinking back on it, I’m not surprised. This is the first Ubuntu Live! conference, so the turnout is understandably small. I picked up a few flyers, an Ubuntu pen for Shinto, and a fresh Ubuntu 7.04 CD. I already had my own ISO, but I wanted a pressed copy that will last longer than a burn. I managed to talk to the OpenMoko guy, and I’ll probably sign up for his mailing list to see if I can help out with the open source development for a really cool phone. We’ll see if I have the time, skill, and inclination to do so. After about 20 minutes of talking to vendors, I headed back to my second tutorial of the day.
My second tutorial was “Pro PostgreSQL”, which was taught by Robert Treat. Robert has been doing PostgreSQL stuff for ages and ages. Much longer than I have. His tutorial ran a little long (by about 15 minutes) but almost everything in the tutorial was great to learn. I learned about upgrades, configuration, maintenance, performance tuning, weird queries, authentication, various “contrib” packages that for some reason (sometimes legal [e.g.: encryption and U.S. export laws]) have not made their way into the core code, backups, restores, high availability, logging, query performance tuning, schema investigation, schema tuning, tablespaces, partitions, and a few other things. Yeah, I know. That’s lots to cover in 3 1/2 hours. It was all very high level detail, but I have a printout of all of his slides, and I have some good notes jotted on them, and even more research points to do. I’m not a PostgreSQL DBA (which is what this tutorial was aimed at,) but I think I came away with a more extensive knowledge of how to deal with PostgreSQL. Robert is also the author of Beginning PHP and PostgreSQL 8, and he’s one of the main programmers of phpPgAdmin, which I use extensively at my work. BTW, Robert was very politically correct when it came to “other open source database systems.” In other words, he would throw out veiled insults to MySQL, but never came out and said it. Everyone knew what he was talking about, though.
I then had about 15 minutes to relax a little before heading to my first Birds of a Feather (BoF) meeting. It was about using open source in the education field. I’m not an educator (although, I hope to be one in the future), but I mainly went there to see if I could get ideas for how to convince my college to get more involved with open source programming, projects, and other ideas. I mainly sat there for most of the hour listening to two guys ramble on about nothing. One guy was explaining to everyone how a community college worked. Yeah. Almost everyone in there works for or teaches at a college. We know how they work. The other guy railed against the horrible fact that most popular open source projects have been leveraged by companies to gasp make money. Oh no! A company is making money. How horrible! What has this country come to? Ah well…. I finally got to speak near the end (as we were almost getting kicked out to make room for the next BoF), and I asked if anyone had any advice on how I can convince my college to add more open source programs. A guy from Oregon State University had done such a thing and it was a success. I got his email, the BoF organizer’s email, and some friendly advice (and some good education on the educational system) from a fellow that I didn’t get the name of. It was an OK BoF, but it could have been better had it not been monopolized by those two people. Ah well….
I had an hour break before my next BoF, so I ran down the block to Burgerville to snag some quick dinner. I ate real quick (good burgers too!!!) and ran back to the conference center.
The next BoF was for Perl Trainers. I’ve never taught anyone Perl. I have taught quite a few people HTML and JavaScript, and a few people C, and I’m helping teach a co-worker PHP right now. We’re looking at hiring a new guy at work that is good at math (which is half the job,) but not so hot with Perl (which is the other half.) It’s probably going to fall to me to teach him Perl, which I’m actually looking forward to. However, I’ve never approached this subject before as an educator, and I’ve been doing it for so long that I’ve forgotten how I learned what I know and what order I learned it all in. It was kind of haphazard when I was learning Perl despite the excellent O’Reilly books. There were only five of us in this BoF, and three of the five were published authors who made a living teaching people how to do Perl. The other guy was a Perl guru that was interested in taking up teaching Perl as his profession. I was the lone guy out. However, I explained to them my upcoming situation, and they gave me some wonderful advice on how to approach the subject and how to teach the guy. I came away with some great information. It was an hour well spent.
I sat in my room and vegged for a bit, talking to Kiara for a while, and then decided to hit the bar to find some geek people to talk shop with. I found the bar empty (except for the bar tender, of course.) I guess there was a geek party somewhere and I wasn’t invited. Even amongst the geeks, I’m a reject. However, the state of the wireless network in the hotel suggests that most of the geeks were probably in their hotel rooms desperately trying to play World of Warcraft, post a blog entry (like what I tried to do earlier), or checking their email. After a few beers and talking to a nice waitress (Jasmine: Yes, she was good looking (but not hot). No, I wouldn’t do her. No, I didn’t make out with her. No, we didn’t share a “special moment.”) I got back to my room just now to find that the wireless was mostly responsive. I managed to finish up my blog entry, and get it posted. It’s almost midnight, and I’ve been up since 7 AM. Time to take a shower, hit the bed, and try not to get annoyed by the tiny little pillows they put on my king-sized bed.
More news about tomorrow’s OSCON to follow…..
