OSCON — Day 4
NOTE: I wrote this during most of yesterday. As things happened, and I had time to write, I wrote this. However the Internet connection at my hotel sucks really hard, so I had to wait until I got to the conference this morning to post.
As I planned, I started my day a little late and skipped the keynotes. There was only one that I wanted to see, and it was Microsoft talking about how they’ve “embraced and extended” open source. Yeah right. I just wanted to heckle, and that’s not worth getting out of bed early.
I hit the conference about 10:00, and went right to the expo hall (sensing a theme here?) I had a few more stickers to get for the main door prize drawing, and there were a good chunk of booths that I hadn’t gotten to yet. I managed to work my way around to a few of them before my 10:45 session started.
My first session of the day was about Error Handling In Ajax but the speaker bailed out over a month ago, and no one at O’Reilly bothered to take note of his email. It was a packed room, and we were all disappointed. Ah well, that’s ok. I ran down the hall and around the corner, and sat in on a pretty entitled PostgreSQL Gems: Running Perl and Ruby Inside the Database. I was more interested in the Perl part of things, which is good. The speaker was a Perl guy, and had very very little Ruby stuff in his slides. He also couldn’t answer any of the Ruby questions that were asked. He knew his stuff, but he should have never thrown Ruby into the title of the session.
After that was more expo hall and lunch. I talked with even more people, shook some more hands, and learned a few more things. More good stuff. I also got the last of the stickers on my passport, and turned it in to enter the contest for the main door prizes of the conference. Part of my last trip through the expo hall was to talk to the EFF because I needed their sticker, and their booth was packed the day before. They had dropped their prices for membership some during the show, and I signed up to be a member. I got a really cool t-short from the deal, and I helped out an organization that I have morally supported for over a decade. It was a good thing.
While in the expo hall, I went back by the Apress booth to see what it took to write books for them. The guy was the head guy responsible for finding new book lines. He asked me what I had in mind, and I rambled off a few ideas for books that the community really needs. He agreed with me, and he asked me if I had the writing skills, technical skills, desire, and time to do a few of them. We talked for a bit about writing (which I’m pretty good at), technology (which I’m excellent with), and other things. He liked what I had to say, and he said that there was a great market for my book ideas. We exchanged cards, and I’ll get in touch with him in a week or two to start the process of seeing about getting a book or three or five written for him.
I got to my first afternoon session about five minutes before it started, but the doors were already closed, and the guard was blocking they way. He was really apologetic, but told me that the room was already over capacity. I was disappointed because I really wanted to attend Ajax and Web Services. Ah well. Such is life.
I managed to hang out for a bit and actually take a break, so it was a good thing that I got to sit and do nothing for a short bit. This allowed me to check email, chat with Kiara, and write on my blog. I’ve got to write up to this point before I had to shutdown and run off to my next session.
My next session was Security 2.0 which was also hosted by Chris Shiflett. He covered some of what he covered in his tutorial session a few days before, but he also briefly touched on the vulnerabilities of Ajax, Web 2.0, etc. It was obvious that he was a back-end/PHP guy, but he did have some knowledge of front-end interactions. It could have been better about the front-end stuff, but that’s ok. It was still a good talk. He also had some live examples of XSS/CSRF on his web site that he linked to that forced things like putting his book in your shopping cart on Amazon using CSRF using their 1-click system. He had reported the vulnerability to them over a year ago, and waited a year to make it public. It was a good thing to make it public because that is usually how things get fixed, but it was a bad thing that they never did anything about it.
After that came a short break. I hit the expo hall again even though I had completed my passport. I walked around, talked to a few more people, and generally relaxed for once. It was nice to walk around and not have a purpose. I found out that I hadn’t won the Wii that SnapLogic was handing out, but that’s ok. I’m sorry, Kiara, but I tried to win one for you. I really did.
After the short break, I haded to Prototype and Object.prototype. It could have been a really good 45 minutes about the JavaScript framework known as Prototype, but it wasn’t. There was some information covered, but the woman giving the presentation was like a bad stand-up comic with tourette’s syndrome. She wasted 20-30 seconds here and there trying to be funny and she wasn’t because it was hard to follow her internally humorous train of thought. Overall, she wasted a good 8 minutes of time trying to be funny instead of covering the topic. If it were a 3 hour tutorial it wouldn’t have been so bad, but in only 45 minutes, it was a waste of 17% if her time. At a 1-to-5 ratio of crap-to-information, it wasn’t all that good. I did get some insight into how things worked, and I took good notes. I have a little bit of research to do when I get back to the office on Prototype.
Immediately after this was a session on pl/php. It’s an implementation of PHP internally accessible in Postgres instead of using pl/sql or pl/perl or pl/pgsql or any one of the number of other things. There were some really cool features brought out during the talk, and I think I can make use of them in my day-to-day job. I think it’s really neat stuff. I need to do some benchmarking data before I take it to my boss to prove that it’s worthwhile. I think it will be. There is some power (e.g.: dangerous power. Like nuclear war power.) in the capabilities of pl/php, but they are really cool in a controlled environment.
As soon as I was done with this, I ran back to my hotel, dumped off my umjeen-million t-shirts and other stuff from the show, and then ran back to the conference center to get in line for the bus to the SourceForge community award show. There were snacks and tons of free drinks available at the award show, and I took advantage of all of them. While there two very cool things happened to me:
1) I got to spend about 10 minutes one-on-one with Rasmus Lerdorff. He’s the creator and head-guy of PHP. He’s also one of the head guys of development at Yahoo. We talked shop, and I got more insight into the development of PHP and Yahoo. It was a great 10 minutes. I really can’t remember a time where I’ve met someone that is famous. Sure, he’s not a rock star or anything, but in my world (the geek world) he’s really up there with Larry Wall, Tim O’Reilly, Marc Andreeson, and many others. If it wasn’t for Rasmus, I would not not be doing what I’m doing now, and my geek/professional life would not be as full as it is now. I did not “fan boy” all over him, and I think he appreciated that. He was open, honest, and direct with me about history, current, and future PHP stuff, as well as the challenges that he faces now with PHP. I really, really, really wish I had the C skills to step up to the plate to help him out. He really impressed me that much with being as open as he was with a total stranger. I hope to meet him again in the future after I’ve become a greater master of his creation, PHP. One thing that I am proud of is that I excused myself from the conversation when it was obviously at an end. I didn’t hang on and force Rasmus to make an uncomfortable exit (which I had seen him do during the night.) I’m glad that I showed that restraint.
2) The award show had a few side rooms with wall-to-wall chalkboards. I walked into one of the rooms, and it was covered in writing. I walked up to check it out, and I noticed that the guy that hosted the Nagios talk earlier was writing away. Him and another guy were discussing and entirely new architecture for a monitoring system. I assumed that they were working Nagios 3.0, but I’m really not sure. They were talking about some really cool stuff that could be easily expanded to a large enterprise, which is where Nagios fails. I had some ideas in line with what they were talking about, and we talked about it for quite a long time. They seemed happy to have my ideas, and I thought of a few things that they did not that I have experienced in the past. I swapped business cards with them, and I think I may be part of the future of Nagios. That’s kind of cool.
I took the free (SourceForge provided) shuttle bus back to the conference hall, and I got into a great conversation with three other guys (from South Africa, New Jersey, and Iowa) about the great and wonderful days of early dial-up, early Perl, and interesting networks that we worked with back in the early- and mid-90s. It was a good time talking with people as “old” as I am. Good stuff.
Once of the guys mentioned a Sun Microsystems part (yes, another one) at the conference center that may not be open. We decided to crash it, and we got in. We managed to get in a few free beers before the open bar closed. We continued to talk about Perl, PHP, web development, networking, dealing with customers on a free-lance basis, and other good stuff like that. It was a good time with good beer. We were finally chased out, and I headed back to my hotel room shortly after 11:00 PM.
I tried to log on to post this, but the hotel network was being uncooperative. I’ll post it in the morning like I have most of the week. Time to take a shower and head to bed. I can’t wait for tomorrow and wrap things up. It’s been a wonderful week, but I’m tired. My brain is also full, and I can only handle so much more education before I explode in a heap of 0′s and 1′s. I also miss Kiara a great deal. I can’t wait to get home tomorrow night to see how much her belly has grown with our son.
