OSCON 2008 — Day 3
Day 2 went very long, so I slept in on Day 3 and skipped the keynotes. I went to them last year, and I really got nothing out of them at all. I needed my sleep more than I needed someone that I didn’t know to tell me how great open source is what they are doing to “foster it’s growth.” I’m here to learn, not to be convinced how great my community is.
As soon as I got to the convention center, the Expo Hall opened. It wasn’t coincidence on the timing. I did this on purpose. I ran around the Expo Hall collecting my Passport stickers, talking with people, shaking hands, picking up schwag, and keeping an eye on the clock. I managed to cover a decent amount of the Expo Hall before I had to split and run to my first two sessions.
I got into my first session (How to be Normal: A Guide for Developers), and the presenter (Mike Hillyer) promptly said something to the effect of, “I’m going to teach you about 1st, 2nd, and 3rd normalized forms and nothing else. That’s all I can fit into the time allotted to me.” Oh. I already know that. I walked out right away since I wasn’t going to get anything out of the 45 minute session. I looked at the schedule and decided to give Rebuilding Linux for the Desktop a try, but the doors were already closed, and the conference worker told me that they were full. Oh.
At this point, I headed back to the Expo Hall and did more Expo Hall stuff. I got so engrossed in talking PostgreSQL vs. EnterpriseDB (which is PostgreSQL with many improvements and extensions) with the developers that I lost track of time and missed my next session which was going to be Open Virtual Machine Tools. That’s ok because the time was well spent learning about some ideas for migrating data from 8.1 to 8.3 without just doing a dump/restore and suffering massive downtime. Even though I wasn’t “in a class” I was still learning valuable information.
Next came lunch and a short break. The lunch, as usual, was great food, and I spoke for a bit with a guy about technology in general. Just good old geek talk and nothing more. I finished lunch up and did some more Expo Halling.
Caching and Performance: Lessons from Facebook
Presenter: Lucas Nealan
This was basically a bragging session by the presenter telling us how great and wonder and fast Facebook is. He basically said that they used APC and memcached and lots and lots and lots of hardware. He threw out what they cached and where, but didn’t really go into how it was done. I have some decent notes to take back to work, but I didn’t come away with enough information to implement these technologies without lots of research.
Open Source Virtualization for People Who Feel Guilty About Using VMware So Much
Presenter: Andy Michelle
This presentation was chaotic to say the best. Andy waffled back and forth between bashing and loving VMWare. She threw out some information about features and capabilities of other VM systems. I took the time to scribble down some of the options, but that was all I got out of this presentation.
Shell Scripting Craftsmanship
Presenter: Ray Smith
This speaker was phenomenal! He is a natural born speaker, and really knew his stuff. While his focus was on making shell scripting better, about 95% of what he said can be applied to any coding practice. I really loved this presentation, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the slides when they are posted. Everything he said was clearly stated in his slides, so my notes consisted of, “See slides online.” He wrote his slides in the same manner as he was teaching us to write shell scripts. He obviously practices what he preaches.
I spent some time after the last session in the Expo Hall, and then headed to the hotel for a brief break. I counted schwag, wrote some of this post, and just sat around doing some relaxing. The party of the night was in the parking garage of my hotel, so I wandered down there about an hour after it started. The party was a blast. There was good music, good beer, good scotch, and loads of fun. The most fun part of the night was just hanging out with my fellow geeks in a social environment and talking with them about life in general, but with very little techno talk. It was a great mental, emotional and social break overall. It went until Midnight, and I headed back to the room to get some sleep.
Schwag Count:
- 9 t-shirts of various types.
- 1 coffee mug from EnterpriseDB.
- 1 mouse pad from EnterpriseDB.
- 2 stuffed dolphins from the OSCON Bash.
- 2 O’Reilly magents (1 Linux, 1 Perl.)
- 4 discs from Fedora (1 CD and 1 DVD), Black Duck and Chisimba.
- 1 black rubber ducky from Black Duck Software.
- 2 pens. (Huh? I normally get many more pens while at OSCON. Maybe tomorrow…)
- 1 512 MB USB flash drive from Silicon Mechanics. It contains various docs on their equipment. From the sales guy’s suggestion, I’ll probably make it into a data drive. Maybe a Billix USB drive.
- 1 PostgresSQL lapel pin.
- 1 Ticketmaster guitar pick. I’ll see about snagging another for some co-workers.
- 2 balsa wood airplanes from Etelos.
- 2 beer coasters from O’Reilly. I have all of the ones that they have made in the past. I missed some today, but I’ll try to snag the rest tomorrow.
- 5 very funny and overly large buttons from Apress.
- 2 other buttons.
- A small bag of EFF buttons as a thank you for renewing my membership a few weeks back.
- 5 stickers.
- 1 sticker sheet from Yahoo!.
- 1 sticker sheet from the EFF also as a thanks for renewing the membership.
- 2 flyers from Apress about books and book submission guidelines.
- 11 flyers/bookmarks/cards/info0sheets from various booths of interest.
- (Not a physical item.) An offer to assist in editing or potentially co-writing a book about ExtJS from Manning Publications!
Schwag of the Day: Black rubber ducky because Shinto said it was “Awesome!” I got the first one for him, and I’ll try to get a second one for Kiernan. Though the interest in assisting in a book about ExtJS is very exciting!
Most Interesting/Unusual Person: There was a fella walking around with the most intersting hair. The first time I saw him, I thought he was wearing a knitted “Jayne hat” (from Firefly), but it turns out that his head was partially shaved into a “knitted” pattern and colored into bright colors.
Best Quote of the Day: While giving a presentation about peer/code review, Alex Martelli stated something along the lines of, “When you get up in the moring, taking time to consider if your teeth are clean or dirty enough to require brushing is a wasted effort. You just do it because you know it needs to be done, and code review is no different. It should be a habit that is always done without question.” Those may have not been the exact words, but that is pretty close to what he said. I could not agree more with his sentiments.
