Beosig's Rambling Thoughts

Day one of OSON 2009 was a fantastic experience. I got to my first tutorial, PHP The Good Parts early and got a good seat. The tutorial ran through so many parts of PHP that was just not aware of and that can help me improve my programming. Of course, most of the items are just a month old (part of PHP 5.3) so this means upgrading all systems to PHP 5.3 if I want to take advantage of the items. We’ll see what use cases I can come up with to justify the upgrade. I can’t wait to show off some of the new things I learned with my fellow developers.

Lunch was good and I spent it with some fellow geeks. I learned a little bit about the Human Genome Project and how Perl is used to facilitate this process. I’m quite impressed that Perl can handle 8-12 terabytes of data crunching to sequence a gene. Very impressive. I’d love to get my hands on that code to see what it’s like. Probably won’t happen, though.

The second tutorial was about Perl 5.10 and what is new in the language. I was hoping for more examples of “You did it this way in the past, but now can do it this different way” but there wasn’t much of that. It was a solid half day of new features flying at me, and I’ll admit that I didn’t absorb much of it because there were few practical examples. I did get my hands on the slides in PDF format for later review. Maybe reading them at a more leisurely pace will allow me to gather in the knowledge. It seemed like most of the tutorial covered Unicode details, so I guess that is where Perl 5.10 has made the most strides recently. That’s good to know even if it doesn’t affect me directly since I don’t deal with Unicode characters all that often in my Perl work.

I attended a BoF (Birds of Feather) meeting about running PHP on multi-core systems. The folks at Sun Microsystems really did their homework for this BoF and have contributed back to the Zend engine and the open source PHP engine for improving performance in a multi-threaded multi-core environment. We swapped business cards because they have some experimental items that I want to play with and I offered to beta test some things for them on my AMD 64-bit mulit-core server.

Once that BoF was done, I headed out to pool and dinner with Chris from Yahoo! We had a good time eating some good food, drinking some good beer and shooing lots of pool at the First Market Pool Hall.

It was about midnight by the time I landed in bed after a hot shower and I slept fairly well out of pure mental exhaustion.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 4:30 PM by Beosig and is filed under OSCON 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.