OSCON 2009: Day Three
Day three is in the books, and it was a really good day.
I started out the day in the expo hall and ran around met a wild array of vendors hawking their wares. Ok. That sounds a little bad, but everyone is trying to make a buck these days. I learned quite a bit from a few of the vendors, and a little bit from some of the others.
After the expo hall trip was a visit to room B2 for a session on using FOSS (Free Open Source Software) in an educational environment. I love seeing what the educational institutions are using as far as FOSS goes, so I try to attend these events. It was quite educational, and the speaker was very enthusiastic.It was a good session to attend.
Afterwards followed a long hike to J3, which was all the way at the other end of the conference hall. This session was about teaching kids how to program. It was a great overview of some of the K-12 software that is out there. I was hoping to use some of the information in regards to methods of teaching my team how to do their job (not all of the, but some of them.) I didn’t come away with lots of information in that regard, but I did discover lots of new tools for dealing with teaching kids how to think logically. That’ll help once Kiernan, my son, is old enough to type and use a mouse.
More expo hall and a quick lunch followed this session. Nothing too exciting here, but learning more from expo hall vendors. I did renew my FSF (Free Software Foundation) and EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) memberships during this time. I think I was a month overdue for both of them.
I skipped the next session, which would have been Programmer Insecurity and the Genius Myth, in favor of having a lengthy talk with the PostgreSQL guys about why my work should upgrade from 8.1 to 8.3/8.4. BossMan: If you read this… We need to do the upgrade ASAP. Lots of security, performance and maintenance issues are resolved in the more current versions. Hot Plate Item!
After talking to the PostgreSQL guys, I went to a session about the state of SourceForge, which revealed all sorts of cool new features and tools SF has released recently. It convinced me to move my three open source applications from my personal server to SF. It’s a bullet point on my growing to do list for the future.
Once this was done, here was a break in the action. I ran to my hotel room, dumped my bag, and returned to the expo hall to try to collect more swag. I ended up not winning the HP netbook from Intel, but I’m going to try again tomorrow. I had a good time learning more about various technologies from varous vendors and it was a good time (and free soda/snack thanks to SourceForge.)
After this came a great talk about filesystem performance and databases. It turns out that ext3 is not the best solution for database performace. BossMan: If you read this… We need to think about going to xfs for our databases! There was some great empirical evidence on this topic, and I can’t wait to return to work to share this with our DBA.
Next came a great talk about Inspekt. It’s a way to sanely manage superglobal data in PHP and do so in a secure manner. I’m going to rework the previously mentioned open source applications of mine to use Inspekt and then maybe move that knowledge into to some work-based applications to lock things down even tighter. I think it’ll be great. I’m also going to join the mailing list for this tool and see if I can contribute back to it because it’s such a great idea.
Follow the last session was more expo hall time which included free beer and free pizza. It doesn’t get much better than this. I talked to a guy I met last year and we had a good time talking technology and geek stuff.
Then I ran to my hotel room (notice a theme?), dumped all my stuff, threw on my horrendous glow-in-the-dark yellow T-Shirt from Linuxfund and made my way to the Motif Lounge where there was a party underway. After a couple of hours of free drinks and talking with my fellow geeks, I made my way back to the hotel (no running this time) to write this up and head to bed.
Having said that…I’m off to the softness of my pillow.
See you tomorrow!
