OSCON 2009: Day Four
The day started like any other with my alarm going off on time. I snoozed it a few times, but still made it to OSON in time to check my email and hang out with my fellow geeks for a short while before my first session started.
Then I made it on to Introduction to Forensics which was a great session. There was tons of good information presented, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the slides. Even without the slides, I made copious notes that will make BossMan happy.
Immediately following this was a wonderful presentation by Chris Shifflet about human behavoir in regards to security. There were a few good videos he presented to support his position, and I learned quite a bit about the psychology of usability and user behavoir. I think I came away from this presentation with some good stuff. I can’t wait to pass on this knowledge.
Then came lunch and some expo hall time. I had actually covered the entire expo hall the day before, so I spent some time at the various booths that had intrigued me from the day before. I learned a few more things, especially about GPLv2 vs. GPLv3. I’ll have to admit that the swag from this year does not match the years before. That’s Ok, I guess. It just means that my coworkers will be a little disappointed in me this year. Sorry guys.
Following lunch and expo hall time was a great speech by a Firefox staff member about their efforts to scale their web sites to handle the great, record breaking, Download Day, and I learned quite a bit in this session. Though most of the talk was focused on getting TikiWiki to perform better, I still learned some valuable lessons.
Next came High Performance SQL in PostgreSQL, and it was a sorry-ass talk. The examples were all contrived and at a high school programming level.There were very few actual business-practice type examples given, and I turned to my email to pass the time. I probably would have walked out of the session, but I was in the front row and I didn’t want to cause a scene by walking out. Such is life.
I spent the next break just hanging out and talking to some Ubuntu guys. They were all wearing “Ubuntu Guru” t-shirts. I enquired about acquiring a t-shirt like what they had, but was told it was a limited edition local group thing. One guy gave me his email address and contact info just in case he got more in the future. He promised to send me one if I got in touch. I love the open source community!
Then came the Perl Lightning Talks. The organizer, R Geoffrey Avery, roped me into speaking at them. We had TONS of technical difficulties as my netbook did not like their video system at all. I still managed to get my Perl script converted to DOS format, so I could open it up on a Windows machine in Notepad. Then I gave my three minute (I had up to five minutes, but didn’t need it all) speech on how Perl saved my bacon when it came to calculating hundreds of binomial distributions for game balance in a role playing game I am working on in my spare time. It was the first time I had spoken in such a large group of strangers in a long time, and I didn’t do a great job at it. I did OK, but not great. It was still a rush, and good practice for future presentations that I may want to give in front of crowds.
Then I attended a session regarding xdebug in PHP. I learned quite a bit from this session, and I can’t wait to bring this information back to work to spread the joy. It’s a good thing to use.
Then came the cream-of-the-crop of the parties for OSCON…. The SourceForge CCA (Community Choice Awards) party. This is the blowout blast of the entire conference, and what I was really looking forward to. While there, I hung out with some really excellent people, swapped some great stories, gleaned some good information, and got another tattoo… Yes, a third tattoo. It’s of the camel from the O’Reilly Perl book. It fits quite well with what I do for a living, and I’m very happy with it. It’s not a precise representation of the Perl cover, but it’s close enough to make me happy. Here’s the pic.
Perl Camel Tattoo
Pardon the sorry quality of the photo. It was done with my cell phone. I’ll have better pictures to post when I get home and have access to a real camera.
After getting the tattoo, I hung out with my fellow geeks and had a good old time. This is the first time since hitting this low, low altitude (I normally live at 7.400 feet) that I’ve gotten a good buzz from the alcohol at the party. Then again, it could be from the serious amounts of ibibement that I took part in.
Today was a really good day of technology, tattoos, geek-dom, and just plain old learning.
See you tomorrow from the last day at OSCON!
Role playing game eh?