OSCON 2009: Day One
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.
OSCON 2009 – Photos
Here are two photos that I’ve taken so far from OSCON 2009. I love the first one as it shows exacly how close I am to the conference center from my hotel.
This is the view from my hotel room at OSCON 2009
The second one is of a beautiful building that is across the street from the conference. It’s just great!
Beautiful Spanish building across the street from OSCON 2009
I might post more photos later if I take them with my phone. We’ll see how things go.
OSCON 2009: Day Zero, Part Two
I made it to my hotel, got settled in, and headed right next door to the OSCON registration area. I got my badge and bag of goodies. The bag this year is not as good as the ones from the past two years, but that’s OK. It’s another bag with the name of my favorite publisher on it.
The “swag in the bag” was mainly advertisements from the various vendors. I leafed through them and trashed most of them. The past two years, I kept most of the adverts and ended up trashing them at home. No sense in carrying them around or flying them back home when they’ll just end up in the same place.
The items I did keep from the bag were two magazines, a Think Geek catalog, an OpenSolaris CD, a notepad (though not as cool as the ones Google gave out last year), and a advertisement for SourceForge’s annual award party. If you remember, last year’s party is where I got my first tattoo. I might get another one this year. We’ll see how things pan out.
Now that I’m checked into the hotel and the conference, I think it’s time to go in search for food and drink.
Oh. The hotel room here is awesome. It’s the closest one to the elevator and is very spacious for a single person. I like it quite a bit. The only downside is that you have to pay $13 a day for Internet access. I’m not paying that when I have my aircard with me and it’s reliable and secure. Not sure what level of security the hotel has on their wireless…
OSCON 2009: Day Zero
I’m sitting at my gate for my flight to San Jose, CA as I type this. I made it to the airport in record time, made it through security in record time, and have killed off an hour with some reading. Now I’m killing more time typing this up.
This is my third trip to O’Reilly’s OSCON, but this is the first time I’ll be going to San Jose. Actually, this will be my first trip to California. I just hope it doesn’t fall off into the ocean while I’m there.
While going through security, I decided to experiment with something. I know. I know. Dealing with TSA is not the best time to try a social experiment, but it was harmless. I tried to chat up every agent I had to deal with. It started with the one giving directions to the least crowded security line, continued on with the two directing traffic, and went on with the three I had to deal with that were actually doing the security work. I dealt with six TSA agents in total, and I asked them how their day was going, encouraged them to have a good day, and little chit-chat items like that. It was a fun experiment, and I encourage other people to try to do the same. With my very small sampling of TSA agents, I found that 2 out 3 agents are too busy with their days to offer a smile or make eye contact with the passengers they are screening. The other 1 out of 3 were very friendly and helpful. I enjoyed my few brief moments in their company.
I might post again later tonight from my hotel room once I’m settled in. We’ll see how it goes. For now, I have more reading I want to do before it’s time to pack up and get onboard the steel, titanium and steel tube with wings that we cal an airplane.
Kindle? No Thanks.
I was seriously thinking about asking for a Kindle as a gift for Christmas. They’re a little steep, but I would love to be able to buy and read books without lugging around the weight of the books. That was until I read these two stories.
It seems that Amazon is selling e-books for their wildly popular Kindle and then stealing them back from the consumer (with a refund) by deleting them from their customers’ Kindles with a remote kill switch. Imagine if you bought a book from a brick and mortar store, then woke up one night to find the sales clerk or manager digging through your book shelves to reclaim the latest Stephen King book you brought home a few weeks ago. I imagine someone would get thier sorry ass shot for stealing books back, even if they meant to leave your cash on your shelf in place of the book.
As far as I’m concerned, Amazon is stealing from their faithful customers. What else will they do with the Kindle in the future? I can’t wait to see how else they will screw over their customers. I’m not going to be one of them. That’s for sure.
Backup Disaster
Here’s my backup schema.
My laptops (3 of them) and flash drives (a handful of them) get backed up to an external hard drive named “Helix”.
Helix, in turn, gets backed up to an identical external hard drive named “Operator”.
Now that the scene is set….
I had successfully backed up 2 of 3 laptops and all my flash drives to Helix. While laptop #3 was being backed up, I decided to save a little time and wiped Operator to make room for the fresh image coming in from Helix.
Well… Dammit… During the backup of the third laptop, things went all screwy and the hard drive at itself. Now I’m left with no backup of anything I deemed important. You see, there was data on Helix that was not on any of my laptops or flash drives. I’m not sure what to do now other than to fsck Helix and see if I can recover the drive. I really hope that I can because I can’t afford to lose the years (decades?) worth of collected data, files, music, PDFs, pictures and more. I just hope the fsck works. It churned all night last night and didn’t finish by the time I had to leave for work. I have the drive plugged into my laptop now, and a second fsck is churning away. I hope things come out well. We’ll see…
Now to figure out an affordable solution for backing up the data that just lives on Helix and none of the laptops or flash drives. *sigh*
Father’s Day Mug
Today I had breakfast with my son at his daycare. It was interesting to watch him interact with the other kids. I’m so happy he gets along with them so well. Part of the breakfast was the teacher giving me a mug Kiarnan had made the day before. It’s a plastic mug with a paper insert. On the paper is some very abstract finger painting swirls that I really like. It’s a combination of purple, blue and a pinkish-purple color. I like how it turned out quite a bit. In the coffee mug was a slip of paper with the following printed on it:
“My Father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.”
The paper brought tears to my eyes, and I quickly blinked them back as I didn’t want the other dads to see. Yeah. I was a little embarrassed by the sudden emotional surge. I guess it’s because my dad didn’t live a life worth watching, and I’ve promised to not to do that to Kiernan. I’m not a great man by any means, but I do my best to live in a manner that Kiernan can be proud of when he’s old enough to know what’s really going on.
Here’s to hoping and praying I can pull off such a tall order.
S9Y Gone
Serendipity (S9Y) is going away on my site. I’m removing it forever because I have migrated everything to WordPress and I’m very very happy with the results.
S9Y served me well over the long years this blog has been around, but it’s anti-spam features are, quite honestly, lacking and poor. WordPress has rocked in this area, so I’m sticking with it.
Goodbye, S9Y.
WordPress Is Up
… and I’ve migrated from Serendipity to WordPress with zero loss of data (other than comments on some old posts, big deal.) It was probably done in record time. I think it took me all of 20 minutes to get the entire process done from the time I downloaded the WordPress tarball to the time I typed this.
I’m hoping to get some plugins installed (a theme is already up) to prevent spam and maybe add some features. We’ll see how it goes. Maybe now that I have a new interface to work with, I’ll start posting a little more often.
An Open Letter to Gaming Store Employees
If a potential customer walks in your store to do nothing more than browse and maybe buy something, don’t ambush them with stories of yore. We don’t care about your favorite RPG unless you’re trying to sell us a copy. If you’re talking about an out of print book, then don’t hype it up. It just makes us want to walk out and spend our time in the nearest used RPG book store to try to find what you’re talking about.
This is especially true if it’s around noon-time. This means I’m in your store during my lunch hour and I have limited time to get through my browsing/purchasing.
Case in point: I was in a FLGS (Friendly Local Game Store) a few days ago to look and see if anything new came out. I came across a copy of Twilight 2013, and I wanted to see if they had the same background items Twilight 2000 had. It did, but they were toned down, I think. I didn’t get a good chance to read through the character creation because I ran out of time. Without enough time to read the pertinent parts of the book, I didn’t make a purchase. Why didn’t I have time to make a purchase? Because I was ambushed in the corner of the store by an employee who just had to tell me about his favorite out of print RPG. sigh He even went on to detail the races, the combat system, his favorite three characters, and some back story about the author of the RPG.
Had I not been trapped by this over-eager employee, the store probably would have made a $40 sale that day. Their loss.
