Tag Archives: oscon

OSCon

Tomorrow I leave for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention.

This year, for the first time, there isn’t an Apache track, and my tutorial is in the Javascript/AJAX track. Ok, a little weird, but I guess I can live with that. There’s also a Web Apps track, where some of the other stuff traditionally categorized as “Apache” has been placed.

I wonder if Apache, or web infrastructure stuff in general, is just not selling seats anymore. Or perhaps we (the ASF) confused things by insisting that “Apache != httpd”. Which, while true, also encourages people to come up with alternate naming for stuff, and thus make Apache (the web server) less visible.

The Whirlwind

OSCon is over, and I’m back home. I’ve hardly stopped moving since I arrived.

I got back to Lexington about 10, and went straight to work moving stuff from the apartment to my house. Some time around 9pm, I sat down on the couch with some pizza, and promptly fell asleep. Bob called about 10:30 to find out where his truck was. I mumbled something and went straight back to sleep, not waking up until 10:15am.

I had told Bob I’d get the truck back to him first thing in the morning, I believe, so I went to do that. But, I figured, I’d stop by and pick up the 2 or 3 things in the garage. Would be a quick trip. There was a bike and a fridge and a few boxes.

Well, as it turned out, I filled the entire truck. Sheesh. Who knew I had that much stuff? It seems that I’ve got way way way too much stuff. I hope that I can get rid of some of this stuff.

By 7pm Sunday, the garage at the house was COMPLETELY full, and the apartment was, finally, all the way empty. Way too much stuff.

I should note, for posterity, that I have the coolest friends in the world. While I wasn’t even here, they moved almost all of my furniture and a bunch of my books. And then Bill and Bert showed up on Sunday to help with the last stretch, including the desk and a few other things.

At some point in there, I moved the servers, and called QX to get my DSL moved over to the house. That’s when it became apparent that Alltel hadn’t done what they said they’d do. (Surprise!) So I didn’t actually have DSL until this morning some time. And, also, my IP address changed somewhere in there, so all my DNS servers were wrong until some time this evening.

Hopefully I didn’t loose any important email in there. Will I ever know?

I’m sincerely hoping to be able to park in my garage some time in the next month, and perhaps get all the boxes put away by the end of the next month. I hope that’s not too ambitious.

Heading home

I’m in the Portland airport (which has free wireless, as all airports should) and heading home. I’m very very tired.

I came to the airport in the early afternoon, because the nice lady on the phone suggested that if I came to the airport, there was a good chance that I could get my flight moved earlier. This turns out to be not true at all. So, I checked my suitcase, and got back on the Max to go back to the hotel and hang out with Ken. I also realized, shortly after checking my suitcase, that I still had my Gerber on my belt. So I’ve given it to Ken, and he’ll hopefully return it next weekend.

So now it is 10pm, and I’m about to get on the flight. Then I get to spend 5am until about 7am in the O’Hare airport. Joy.

I am very ready to not be travelling any more. But I still have one more trip this month, for the ApacheCon planners meeting. At least I have a few days to enjoy my new home before I have to leave it again.

Wednesday and Thursday

As usual, once the conference starts in earnest, I have fallen behind on blogging about it. So here’s a summary of some of the high points.

Wednesday morning, there were a variety of interesting keynotes, but the one that was the most interesting was Kim Polese talking about the transition from geekdom as a diy (do it yourself) to dit (do it together) culture. Very interesting observations.

The interview with Jon Schwartz was also very interesting.

I attended John Coggeshalls talk on php5, which was somewhat helpful. I knew many of the things he talked about, but I was curious as to whether there were new features in php5 that I wasn’t yet aware of.

I also attended Rasmus’ talk about the state of PHP. Unfortunately, he covered almost exactly the same material that John covered.

Somewhere in there I attended Damian Conway’s talk, which was, as always, entertaining, although the contents likely won’t be immediately useful to me.

The evening event was “70 Proof” – a 70’s band who played absurdly loudly. At one point, the lights went out briefly, and the singer, at the end of the song, observed “when the lights went out there, it was almost like a real rock concert!” Yeah. Almost. 😉

After being up too late, it was pretty hard to get up this morning to get to the keynotes, but I’m glad I did.

Dick Hardt’s talk about Identity2.0 was fascinating. We need a “universal id card” for the web.

But the winner of the morning was Robert Lang, speaking about computational origami. He showed how an arbitrary shape can be computationally turned into a piece of origami. It was *amazing* the things that he had made out of a single piece of paper without any cuts.

I gave my “Why I Hate Apache” lightning talk again. It was received less exuberantly than in Stuttgart, but it was still well received, and a lot of fun to give.

And this afternoon I gave my mod_rewrite talk. I ran a little long, but there were good questions, and I fell like it went well. There are some things that I need to tweak if I give this again. Unfortunately, the talks here are 45 minutes, rather than the 50 or 55 that I usually expect, and I was just about that close to the limit. But this left no time for questions at the end.

DrupalCon, Mudai, Canby

After some geocaching yesterday, and a couple hours writing, I ran into Steve Mallet. Steve always seems to know what’s going on. Yesterday, for example, he knew that Drupal was having a conference here in Portland at the same time as OSCon. We treked across town, and spent a very enjoyable few hours with the Drupal folks.

When I got back to the hotel, Clint picked me up, and we went down to Canby to visit Del and Lynn, who seem to be doing really well, and are anxious to get home as soon as possible and get back to their lives.

Then, we headed back to Portland, and went to Mudai, where we hung out until about 11. Wonderful, wonderful food.

Although I missed the Extravaganza, about which I’m a little disappointed, I really come to these things primarily for the chance to spend time with certain people, and meet new people. So, in all, it was a day very well spent, even though almost none of it was actually at the conference that I came all this way to attend.

But I’m a little disappointed to have missed the State of the Onion, which is always a high point of the week. I wonder if someone recorded it.

NW 2010.6mi from your home coordinates

I just discovered that I really don’t much enjoy Geocaching alone. It’s so much more fun with Sarah. I found one, but kinda lost the passion for it. Perhaps I can persuade one or two other folks to go with me later today.

Last evening was *amazing*. I called Clint, who just moved out here less than a week ago, and he and Madeline came to pick me up, and we went blueberry picking. We drove about 45 minutes south, met up with some other friends, and then drove out to Pihl Orchard. We picked for a while, and I just wandered around the orchard for a while. I have never smelled peaches that smelled quite so wonderful. Still alive and still on the tree, and so full of wonderful flavor that they were about to burst. Mmmmmm.

The lady that owns the place has been there 40 years, and planted every tree with her own hands. The blueberries were fantastic, particularly with a little vanilla ice cream back at Clint and Sarah’s house, where Madeline told all about our adventure. It is *great* to have good friends. And having good friends this far from home is a big plus.

Hopefully this evening we’ll squeeze in some time for a visit to Mudai. Mmmmm.

Tutorial over

I had a very well-attended tutorial, and they had good questions. Over all, I’m very pleased with how it went. Now I get to enjoy the rest of the conference, except for a 1-hour talk on Thursday. That’s a new talk that I haven’t given before, but I’m not particularly concerned.

Time to find other like-minded geeks to hang out with.

Or maybe I’ll go geocaching.

In Portland

I arrived in Portland around 10:30 last night, and took the light rail to the hotel, where there was no reservation for me. Now, I’m certain I sent the email saying, yes, I wanted the hotel room. And I’m *very* certain that the folks at O’Reilly didn’t screw it up. In all the years I’ve been attending O’Reilly conferences, I’ve been very very impressed with how the handle things, and particularly at how they take care of their speakers. So I can only assume that the Red Lion just decided not to book my room, for some inscrutable Red Leonine reason.

Fortunately, they had one room available last night. And I’m confident that Vee can straighten things out. She seems to have a knack for straightening things out.

The clock in my hotel room was off by an hour, so I got to the convention center at 6:3o instead of 7:30. Better early than late.

So, here I sit, in the dark, in my presentation room, waiting for the knowledge-hungry hordes to arrive. I have an ENORMOUS room, which is always a little disconcerting. Particularly since nobody’s here yet.

In the airport, again

Once again I’m in the Bluegrass Airport, on the free wireless network.

For the record, *ALL* airports should have free wireless. It’s about the only thing that makes this airport tolerable. Or any airport, for that matter.

I am *so* tired of travelling. I am so tired of airports. Tired of the TSA. Tired of ear-bleedingly-loud PA systems begging for my attention and telling me that security is everyone’s job.

I’m telling you, one of these days, I’m actually going to report the “suspicious” looking people, and it’ll bring things to a grinding halt. That guy over there is wearing a Beatles T-shirt. That must be suspicious. And that group over there is sitting around on the floor *praying*! They must be fanatics.

And that guy sitting over there with the loptop has an open file share with confidential business documents in it. Clearly suspicious.

*sigh*

As much as I enjoy OSCon, I’m really not looking forward to this one. I wonder if I can wrangle an earlier flight home.

OSCon

Having left everything to the last possible minute, I was of course unable to find any tickets to Portland under the travel budget. Fortunately, the OSCon travel agent came through for me and found tickets for about half of anything I was able to find. So, my momentary panic that I would not be able to make it to OSCon has abated. So, now I just need to figure out what I’m going to say.