Chasing Nuts

So I was reading Planet Ars and saw Ken did this so I decided to give it a try.

OSCON was amazing but I came back Monday hitting the group running. The first thing I did was finished up something I planned to do before I left. I deployed NFS shared homes and NIS on our testing environment. I know there are those of you reading this wondering why on earth I did not go for LDAP with some Kereberos(sp) thrown in for good measure. To be honest I would have liked to do that but I have worked with NIS before and knew that I could get it all up and running on the network in just a few short days. Setting up NIS was good practice too because we may be looking to deploy it into production soon. LDAP is something I am looking at but I feel LDAP is a 2006 project as my currect plate is pretty darn full.

On a Ubuntu/Kubuntu I am planning to move my laptop up to Breezy today and get some bug reports filled this weekend. I might even move my desktop from Fedora Core 3 to Breezy if things go well on my laptop.

For those Debian people out there that want to play with Slony-I I have a deb you can install now. You can find it on my home page or here.

When I was heading to Portland I mentioned that I was going to try and blog every day of my trip. If regularly read my blog you will noticed I fell short on this one and it has been five days. The main reason for this was the amazing pace of OSCON and surrounding events. Every day was so action packed that I was exhausted in the evening and did not to use any brain cells to write. So I am doing it now at 40832 ft high and 512 miles an hour.

My last post was Tuesday afternoon and this was before the Tuesday night keynotes. Tuesday is where my mind exploded for the first time. I had herd of Damian Conway before and Greenfly even mentioned that he was a great speaker but nothing could have prepared me for his keynote. If you are EVER presented the opportunity of attending one of his lectures or presentations DO NOT MIS IT! Anyone who invented a programming language in latten for some fun is just a crazy cool guy. I won????????t even go into his plans to build a baywolf cluster of PostScript printers. Next Larry Wall took the stake to give us the State of the Perl Address. I never expected this one to be funny but I think it had many of us rolling in the isles. I think what makes all the big keynote speakers great is they are more then just people with a commanding knowledge in their field. They are also passionate about what they do and know how too translate their passion into fun for others. I walked out of the hall with so many thoughts that I could hardly sleep Tuesday night.

Unlike the first two days where there where 4 hour half day tutorials with half hour breaks day 3, 4, and five where more like Penguicon, shorter 55 minute sessions. The other thing about day 3,4 and 5 is the main exhibit hall was open.

The exhibit hall was filled with all the usual non profit groups you would expect like: PostgreSQL, BSD, Local Lugs, and more then I can list. All the big computer companies you would expect where there too: Google, SUN, Yahoo, CA, Apple and again many more. I went around and talked to most every company to find out why they where there and gathered some information.

I attended so many great presentations I am not even going to try and list them. The thing is official sessions was only half of it, I can not even begin to describe what it was like to just talk to all the whose who of open source. Things like arguing about PHP with Marcus Borger, I should note that it was in good fun and Marcus did say I was one of two cool Perl guys. I actually meant the creator of PgPool who had flow in all the way from Japan, and most of the PostgreSQL development team. I can not imagine where else you can meet and talk to so many people so pivotal to open source projects.

To take a minute and plug my self I did do my presentation ???????PostgreSQL Built Your Car??????? on Thursday morning. I was in the PostgreSQL booth just running over my slides one last time then I was off to room D140. I got in the room and was a bit distracted from the people in the room while I get my laptop all set up. To my shock not only was the room packed, standing room only, all the heavy PostgreSQL hitters showed up. To be honest this is when I got VERY nervous. Most of these guys have been around PostgreSQL from the beginning and if anyone could have found a problem or torn my presentation to shreds it was them! Fortunately 30 seconds into the presentation I got into my groove and I have to say I was 100% in my groove. I talked for 45 minutes and then 10 minutes of questions. That was not where it stopped though, the next two days I was approached my several people about the presentation and it was all positive! I did let some of it go to my head and it was nice to know that my many hours of preparation where not wasted.

I know this was my longest blog post to date and it only covers about 1/100 of my OSCON experience. I imagine that over the next few weeks I will be talking more about my last week and how incredible it was. My goal for the next year is to ensure I make it back to OSCON. It was grueling and tiring and most nights my brain hurt but I feel I learned more in 5 days about Perl, PostgreSQL, and Unix then I typically learn in 5 months.

Don????????t for get to check out all my OSCON Photos.

Day two was another day of longer half day tutorials. I started with my day with Embracing and extending RT and Creating Passionate Users.

The talk on RT was pretty cool and I learned a lot about RT and its internals. The two people giving the talk where Jesse Vincent and Robert Spier. Jesse is the creator of RT and started with some questions for the group about how we used RT and what versions we used. Robert is a major code contributor and works with Jesse on giving the presentation. The both got into their grove pouring over 200+ slides. I love it when I learn how to easily do something I have wondering to do for ages. I had no idea it could be so easy to tweak RT. I can hardly wait till I get some time to start hacking some more at RT.

Creating Passionate Users was presented by author Kathy Sierra. She started out with a funny into that she wrote and gave to someone else to read. It started thing out on a light node and made finding out who she was fun. This session was one where she gave the room little tasks to get us talking and thinking with one another. The whole topic could be summed up in how to market something. We talked about everything from USB thumb drives to network security. It was an interesting talk and I hope to get some more details about what she said soon.

Originally uploaded by AaronThul.

At the moment I am sitting on my fifth plain in three days. The nice thing about all the flying recently is it has given me plenty of time to look over my OSCON presentation. The down side is I am starting to get really sick of all these damn pretzels. It was a fun weekend at Jon and Jen’s wedding and though the Tech crew numbers where small those of us there had a good time. I fly back to Detroit where I plan to crash right at the airport and I fly out of DTW at 6 AM Monday morning. I am somewhat bummed that I never was able to catch up with Aaron Morison while I was in MSP. I am also a little bummed that I did not have time to go out at all while I was in Minneapolis. I will just have to plan another trip back to party at the bars and visit some of my other friends.

I got into Portland at 10am and went right from the airport to the hotel. Checked in and got quickly to the convention center. I got checked in with Vee and was ready to go. It was at this time the afternoon session was just starting.

My first afternoon here I decided to take in some Perl and went to Pratical mod_perl 2 presented by Stat Bekman. Now I thought I had a pretty good handle on the way apache did this but Stas blew me away! Now I have an idea how mod_perl is able to do what it does and have a much better idea how things happen in apache. His presentation started out a little slow but once it got going I wonderd where the heck the 3 hours went!