I’m at ETech, where there have been some great presentations. But during his keynote this morning, Jon Udell momentarily had a problem where the window he was using was larger than his screen real estate. And this reminded me of one of my pet peeves.
Why the hell do conference projectors still support a resolution of no more than 800 x 600?! There is simply no excuse for this anymore—and there hasn’t been for, what, a decade?
That is all. Thank you.
Joy of Tech gives you: What’s really behind a Steve Jobs keynote.
I think they nailed it.
I just saw that the OSCON 2006 Call for Participation has gone up. Deadline is February 13, 2006. I’ve been thinking about some of the things I’d like to see:
The PostgreSQL equivalent of this presentation, in which Flickr’s John Allspaw (hi John!) offers up advice on how to configure hardware, replication, and proxies for a busy MySQL-based site. Can Slony-I scale out in the same way? How does it work? I’d love to see someone who’s had to make a busy PostgreSQL-based site scale up to massive load tell us how it was done.
Something about an open-source JavaScript library project. I know that there are a number of them, each with its advantages and disadvantages. I’d love to see a successful, general repository for reusable, well-tested JavaScript libraries. Me, as a Perl guy, I’m partial to the CPAN model, which has been enormously successful. Will JSAN have similar success?
I’m sure I’ll think of others in the coming weeks. What ideas do you have? Post them below!
Kineticode has posted PDF versions of my my OSCON 2005 presentation slides. Direct links:
What’s New in Bricolage
Polymorhic Database Design(a.k.a.
How to Move Object/Relational Mapping into the Database
Enjoy!
I just had to share this lovely picture of Nick Clark, taken on the Friday night of OSCon 2004 at Matt Sergeant’s party. I honestly have no idea what Nick was doing, but it was worth it for the photo, don’t you think?
I’m finally getting round to typing up my thoughts on my OSCon 2004 experience. I would’ve done it sooner, but I spent most of last week on the road and fixing bugs in Bricolage.
OSCon 2004 was, in a word, great! I spent every day of the week there, getting there around 8:30 each morning, and finally leaving the hotel or a party each night somewhere between midnight and 3 am. I was even there late on Sunday night, talking to folks who just came in, and late on Friday night, at a party in Matt Sergeant’s room. It was great to see so many friends there, including Casey, Schwern Jesse, Nat, Bruce, Josh, David, Elein, Dan, Nicholas, James, Arthur, Robert, Ask and Vani, my brother, Alex, and probably lots of other people I’m forgetting about.
There were more conversations between members of different communities than I can recall seeing at past OSCons, and people were generally excited and engaged. I’m told that they had the highest number of attendees since 2001. The energy at the conference was very positive, and people seemed very interested in things that other people were doing. Some of the highlights for me:
Speakers Sterling Hughes and Thies C. Arntzen talked about how amped
they are at the idea of poring PHP to run on Parrot, the virtual machine
being developed for Perl 6 and other dynamic languages. The session
ended up as a conversation between Sterling and Thies, on the one hand,
and Larry Wall and Dan Sugalski, who were sitting in the front row, on
the other. Larry assured them that any programming language community’s
members would be first-class citizens
in the Parrot world, and
Dan told them that all they need do is ask for things they need and the
Parrot developers would help as much as they could. Sterling wrapped up
by saying something like, I guess the real reason we’re so excited
about Parrot is because we really love Perl!
That got a good
laugh.
There was a bigger PostgreSQL presence than ever at OSCon this year,
with lots of great discussion. There seemed to be quite a few Perl folks
going to the PostgreSQL sessions, too. Dan Sugalski was suitably
impressed with what’s coming up in PostgreSQL 8.0 (formerly 7.5) that he
told me that he was moving up his plans for implementing pl/Parrot. A
few of the core PostgreSQL folks said that they felt like people were
finally being more open and exited about their use of PostgreSQL, rather
than keeping quiet about this strategic advantage.
And the
features in 8.0 sound extremely promising, including Win32 support, save
points/nested transactions, point-in-time recovery, tablespaces, and
pl/Perl. It’s going to be a kick-ass release, no doubt about it. Watch
for the beta this week.
SQLite is fast, ACID-compliant, relational database engine in a public-domain C library. It’s great for embedding into an application because it’s not a client-server application, but a simple library that stores databases in files. It’s twice as fast as MySQL or PostgreSQL because it doesn’t have the client/server overhead, and its extremely portable. Version 3.0 adds UTF-8 and UTF-16, which makes it a real possibility for use in Bricolage 2.0 (for small installations and demo servers, for example).
I was pretty amazed at what this little database can do, and not only is it open-source, but because it is in the public domain, there are no constraints on its use. It’s just one sexy library. Everybody run out and use it now! Perl users get it for free by installing DBD::SQLite from CPAN.
A year later, Dan lost the bet with Guido, and gave him a case of
beer, ten bucks, and the right to put pie in his face. Dan even made two
key-lime pies for the occasion! At the Python lightening talks, Guido
graciously declined to pie Dan. The Pythoners seemed to think that this
was very nice of Guido, but the Perlers in the audience (including yours
truly), were shouting, Get him! Give him the pie! Do it, Guido!
.
As Allison commented later, it’s nice how the Perl community takes
care of its own.
Dan later auctioned off the right for someone else to pie him in the face. Schwern ponied (heh) up the cash, a ca. $500 donation to the Perl foundation for the right, but gave it to Ponie developer Nicholas to enjoy. The event came off just ahead of the final keynote. This time Guido decided to go ahead, and he doused Dan in cream pie. Then Nicholas came out and gave Dan the dessert, so to speak. Great fun for all.
The upshot, according to Dan, is that Guido wrote a really evil test suite with seven tests exercising 75% of Python’s ops. Of the seven tests, Dan got 4 working on Parrot, and 3 of those were 2-3 times faster than on Python. Things look very good indeed for Parrot going forward. Look for the tests to be fully working on Parrot (and fast!) in the next few months.
There were parties and conversations every night, lots of great talk, good food, good friends, and, well, I just had a great time. I can’t wait until next year’s OSCon!
My presentation went off well yesterday. It was in a small room, and I was delighted to find that it was standing room only. Several people told me later that they weren’t able to even get into the room. I told Nat that next year he’d have to give me a keynote.
This is a new version of my usual presentation. It simplifies some things, and uses the new Bricolage Website for its example. I think that it was positively received. I’ve worked hard to try to make the presentation engaging, and it was nice that I didn’t lose my audience; no one left during the presentation that I noticed (although it was mighty crowded in the back!). So I’m happy with it.
I exported the presentation to PDF, and added the movie that runs at the beginning as a set of slides ahead of the main presentation content. You can download the presentation from the Kineticode Website.
