Seek Nuance

16:45: Your Internets are Leaking. The talk starts with a Wireshark realtime display of the local net projected up on the front screen. Funny.

16:39: I left my parka behind in an earlier session. I return to that room to find it still on the back of the chair in which I was sitting.

15:45: Efficient Multi-core Application Architectures. The speaker defines “CPU” and “concurrency” in ways that I find odd, but I can roll with it. He knows his stuff re: processes, k/u threads, fibers, and co-routines. Comparison of Apache HTTP server 2.x and Lighttpd. Event and threading models.

14:30: Relational vs. Non-Relational. A DBMS survey. Great talk. Josh is smart. I’ll post a link to the slides, once I have it. A good percentage of the audience expected Josh to give a highly partisan pro-SQL talk, which was funny, because in my few interactions with him I’ve found him to be extremely reasonable and insightful. As he was here.

Read more…

19:00: Checking the PostgreSQL BOF session. Oh, Selena‘s here, that’s a +1. News and tidbits about Postgres 9… I made a lame joke about Postgres running on Android, and the response was a serious, “I don’t think so, not yet.” (The times, they are a-changin’.) Postgres’ site will be migrated to Django. Hot-standby replication and streaming replication. Automatic join removal and optimization of ORM-generated queries. Some disparaging comments about the SQL generated by Rails.

18:41: Dinner was a quick bite at a Subway. Then after I return to the hacker lounge, there’s a call for a group to go to a sushi place. argh!

16:45: import rdma: Zero-copy networking with RDMA and Python. Interesting talk about kernel and user mode buffered-I/O, and the consequences of buffer copies in the socket interface. Locking down memory regions used for I/O feels like going back to the future, before the time of scatter/gather. But InfiniBand products’ price/performance are impressive. I don’t expect to use any of these techniques anytime soon, but I’ll file them away for future reference.

15:45: Cassandra: Strategies for Distributed Data Storage. Overview of CAP theorem, then delved into using Cassandra. A little too deeply too quickly for my interests, but I stayed with it. A good talk.

Read more…

16:45: Living in an open-cloud world. The speaker is one of Rackspace Cloud‘s founders. This talk is more Rackspace-centric than it ought to be. I didn’t come here to listen to a marketing spiel. “Some days, 75% of our HTTP referrers are from Facebook.”

15:45: Stacks of cache. This is a memcached talk. Useful fact: Memory assigned to a slab is never moved to another slab size, which is why you’re advised not to store huge objects in it. The presenter is smart and clearly knows about memcached’s innards, but this talk was at a different level than I had expected.

14:30: Apache Libcloud. Cloudy things = SaaS, PaaS, storage, server. Looks like a good abstraction of compute-type cloud APIs, but it’s useful only if your IT staff or application talks to multiple cloud providers. Otherwise, it’s just another level in your technology stack, with the associated downsides. I have to wonder, wouldn’t it be easier if cloud providers just agreed on & implemented a common API? But that’s crazy thinking.

13:30: Fixing SSL Security. A talk about the successor to SSL 3, TLS. Real good to use this on every connection, to thwart government snooping. But, SSL/TLS is somewhat fragile, it was created to reassure users, and is often not the weakest link in a realistic threat model. Passive vs. active adversaries. Strict Transport Security. Yeow this is a good talk – a dearth of slide deck eye candy and a high S:N. I’m getting a couple good ideas here for my employer’s products.

Read more…

I’m attending Open Source Bridge this week on my dime. In fact, besides paying for this trip with my money, I’m also taking time off without pay from work. That’s because I just started working at IP Street, and I don’t have any accrued vacation time.

On Friday, I left work with a task about 85% completed. I thought about working on it this week. But…I’ve decided to wholly put work on the shelf. That task will keep until I return. This week’s about technology, learning, and the open-source community.

Tomorrow, I’m up bright and early, to get my registration material, scope out the hacker lounge, and mingle.

I’ve developed a head cold a little over one day before I leave for Open Source Bridge. Naturally.

Open Source Bridge is in just 10 days! Oh boy! Oh boyohboyohboyohboyohboy!

If you work with open-source technologies and live in the pacific northwest (or even if you don’t live in the pacific northwest), you ought to strongly consider attending Open Source Bridge in Portland. It’s a 100% grass-roots conference devoted to all things open-source, and an incredible bargain at $300 for four days. From their site:

Open Source Bridge is not a typical technical conference:

• It’s entirely volunteer-run, by developers, for developers.
• Session tracks are technology agnostic; the conference content is based around shared community experiences and similarities between projects, not differences.
• Proposals are public from the start, and we welcome community comments before our content team selects the featured talks.
• A 24-hour hacker lounge is an integral part of the conference for code sprints, bug bashes, session deep dives, bouncing ideas, starting new projects or just mingling with other geeks.

Peruse the session list, get interested, and then register!

Guess O’Reilly’s moving OSCON to San Jose didn’t work out so hot.

O'Reilly OSCON 2010 announcement

I might attend OSCON 2010, depending on ticket prices and other factors. I’m more interested in Open Source Bridge 2010 — last year’s conference was epic.

I should have a preamble here, but my mind’s blank. I’ll jump right in.

Comparing Portland and Seattle

I’ve been ruminating over this since returning from Open Source Bridge. I felt odd the day after returning, and I quickly realized that my mood was… depressed! For the first time ever, I was in a funk about Seattle.

OSB was a rush of camaraderie, intelligence, and cutting-edge developers. Portland (in the tech realm) struck me as approachable, celebratory of cooperation, and tuned for geek individualism. My vexation, and the cause of my blues, was that Seattle isn’t as solid in those characteristics. I’m not claiming they don’t exist here, but that they are stronger and more evident in Portland. I’ve been thinking about why this is, and what if anything to do about it.

Admittedly, I have asymmetrical data points. I’m drawing on knowledge gained about the Portland locale over time, but at a distance. I’ve tried to compensate for my familiarity with Seattle, so that I can infer (or perhaps rediscover, or finally acknowledge) some fair conclusions.

Read more…

All the talks I attended were very good to excellent, with one exception. I didn’t like one that was at a more elementary level than its synopsis had led me to expect.

The sessions were more casual than those at OSCON or PyCon. It’s hard to explain why, but that’s the impression I came away with. Well, here’s one example: More than one presenter commented about how they had generated their slides the night before. I never heard that at the other conferences. It’s neither better or worse; just different. Although, maybe these presentations were slightly more survey-ish in nature. Hard to say. Spelling or layout errors were evident in two talks, including my hot button of “its” vs. “it’s.” Gaaaaaa! I also caught a “your” vs. “you’re.”

One in three presenters were female. I didn’t hear attendee statistics, but it also seemed that women were a high percentage (i.e., higher than in a typical software conference) of the entire assembly. I found the social atmosphere was a little more sophisticated (mature?) than in some other conferences I’ve attended. Probably not a coincidence.

Read more…

This conference is great, great, great!

The Open Source Bridge organizing team deserves kudos and huzzahs. They hit the ball out of the park and tore off the cover, like that scene from “The Natural”. If I could, I would buy all of you new cars. (They would be BMW 7-series.)

I heard two numbers: Over 400 attendees, and about 500 attendees. This is an extremely strong showing, from a new nonprofit 100% volunteer conference, in this economy, without prior brand establishment. Open source world, take notice.

Portland Mayor Sam Adams gave a keynote address today. He spoke about government’s use of open source, digital media, and governmental openness. The crowd went wild. Nobody asked any embarrassing questions.

Read more…