OSCON, Day 4, Thursday / Update

All busy in the sunlight
The flecks did float and dance,
And I was tumbled up with them
In formless circumstance.
        -- Leonard Cohen

This conference rocks. Way too much fun stuff to do. Way too many cool people to meet. Moving from my carefullly selected group of friend in Denmark, it takes a long time to pick up bright people who are fun to hang out with (you know who you are). The Open Source Convention is like an instant boost to the brain of fun bright people. I'm just back from Nathan's p5p party in his suite. Lots of fun people, lots of drinks, lots of laughs.

BoFs

After the last talk I stayed in the room talking to Perrin, meeting Eric Hammond and Christopher Fry whom ironically is on the same floor as I am when I go to do stuff at CitySearch (although he works on the Ticketmaster part). We talked about various ways to manage session data across a large cluster or multiple clusters. Just before this was the last time I saw Chris and Kevin by the way. I wonder where they went and if they made sure to get some of the free beer later. :-D

The room we were in was used for the p5ee bof, so I just stayed there after Leon came in. It ended up just being lots of ranting about managers who gets sold on Java even when perl would be a better choice. There was not really much consensus or energy behind P5EE at all, so it seems a bit dead. It would have been nice to have Stephen Adkins and Matt Sergeant in the BOF, but Matt was elsewhere and Stephen not at the conference. Stephen has done pretty much all the work and Matt has a bunch of insight on this. Oh well.

Then I went to the weblog BOF which was fun. Low tech. Nice. People talked about why they liked the different tools. There was talk about trends in the community and things we would like to see. The last people got an explanation of TrackBacks. I need to remember to ask Rael about the log aggregator for Mac OS X that he talked about. What was the name again?

Ben and Mena Trott (of Movable Type fame) was there, but somehow I didn't really get to say hello to them. What's up with that?! Someone else said hello afterwards and while talking to him Mena and Ben disappeared. It was cute, they seemed a bit shy in there. They've made the coolest thing, they are very likeable and friendly people; I really wish I'll get a chance to say hello properly before the conference is over. They make cool stuff, I'd like to praise them some more in person.

After changing to shoes (feet in sandals got really cold as the air condition made the rooms colder and colder), I went back to the same room for mjd's BOF. I wanted to go to the Perl Foundation BoF too, gaah. At mjd's BOF we talked about random things and in particular debuggers and the perl debugger. I'd like to make a simple command line interface to the regexp debugger he made. Maybe that could be a start of getting someone else to make a cool free GUI thing. My bloodsugar got really really low, so I headed towards the bar and ordered whatever Tim Bunce had. He was there with Graham Barr, Sarathy, Gisle Aas and one more whom I in my semi drunken state right now can't remember who was. Gaah.

p5p party

After a few rounds of free beer courtesy the Aaronson Consulting group, Stonehenge and Dyndns (I think it was), we headed up to Nathans perl5-porters party. On the way out of the bar for a last drink I met Ben Hockenhull. After talking to him frequently because he does the dns for some of our perl domains it was nice to say hello. I had no idea that he was he. Someone sent me a caption for a photo where he was on. "Ah, that's him!"

Anyway, up to the p5p party I went. Lots of fun people there; too many to enumerate. Robert and I took a bunch of photos with my camera and I got to play with Nathans DV camera. Poor Nathan if he tries to edit the ~45 minutes people recorded. Or lucky Nathan as some of it is probably funny.

I finally got to meet Jeffrey Friedl, author of the Regular Expression Book. (Go buy it already; it's out in a second edition). Somehow he was a lot younger than I thought. I'm not sure what I expected, but maybe I think he's too smart *and* nice to not be really old. :-D

I also talked to Milton Ngan, operations manager at Weta where they work on the Lord of the Rings movies. It was very interesting to hear about how the problems are similar and different when your ~1000 servers are rendering movies (compared to have your server farm serve some kind of webfoo). He seemed like a really nice guy; if saleries were only higher in New Zealand I would hurry to explain to Viridiana the benefits of living there and try applying for a job. :-D

Ingy told a bit more about his roadtrip in his car. It really makes me want to not play with computers and travel around for a bit. Maybe I would bring my powerbook. Just to download the photos from my camera. And maybe I'd bring the list of dialup numbers from Speakeasy. Just to check a bit of mail and use CVS. And do a bit of work... Just a bit.

Rael Dornfest told about his dream job (which he has). It sounds like he has a bunch of fun. Lots of it is just staying on top of what's cool. I wonder if I could do that. I'm afraid I'd dig myself down in some of the coolness too much instead of staying up where you can see more of what's going on.

Jason May was there (and at the P5EE BOF). I'd like to talk to him some more too, but I don't even remember when I met him before and where he works. Maybe at last years p5p party where he worked at eBay's onllne payment thing. Hmn... Could be. Must try to find him again.

Oh, did I mention that the multimedia repository from this TPC is getting pretty cool? Check it out.

Okay, very late now. Sleepytime .... ZzZzZz....