Recently in OSCON Category

I've been attending the O'Reilly Open Source Convention for nearly a decade. When I first attended in 1998, it was still "Perl Conference 2.0", as it was before the whole Open Source "revolution" had started. (The 1998 Perl Conference also was a turning point for me, as it was there that I met Jeffrey Friedl who would become a very good friend and later co-worker as he helped me get interviewed by Yahoo).

The past few years, I've been managing to weasel Press passes to OSCON to avoid paying the registration fees. As conferences go, OSCON is right in line with other conferences, price-wise, but the last few years, I've always had a hard time cost-justifying attending. Certainly, one can argue that the hallway track at OSCON is great, and I'd not argue with that a bit. Probably some of the brightest minds in the Open Source software industry all congregate there for a week. But asking an employer "pay to send me for a week of hallway track" is a dicey proposition at best.

In past years, I was able to usually say things like, "I've scored a free pass to the conference, all I need is for $EMPLOYER to cover airfare, hotel, etc.," and use that to sweeten the deal. I could usually point to a few things that would be relevant and useful to our current work environment, and that would be enough to get approval to go. (Although, in some years, I've even had to sweeten it further by saying things like, "and I'll split the cost of the hotel with a friend of mine, who is also going").

Last year, though, I found myself wandering around sort of aimlessly for a good portion of the conference. It was then that I had told myself, "That's it, it's just not worth it. I can't even really cost-justify it any more."

This winter, though, when the CFP went out, I began to have second thoughts. I thought to myself, "Well, maybe if you give a talk there on something, maybe then it would be worth it, because it would give you exposure, and it would give $EMPLOYER exposure as someone who hires smart people who give talks, etc., etc.," and all that would -- in the end -- cost-justify the important part of the conference for me: the hallway track.

But, I learned that my talk proposal was declined. I won't go into the whole argument about how the reasons why it was declined were silly, nor any of the many failings I think OSCON is suffering. As I told Nat Torkington (program chair), OSCON is going into its tenth year this year, so clearly they've got an idea of "what works", and it's putting asses in the seats for them. Mine simply won't be one of them.

Which makes me sad, because while I infinitely value more a conference like LISA, I am still a generalist. Yes, I'm a System Administrator, but I also do Perl programming, and I am also a MySQL DBA, and I also deploy a myriad of open source tools at work every day. OSCON should, near as I can tell from the marketing speak, be aimed directly at me, and it doesn't seem to be any more. Nor does it seem to be targeted at any newcomers to any of those things -- gone are "Learning Perl" type one-day tutorials, or introductions to MySQL, or any of a hundred other things which might at least leave me thinking "oh, well I outgrew OSCON" or something like that. There's very little for the "newbies" that I can see (at least in past programs), and very little for people who aren't interested in seeing niche case-studies ("Explaining Explain"? "The Semasiology of Open Source"?) Unless you're an actual hard-core Open Source developer, it has little value, where once upon a time it had a lot of value as well to Open Source users.

Hmmm, I guess I did sorta "Get into the whole argument" ... sorry 'bout that. I lied.

But, anyhow, looks like my jam-packed three-weeks-of-hell-in-a-row thing is now alleviated. OSCON won't be happening, and the NetApp training is probably going to happen at a different time, so now we're all back to something resembling normality.

Remember that four-hour O'Hare layover I mentioned? I'm glad I had it. My flight out of PDX this morning is three hours delayed. This means that, due to my scheduled layover, I didn't have to go through "connection rebooking hell". Also, since PDX has free WiFi in the airport gates and O'Hare doesn't have any sort of WiFi at all, not even for-pay(?!?!!), I was probably the only person on this flight to be happy for the three hour delay.

It's been a long week this week at OSCON, and I haven't been blogging much here, mainly because I was asked to write about my OSCON experiences for the O'Reilly Network of blogs. So there's a couple entries there, on specific topics from this past week.

It was a long, interesting, week, though. I had a great time doing lots of things.... got to see some people that I really only get to see once or twice a year at various conferences... got to meet some people I hadn't met before.

Some of the highlights, outside the normal sessions:

• Wrath of Khan was great. There was about 30 people there.. of that 30, only about "2" were actally like die-hard Trek fans that were trying (in vain) to insist upon a pristine viewing of the flick. The rest of the audience was extremely content to MST3K the movie to the fullest extent. For myself, I was amazed at the number of places you can insert the line "Mother-fucker!" as if it were uttered by a character on screen and have it actually seem like it should actually be part of the script. Jeremy says I may have been wrong on one or two occasions, but the rest all seemed pretty normal.
• Got to meet a lot of people at the O'Reilly shindig Thursday evening. Very amusing was spending an hour or so on the balcony with Tilly and Allison, while Tilly tried to comb his vast knowledge of really really bad jokes in our presence. Apparently, the party really got interesting after Jeremy, James, and I left. (The old ActiveState parties used to end when the police came... this one ended when the medics showed up)... I'm just glad (very glad) that everyone was OK in the end and just had to sleep it off).
• Brian Aker's talk on his exploits with Asterisk in his home phone environment was probably the most enjoyable of the week, and I'm looking forward to potentially playing around with it when I move in with D (because I can screw my phone line up all I want without affecting hers *grin)
• I was a really good kid on my annual Powell's visit, and only came out with three books.

There's people I miss, though ... I haven't seen Jon Orwant in four years now. (Come back, Jon, we miss you! *grin* Maybe if you throw another coffee mug against a wall, Arthur Dent style, we can get a release of Perl 6)

It's a long flight back home tomorrow. Luckily the week has exhausted me enough that I'll fall asleep early this evening, so I can get up early for my flight.

Apparently the "open source friendly" folks at Slashdot dind't think to wonder "hey, I wonder if there'll be some people with aggregators at OSCON this year?"

I opened up NetNewsWire, and found:

Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow. Please see the FAQ link for more information, and if you email us, include your IP's srcid: 203104289e737f9d.

Morons.

How cool is this? A local theater is showing, until Thursday Wednesday, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

James, Ask, Meng, Radwin, and Jeremy are going to get together for the 8:25 showing on Wednesday. What better thing is there to do than to see the best of all the Star Trek movies ever, up on the big screen?

UPDATE: Apparently the theatre that is showing Khan loses the print after the Wednesday showing. Yahoo!Movies has bad info (bad Yahoo, no cookie!). SO... considering how late in the day it is today, the new plan is for tomorrow (Wednesday) evening.

Day Two was a pair of tutorials for me. Now, I've said it before, but I think it bears repeating: You can have so much important, useful, intelligent stuff to say, but if they put you on right after lunch, you have got to be more engaging of your audience, and you can't put them in a dark room and expect them to stay awake. Turn the lights up, even if that means spending less time on your powerpoint slides. Be energetic and engaging. You've got to, especially in a tutorial because they're longer, hold the attendee's attention for a long period of time when their body is telling them to sleep off their lunch.

Yesterday was a lot more interesting, though. First off, because it became abundantly clear that IT budget purse-strings are loosening again. The attendance this year was just huge. I haven't been in a room that wasn't overflowing into the hallway. Jeremy had joked on Tuesday "they put me in Salon E [huge-ass room] so there's absolutely no way it's sold out", and while he was right, it wasn't, it probably was pretty damned close. I've been to sessions yesterday where "the seats were full, the floor was full, the aisle was full, the doorway was full, the area BEHIND the people standing in the doorway was full, and getting any closer than six-feet-outside-the-door was damned near impossible. So, yes, attendance is high, and that's a good thing.

Dan Gillmor's talk was enlightening. None of it was really terribly surprising, about how the rise of "distributed journalism" in the form of blogging, etc., is having an effect on both where people get their news, but also what the media outlets begin to think of as newsworthy. In the afternoon, I attended the Apache Performance talk, which had a lot of information I already knew as well as some new things to try out when I get home.

"Why Data Stinks," though, was another great session. It was basically a talk about data-constraints and where you should be setting up those constraints in a database-driven application. Was really interesting stuff.

The Perl Lightning talks, this year, were really disappointing. Maybe I just remember when there were a lot more, maybe it's that they've split up the Lightning talks and the WIP (Work In Progress) talks (in past years, WIPs got the same 5 minutes as anyone else). Personally, I liked the old format, where WIPs were just another lightning talk. I don't want to go listen to a WIP where one guy can potentially drag on about a topic for 10 minutes that I care nothing about. Get him on-stage, force him to concentrate on the important bits, and get him off-stage. If I'm interested, I'll find him after and chat. If I'm not, I won't care because I only have to listen to him for five minutes.

We also had our first "formal" book-signing last night, as O'Reilly rolled out a couple dozen O'Reilly authors. The only thing I saw wrong with this was that -- since O'Reilly now subs out the on-site book store to Powells -- ORA couldn't directly sell copies of the books right at the booksigning table. When ORA ran the book-store themselves, they'd just bring inventory over and make it easier for people to buy the book and get it signed. With the way it is now, you basically have to tell the prospective recipient "go away and buy the book" which gives them the opportunity to get distracted, not come back, etc. I understand the business reasons behind the way it is now, but it still would make a lot of sense to be able to sell directly from the tables.

There were two parties in the evening I attended. One in a location I will not disclose hosted by a publishing company and it was cool. I got to see a lot of people I don't see all that often, put faces to some names from e-mail and blogging, as well as got to meet a couple other people I really enjoyed. After that, we headed over for Stonehenge's annual soiree. Lots of cool people, although it seemed a little less populated this year than last (but then again, we weren't there all that late and it probably picked up as the night went on, knowing the way Randal's parties go).

A couple other random notes before I get showed and ready for today's activities:

• 5 minutes in between sessions is really not enough time. You can't clear out a room in 5 minutes.
• Portland is beautiful, but I suspect we need a larger capacity place to hold it next year
• The wireless has been really pretty decent this year. I complained a lot last year about why the WLAN didn't have a budget to "do it right". Apple apparently sponsored the WLAN this year, and aside from a brief hiccup yesterday, I have yet to have any significant problems with it. Kudos to all involved

Enough for now... more later.

This morning, I attended the Stop Spamming Me!! tutorial, given by Matt Sergeant. I was readily impressed by the breadth of options discussed. Matt definitely knows what he's talking about from personal experience, and it shows.

I was scheduled to go to the mod_perl 2.0 tutorial in the afternoon, but the more I read the tutorial notes, the more I realized I wasn't going to understand the tutorial anyway. It was written more as a "mod_perl 2.0 for mod_perl 1.0 users" talk, which makes sense for a lot of people, but I'm not nearly "mondo mod_perl 1.0 guy" that I would be able to follow along. The class notes will make excellent reference material, but the tutorial itself would have lost me. Instead, Jeremy and I headed out to get some groceries and lunch.

Tonight, I sat at the SCO Moot Court session, and was fairly disappointed. I understand that they had trouble finding someone who could get behind the SCO position themselves, but they found someone who said they'd "Give it a go". What I came here hoping to see was an actual "Reasoned Debate" version of the SCO v. IBM trial. Instead what I got arguing the SCO position was someone who actually stands behind the IBM argument in their heart. The guy who "made" the SCO point did so mockingly, in a way that obviously would never be done in a real trial.

I wanted a "Moot Court", I got a "Kangaroo Court". Very disappointing. Admittedly, there was a lot of "give the audience what it wants" as well as "this is a six-month long trial, you can't do it 'right' in 45 minutes", though, so it's not really the "SCO Lawyer"'s fault at all, I guess.

Ah, well, more fun tomorrow...

Spent the entire day on planes today. On my Albany to O'Hare flight, I managed to sleep the entire flight, with the exception of three instances of "five minutes of awake-time". After a two hour layover in Chicago, I was not looking forward to the much longer Chicago-to-Portland leg. But, as luck would have it, I got seated next to someone who I actually didn't mind making conversation with, and we spent the entire flight talking. A bag full of magazines, a fully-charged iPod and several DVDs sat idle. It was a welcome refreshing relief from the usual in-flight boredom, let me tell you.

I was a little disappointed that my rental car wasn't a Mazda 6 like it was in Chicago, but what can you do? Ah, well, c'est la vie.

So I'm sitting in my hotel room, forcing my body to stay up (10pm local time is 1am according to my body) so that I can get on the right clock with the local time. Jeremy apparently isn't showing up til Monday morning, but that's no big deal. Now I just need to figure out what I'm doing tomorrow before registration begins (maybe go see The Bourne Supremacy, or get a haircut or something).

OK, time to go watch The Punisher... that should keep me awake long enough.

One of the things that every OSCON has had in the past is to close out with a Town Hall meeting. People bring up ideas, things that occurred to them while they were here this week, things that they think need to merit at least being heard by the Open Source community, or just to thank certain members of the Conference team for their work.

But, this year, there's no Town Hall scheduled.

To me, the Town Hall was always indicative of what made the OSS community unique. That, annually, you could show up and speak your mind about where the community had gone, was going, or - more often - should go.

I wonder if its disappearance is a by-product of the Microsoft sponsorship of the lunches. Just kidding, I'm not that much of a conspiracy theorist.

It occurred to me, as I sat in a room that had no connectivity to speak of, to wonder this: Why does ORA continue to depend upon volunteer efforts for the WLAN for OSCON?

Now, I mean no disrespect for the fine folks who are donating their network skills and hardware, but we (attendees) are left sorta saying "well, ya can't complain, nobody's getting paid for the network, so it's catch as catch can".

But, why isn't anyone getting paid for it? There's 1500 attendees this year. If the conference fee total was raised $50, few people would really notice, and that would amount to $75,000 to spend on wireless network support for five days.

That's a helluvalotta money to build a small high-traffic WLAN with. Occurs to me to wonder why it's not being done.

Use a gateway of 192.168.10.1 and a netmask of 255.255.252.0. Pick an IP address somewhere in the range of 192.168.10.2-192.168.11.254. If you get a message about a conflict, change to something else.

Why a wireless LAN that's NAT'ed and sits in RFC1918 space, with literally millions of IP addresses available to it, is having issues providing enough IP addresses for the subset of 1500 attendees that are using wireless is beyond me, but this is how I'm protecting myself from the DHCP Server Madness. Maybe at some point they'll open up the DHCP server to use a larger subnet or something. I mean, 192.168.0.0/16 gives them 65K addresses to use, but they are only using 512. :-/

I was speaking with Jesse during the break in his RT talk, and pointed out how if there was a book on "doing cool stuff with RT", I'd buy a copy in a heartbeat. He indicated that there was this "on-again,off-again" ORA interest in a book that Tim had killed the idea, then it had gotten a new champion, and Tim had gotten back on board, but then it later got killed because they didn't think it could get enough copies sold.

I personally think that's a shame, and would encourage Jesse to either find some way of convincing O'Reilly to publish a book on the topic or to go find some other publisher more willing to get behind the project. Lots of people (myself included) have installed RT in the past, and been very intimidated after trying to look under the hood, and a book that walked someone through the innards, and how to use those innards to get RT to do what you want would be very well-received I think.

In the morning session, I went to the Extending and Embracing RT talk, which was very useful. We're in the process right now of evaluating RT3 (we're presently running a mid-range 2.0.x version), and it was reassuring to see that a lot of the things I thought "Wow, that's going to mean someone spending some significant time hacking on RT to make it work the way our users want it to!" is actually (with version 3.x) more like "OK, someone's going to have to write a script or to against the RT API, and maybe change a couple configuration options".

In the afternoon, I headed over to the Jabber Boot Camp session, which was quite well done, if a bit too basic for my hopes. I was sort of hoping more for "here's how to do cool stuff with Jabber", instead of "here's how to use Jabber"... I can't really fault the organizers or speakers, at all, it was advertised as a boot-camp after all, and for the target audience, it was very well-done.

Anyone else think it's kind of funny that the Technology Volunteerism Summit at OSCON is invitation-only?

Guess they don't want any fresh ideas on the topic. Why even include that on the agenda as "an event" if it's something that 99% of the attendees aren't even allowed to attend? There's a nightly event held in my hotel room. It's the Derek Balling Sleeping Summit, and it's by invitation-only.

There's nothing like forcing your body to do stuff it doesn't want to do, in order to be able to do the things it needs to do the following day.

I left Newark Airport yesterday morning at 08:22. Which means I woke up around 5:00 yesterday EDT. In Pacific time, that's 2AM.

But, I needed to get onto Pacific Time right quick, or every night around 7 or 8, I'd be dying, getting ready to fall into bed, etc.

So, after spending 8 hours in the air, working 5 hours at the Registration booth downstairs, and a number of hours on either side of that waking or waiting in airports, I pushed myself to stay up late, really late, in the hopes of kicking my internal clock onto Pacific Time in one fell swoop.

I'm amazed. It worked flawlessly.

In NY, I wake up at 6AM every time without an alarm clock, sometimes even earlier. Today, no alarm clock in sight and three hours "off-kilter", I woke up at 6AM exactly, feeling rested and ready to go.

I figure I'll probably have to force myself tonight again to stay up, but then it should be over, and I should be perfectly fine.