Archive for the ‘oscon07’ category

OSCON – catch up

July 27th, 2007

Wow – the connection to my server from the convention center just died yesterday.  I could traceroute all the way to something internal to the data center, but it just stopped.  I need to determine if some iptables crap triggered to block me out (why would that have happened?)

So, yesterday afternoon was great.  I had a brainwave (why so late in the game?) to record people directly from the board.   I got Mark Pruett talking about AJAX tradeoffs (learned something new about the proxypass trick).  I got the head developer from Zimbra talking about the Zimbra desktop (can’t find his name right now).  I got Robert Treat from OmniTI talking about running PHP in PostgreSQL.  Who else…?  I got the windmill guys (Mikeal Rogers and Adam Christian) one-on-one about the project and what’s upcoming.  Also, I got Clinton Nixon, ex-lulu, doing his talk on ‘untangling legacy PHP code’.  I’ve invited him to come talk to our PHP group in 2 weeks – I need to ping David @ tripug about this, but it shouldn’t be a problem.

I was going to do a BOF on SOLR specifically, but there was a BOF on ‘open source search’ run by Peter Zaitsev, from the mysqlperformanceblog.com, a blog I catch up with on a regular basis.  I believe Peter is involved in the sphinx project, a fulltext project for MySQL.  The BOF brought some questions for me about SOLR, though I don’t have all the experience to answer the in depth questions.  I think I was seen as a representative of the SOLR project, and as such, I should know all the nooks and crannies.  In a way, I probably *am* a rep, but not in an official capacity.  Peter wants to get in touch to work on some benchmark comparisons between SOLR and MySQL (sphinx?).  Not sure what that’ll actually demonstrate, and if I’m in over my head I’ll pass this off to Yonik Seeley, Erik Hatcher or someone else from the SOLR project with more experience.  :)   (BTW, Monty was there with more black vodka!)

I got to  meet Luke Welling and Laura Thomson, huge names in the PHP world.  I’ve known them through their reputation (as good authors and nice people) for several years, and it was great to finally meet them in person, however briefly.  Hopefully we’ll be able to meet up again today or at a future conference.

Watching Jimmy Wales’ presentation right now.  (He looks like Chuck Norris, at least from certain angles.)  Interesting talk about upcoming wikia directions, and a bit of the history of wikipedia.  Not anything I didn’t know already, but interesting to listen to.

Side note: One of the things I’ve noticed listening to all the speakers the past few days is how many ‘crutch words/phrases’ people use – “ya know”, “ummm”, “uhhh”, “like”, etc.  I recorded myself and will be listening for my own violations.   Having gone to Toastmasters for awhile now it’s ingrained in me to listen for those words, and it’s hard to break that habit when listening for ‘content’ only.

Not too many tracks of pressing interest today – not that they’re bad, just nothing that jumps out as a pressing need for my day to day work.  I’ll see what strikes my fancy in a bit, and we’ll take it from there.

Anyone reading this that wants to meet up this afternoon for drinks, a chat, or more in depth web/search chat, email me (mgkimsal@gmail.com) or cell (919-455-8488).

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Posted in Conferences, MySQL, PHP, SOLR, Software, Testing, Web, opensource, oscon, oscon07

OSCON 07 – windmill testing

July 26th, 2007

This is one I wish I’d just recorded straight from the board.  This testing framework looks pretty awesome, and one that may have a big impact on how people do AJAX/web testing in the coming months.  While it’s been ‘out’ for awhile, this was basically a public launch here at OSCON.  I’m going to see if these guys will do a webdevradio interview with me sometime today.  Great looking system, with apparently a lot of power under the hood.  http://windmill.osafoundation.org is where you can learn more about it.  Have a look!

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Posted in Conferences, Software, Testing, Tools, Web, opensource, oscon, oscon07

OSCON live recap (and solr BOF tonight)

July 26th, 2007

So, I hit a couple more sessions last night.  The ‘high performance web pages’ talk from Steve @ Yahoo wasn’t open – SRO apparently.  Instead, I caught the end of “Profiling PHP apps” (Reilly).  I missed the beginning, but was hoping to get a bit of something out of it.  I did – a reference to wincachegrind (also referenced multiple times in comments on another post here).

I did end up meeting up with Ben Ramsey and George Schlossnagle.  I’ve talked on and off for years with George, and met his brother Theo, but we’d never met in person before.  Very nice guy.  Ben was good to see as well, and recently became a dad.  I was surprised that he was able to make it at all!  I gave both George and Ben copies of my ‘work in progress‘ book about the PHP job market, ideally getting some feedback from each of them with criticisms and pointers about how to make it better.

I checked out the ‘scrum war stories’ ‘birds of a feather’ session last night, run by Eric Pugh.  It was interesting to hear other peoples’ experiences with scrum and agile methodologies.  There was another person (Bill West) from Raleigh, who’s also been to the Agile Artisans group run by Jared Richarson (who’s also here speaking today – if you are doing Rails and want to tune your apps, check out Jared at 1:45 today – he’s a good speaker and great guy).  We then checked out the MySQL session with “pizza and beer”.  I had pizza and some home made “black vodka” personally made and poured by Monty himself!  It was *strong*!  I think I took 4 years off my esophagus last night with those few ounces.

I’m watching Bill Hilf’s keynote right now, and will be attending a lot of web dev sessions today, and am going to try to corner some people today for a webdevradio podcast interview.

Lastly, I’m hosting a SOLR “hands on” BOF tonight at 8:30.  There were a number of people who had some SOLR questions after yesterday’s presentation which I didn’t get a chance to respond to.  Hopefully a few people will stop by tonight and we’ll go over any more questions or demos people want to see, or others will stop by and share their success stories (please drop by!)

If you’re at OSCON and want to get togethe

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Posted in Conferences, Development, SOLR, Search, Software, Web, oscon, oscon07

OSCON – PHP and OFBIZ

July 25th, 2007

I went to Rasmus’ PHP talk.  Didn’t have too much I wasn’t aware of, but did have a good demonstration of debugging and performance stuff.  He demoed kcachegrind, which you have to use now if you use xdebug2.  I was using kcachegrind and valgrind to debug PHP 4 years ago, and it was refreshing to see someone else using it too.  It sort of excludes Windows people tho (doesn’t it?)

I went to the plaxo presentation on ‘high performance javascript’, but it was too crowded, so I’m hitting the ofbiz presentation.  I didn’t know it was now an Apache project – very interesting.  I was just told that you can use groovy directly in ofbiz when writing code – again, very interesting.

At lunch I ran in to Kevin from discogs.com, and he’s using SOLR  :)   And I’ve met Jacob from platial.com – very interesting site/concept.  They need to speed up their searching, and SOLR may be what they use as well.

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Posted in Conferences, PHP, Software, oscon, oscon07

OSCON – testing the web tier

July 25th, 2007

Muness from thoughtworks is presenting web testing concepts. The new ones (to me) presented here

  • crosscheck – simulates other browsers – need to check this out more
  • distributed jsunit – java run js on multiple browsers remotely
  • check firefox profiles in to cvs – to keep all developer experiences uniform

The basic firebug/selenium info was also presented – not new to me, but it was to some people.

Side note: I’m sitting next to a ‘loud typer’ – he smacks every key as if his life depends on it. Very annoying.

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Posted in Conferences, oscon, oscon07

SOLR presentation

July 25th, 2007

I ended up running over just a bit in my presentation, and didn’t quite get through all my slides (missed the last 3).  For anyone that wanted to see how it ends, download the files from  http://www.webdevradio.com/solr_oscon.tgz.  The only thing I didn’t demonstrate in detail was the PHP/SOLR search code, which is running at http://www.pfblogs.com/v2/ right now.

I’m currently at the MySQL Internals with Monty and Jay (Pipes), but it’s a bit over my head.  I guess I wasn’t expecting this many internals at an ‘internals’ talk – Monty is getting in to the speed performance of different iterator classes and whatnot – a bit too low-level for me.  Very interesting nonetheless, just not something I can use in my day to day work.

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Posted in Conferences, MySQL, SOLR, Search, oscon, oscon07

OSCON 2007

July 25th, 2007

I got in yesterday (what a long trip!) and will be presenting my SOLR material this morning at 10:45 in room D133.  As of last evening there wasn’t a projector in the room, so I’m not sure exactly what I’ll be doing if there isn’t one, but we’ll make it through somehow!

I bumped in to Cal Evans last night (we first met @ codemash) – he’s working on a book for the Zend Framework, which will certainly be welcomed by many out there.  I know one of my colleagues at work has tried the ZF a few times but keeps turning away because the docs/tutorials available don’t match up well with the final 1.0 release.  Turns out Cal and I have something else in common.  I haven’t mentioned it here yet, because all the paperwork hasn’t been signed, but the book I’m working on will likely be published by the same publisher – php|architect.

My travelling companion and I were a bit beat last night, so we didn’t stay too long at the Zend/MySQL bash they threw, but it was very well attended.  We sat in probably the only two seats in the place that didn’t see the food buffet, so by the time we got around to thinking “a little food wouldn’t go amiss” the line was about 25 people deep.  We skipped out for a quick bite at a place across the street, then headed back to the hotel.

I’m excited about being here.  My only worry is that I’ll miss a good track.   Like codemash, there are some time blocks with 2 or 3 very interesting topics, then others with nothing much useful for my interests.  Perhaps I’ll record a podcast interview during that time.  I brought my equipment, and am looking to try to get a few interviews before the week is done.  If you know of someone here who would make a good interview subject for webdevradio, ping me at mgkimsal@gmail.com or just call 919-455-8488 while you’re here.

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Posted in Book, Conferences, oscon, oscon07