OSCon.2k5.4.Back-Home

So yesterday after the conferance was over, a bunch of us gathered together to field trip to the OSDL facilities. Along the way we stopped for lunch at the food court of one of the shopping centers. I have to admit that sitting there talking to Bruce Momjian while Tatsuo Ishii sat next to me eating a hot dog was kind of surreal; everyone should go to an OSCon at least once if at all possible. Once we got up to the OSDL offices, we took a look at the hardwhere they use for running all those crazy PostgreSQL benchmarks… I wish I had a machine with 47 SCSI drives hooked up to it! [[image /xzilla/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png alt=”:-)” style=”display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;” class=”emoticon” /]] I noticed they had a bunch of valinux servers running, to which someone commented it was kind of bad when your hardware last longer than the company you bought it from. When then had a long chat with a few of thier kernel developers, dicussing a number of pg related issues surrounding fsync/osync/etc… the result of which was a little bit of good news/bad news as Josh put it; the good news was that the path we were working on seemed to be right, and we werent missing something obvious wrt working with buffers and disks, but the bad news being that we didn’t really get any closer to a solution either. Still I think it was a good discussion, and several people planned to follow up on some things so all in all it is good for PostgreSQL. After we finished up there, it was the long round about on the max rail for me, back to my hotel and then back to the airport. Along the way I got to see the sights of portland by way of the rail, and met a nice lady who had hitch-hiked to florida when she was younger, and ended up living at a cattle ranch on the eastern side of oregon with her husband who had been running from the law. She was on her way to shoot some pool… if only I’d had some more time I could have played a few matches. So that pretty much concludes OSCon 2005 for me, I hope you’ve enjoyed the updates. I am off to sleep for a couple of days (hopefully) [[image /xzilla/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png alt=”:-)” style=”display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;” class=”emoticon” /]]