OSCon 2k6 Day 4 and 5 : Lots of Talks, the Bof, Poker, and the Morning After

Man, it has been such a busy week I haven’t had time to keep up. After my talk yesterday I chatted with a few ruby/rails users on the way to the PostgreSQL Time Travel tables talk. It has some nifty ideas, I might have to do a [http://pgfoundry.org/projects/dbsamples/ pagila] based article on it just to play with it. After that blew off the out joins talk to go see the marketing to Dilbert talk. The idea of the talk was how to get developers interested in your project. Since I’m involved in a number of projects and also want more developers, I thought it would be interesting. Unfortunately it was really oriented towards companies, so it didn’t do a lot for me, though one nugget of wisdom they had was the idea that “marketing creates monopoly”. His example was that the microsoft folks were good marketers, and now they have a monopoly. I can think of some open source projects that also won their markets with a lot of marketing, and now are the dominate player. After that I went to Christopher Browne’s PostgreSQL performance tuning talk. While it wasn’t exactly exciting, it was the type of deep technical information a PostgreSQL user might come to a conference. Following that went to the free-software in Venezuela talk, which had an interesting overview of how open source is taking hold in that country (and being funded by the government no less). One thing I had to wonder about was, with all of that activity going on, do we have any PostgreSQL user groups or advocates working in that country? After that I went to the Art of Community lightening talks. It was somewhat interesting though not earth shattering… the more unfortunate thing being that it ran over a bit, giving me no time between the talk and the PostgreSQL BOF to get dinner. Chris Browne and I order a pizza from the nebulous “Kustom Pizza” which turned out to be good, but at $30 seemed a bit overpriced. The PostgreSQL BOF actually turned out to be pretty good. We discussed a number of hot topics including Pervasives recent announcement, Sun’s new entry into PostgreSQL, the PostgreSQL Summit, and some upcoming features for 8.2. We also took some questions from the crowd, and then did a book giveaway involving a number of books from [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0672327562/sr=8-1/qid=1154109686/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-0410869-2941514?ie=UTF8 Sam’s] and [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590595475/sr=8-4/qid=1154109686/ref=pd_bbs_4/104-0410869-2941514?ie=UTF8 Apress] [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590594789/sr=8-2/qid=1154109686/ref=pd_bbs_2/104-0410869-2941514?ie=UTF8 Publishing]. After I got out of the pg bof, I went to the gpg bof, but I hadn’t brought my gpg key cards, and was too tired to actually write my key out properly (I tried, and kept coming up one number short). From there I was trying to decide which party/gathering to head to when I stumbled upon a friendly little poker game. With [http://www.sqlite.org/index.html Richard Hipp] busting out, I hopped into the open seat, doling out some left over pizza to help flesh out my short stack. We played a mix of Omaha, Texas Hold ‘Em, 7 card hi lo, and a quick round of “between the sheets”. I hadn’t ever played between the sheets before, so I was a bit nervous, but after someone showed when to go in and and pull out, I was able to fake my way through it enough to get a big payoff at the end. After poker I was bushed, so headed back to the hotel and promptly passed out. Luckily I had waffles to look forward to in the morning, so I was able to drag myself out of bed this morning and make it on down for the keynotes. Friday keynotes tend to be pretty good and this year was no exception. The first speaker discussed some of the history of early IBM computers; something I was afraid would be horrendously dry and boring but which turned out to be pretty entertaining. After that was a talk on open source interaction wrt the government. One low hanging fruit of mention was pestering the government over bad html and broken links, which seem to be all too common a problem with govt. sites which should be able to hire decent web masters. The last hurrah though was Damian Conway’s cXap talk, which was hilarious. This was probably the best of the keynotes (Sierras being the main contender), there are already photos up on flickr for those interested. The rest of the morning will consist of David Wheelers OR mapping talk which I went to mainly since I saw this talk last year, and needed some place to get caught up on blogging. (Yep, it’s going on right now) and then 1 more before the closing keynotes. For those with time on your hands, dig around and see if you can find some info on solaris and the gpl [[image /xzilla/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png alt=”:-)” style=”display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;” class=”emoticon” /]]