OSCON July, 2007 - Portland
I attended the O’Reilly Open Source convention again, making it 10 years in a row. Once again it was held at the Convention Center near downtown Portland, a convenient light rail ride from the airport.
Like many experienced developers, I spent a lot of time in the “hallway track” talking to other developers and users, as well as in one of the 15 simultaneous talks.
The general consensus was that the talks were not as strong as in previous years (not even compared to the MySQL conference this year), but it’s worthwhile to me if I can get even one juicy nugget from each talk, or gain an understanding of a developing trend in programming or system administration.
Many of the presenters griped about there not being enough time to look at source code in a 40 minute talk.
For those who want a conference summary in a nutshell:
- OpenID is popular
- lucene and its REST interface have more mindshare than projects like Kinosearch, language-specific bindings, etc.
- Yahoo! released the yslow browser plug-in for front-end performance evaluation
- Perl: no ORM appears to be gaining the upper hand, though DBIx is respected. Tim Bunce would like to see a wrapper around JDBC for each scripting language. Alison Randal is updating the Perl license.
- PHP: no good way to do vector reporting graphics, especially since IE doesn’t support SVG and Adobe is killing the Macromedia plug-in in December. PHP4 is being EOL’ed 8/8/8 so that the PHP developers can focus on 5 and 6 only.
Google was heavily recruiting at the conference. I ran into 3 recruiters, and there were even more in the Google booth.
Pretty good food for lunch, usually chicken or fish in some kind of red sauce with steamed veggies. Better than the wilted sandwich boxes from previous years that mainly got tossed out.
Tuesday nite
I arrived at the Convention Center in time for the evening Google Open Source awards. Happened to sit next to Zak and the 20 year-old OpenID guy, David Recordon, who won $5,000 and a colored, transparent, angular plastic trophy and base that we had fun stabbing each other with.
The OpenID Foundation is offering a $5,000 bounty to the first 10 OSI-approved projects that add OpenID support. Many programmers were busy adding it, including SocialText and others. (David works at Verisign.)
I walked over to the Doug Fir Lounge with a few guys, 2 of them Austrian. I had the halibut fish and chips and lemonade for $20 including tip. It was ok. They have a log cabin motif happening with a restaurant, patio and bar upstairs, and dance club downstairs, so ID is required to enter. Open from 7 am to 2:30 am every day, 1 503 231 WOOD.
Wednesday
Nagios
- general overview of features
- Event Broker most powerful, least used
Bigger and Faster
Rasmus Lerdorf
Rasmus did his usual “PHP is as secure as any other language”, and “pick on a PHP app and make it go faster” talk.
He said he’s still not a Y! Paranoid, but his work does often touch on PHP and web security.
He used to use httpload, but now prefers siege for load testing because it has support for cookies.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
Live HTTP Headers
APC
sla.ckers.org/forum/list.php?3
php.net/filter
xdebug.org/docs/profiler
talks.php.net/show/oscon07
xdebug
jeremiah san diego xss console author
scanmus.corp.yahoo.com
PHP and Ruby Envy
- NZ programmer on Silverlight CMS (BSD licensed)
- own object system in PHP5
- Ruby less available on web servers, less mindshare
- rolled his own PHP OO frameword apparently
Exhibits
- talked to Mark Finkle of mozilla.org
- said hi to Larry. He had the whole family there.
Trac
Vivek Khera
- he uses RT for public tickets, Trac internally
- doesn’t require much resources since only a few developers
- Trac is used on many Ruby/PHP projects
- gives you wiki/tickets/etc.
- modified BSD license
Afterwards mentioned:
- uses Trac in a BSD jail
- an alternative to Trac would be basecamp (or I guess Sourceforge software). See slashdot.org threads for more ideas.
- likes pfSense firewall as an appliance
- nagios alerts too much, and no good rule builder for multiple hosts
- own web framework called Rowdy (RWDE)
- software as complicated to install as RT should be treated as an appliance
- he submitted 6 related talks on software development environment, only 1 accepted.
Steve Souders
Chief Performance Yahoo!
souders@yahoo-inc.com
Exceptional Performance Group
http://developer.yahoo.com/performance
- IBM Page Detailer Pro
- yslow (crawls the DOM, not a packet sniffer)
- firebug
- jslint - The JavaScript Verifier
80-90% of end user response time is spent on the front-end. so optimize there.
14 Rules for a Better User Experience
1. make fewer HTTP requests
2. use a CDN
3. add an Expires header
4. gzip components - even JS and CSS
5. CSS at top
6. JavaScripts to bottom
7. avoid CSS expressions
8. make JS and CSS external
9. reduce DNS lookups
10. minify Javascript
11. avoid redirects
12. remove duplicate scripts
13. configure Etags - disable in most cases if load-balanced or multiple web servers
14. make AJAX cacheable
move JS to onload
remove bottom tabs
avoid redirects
images sprites
expires
Thursday
PHP Graphics
Luke Welling, OmniTI
Luke presented an overview of raster and vector graphics modules for PHP.
He prefers vector graphics, but there’s not many free options for doing that.
He feels that Yahoo! Finance and Google analytics sites are state of the art in presentation graphics with anti-aliasing, interactivity, esthetics, text and maps. I’d say that’s aiming a little low, but it’s a start I guess.
- JpGraph (GD-based, QPL/Commercial E85.+)
- raw Adobe PDF
- Dojo charting (BSD/Academic)
- FusionCharts (Commercial $499+)
- DIY Flash
- Flex
- Ming Flash
- ez graph (GD and swf-based,
- another is zxChart (swf-based, shareware E15.)
- another is Open Flash Chart (swf-based, GPL)
Perl Lightning Talks
- Vani Raja did a talk on Yahoo! JS
- Ask did his talk on qsmtpd again
- talk on Test::More 3?
- talk on task lists for hit and run volunteers
- Schwern did one talk on making tea for 5 minutes, and one on “Blame Schwern” - just do it instead of waiting for permission
- Tim Potter did a talk on a messaging standards effort for his employer, saying that the ANSI process was too slow and looking for an alternative
- Andy Lester did a talk on ack
- a talk on SVN::Notify
- http://angerwhale.org/
- Tim Bunce talked about DBD::Gofer Proxy and next-gen cross-scripting language DB API based on JDBC API
- guitar song about #perl
YouTube: Perl Lightning Talks on Handycam by Schtonk
Perl Auction
Larry’s talk on comparative languages and Perl6. Sounds like we’ll be able to do something like foreach (1..infinity).
Full Text Search BOF
Peter Zaitsev
- based in London, England but often in SV
- uses Sphinx on several servers
- http://boardreader.com/ one TB of searchable data
- geneology is big on full-text search
- after insert, mysql full text gets slow, run optimize.
also, doing it at insert time causes index update per keyword
- gin or gyst for Postgresql 8.4?
- Michael Kimsal, SOLR
- hard disk space is free (enough for whatever indexing is required)
- mostly news search involves last 5 minutes of feed
- MessageOne stores email for lawyers to mine. They like to search, archive and expire. Mostly Exchange lusers, rarely Unix admins.
- Lucene and REST interface
- Monty says MySQL AB hired a programmer to work on search, but he’s working on another project now. They need somebody with a burning desire to make progress in an area like that, but they recognize the importance of search.
- Monty poured out free Finnish chocolate rum from a Pepsi bottle that was so powerful it scared most people. He said it was banned for 2 years in Finland because it was so addictive.
Sun BOF
- audience talked to senior Sun staff about Java and Solaris a little.
- free beer, cheese and crackers.
Friday
A bunch of Postgres people went to the Portland wine tasting on the river event in the afternoon.
Call for Software Whiteboard
OSCON07 Call for Software Whiteboard
flickr.com: Jeff Kubina’s OSCON 2007 Whiteboard set of tiles
