OSCON 2006 was in Portland, Oregon again this year, in the cavernous Oregon Convention Center. I stayed in the Inn at the Convention Center as usual: it’s both the cheapest and closest hotel to the Convention Center, and the Red Lion-side gets free wireless Internet in the rooms.
Apparently some local programmers created a FOSSCON, a parallel free conference, that many of the Ruby speakers contributed to.
Here’s my notes from some of the sessions and BOFs that I attended:
Painless Web Proxying with Apache mod_proxy
Justin Erenkrantz, UCB and Google.
erenkrantz.com/oscon/
- Apache reverse proxying mainly was discussed
- more new and helpful features than I expected
- Apache 2.2 and even better 2.3 has awesome features
- new version 3 rewrite of mod_proxy that can actually work
- load balancing
- ProxyPass with min max connection parameters
- mod_jk now included for Tomcat
- binary protocols available for ajp and fastcgi, 2% or 3% faster
- new fastcgi module included that is a good example of modern Apache module writing. great for ruby.
- mod_cache can fetch data and cache it locally,
shared cache with NFS
- mod_proxy understands http, https, ftp get, ajp, fastcgi
- squid is more intended for forward caching, mod_proxy more intended for reverse proxy and those already familiar with apache configuration
- mod_proxy is efficient (just sits around waiting for requests)
- HA with multiple reverse proxies
- ajp does not support healthcheck currently
New Query Interface
Randy Newsome
- show cardinality of query (how many permutations or results may be selected)
- freeform (text field) vs. pulldown menus (under say 50 items) for numerous returns
- show total matches
- db and memory is free these days
- for paging, cache all ints for ids (ints are small)
- get by fine without Ajax
- some members of the audience concurred with his ideas
- not a very technical talk, but a good UI is key these days.
Exhibits/Recruiting Area
- Rasmus (I work as a PHP architect, not a PHP programmer) and Jeremy 1 were recruiting in the Yahoo! booth
- ActiveState was there on their own after the spin-out from Sophos. Looking for new tools to write.
- talked to Matthew Olander, ex-BSDI, now CTO of iXsystems. maybe a BSDcon in future?
PHP 6 and Unicode
Andrei Zmievski, Yahoo!
- good update on ICU programming effort
- ICU features did not make it into 5.2 or 5.3 because it was “intrusive”
memcached BOF
- chaired by Brian Moon of DealNews
- he replaced NFS with memcached, 64 MB per server
- uses Omniture for tracking – expensive but worth it
- PHP C client is 4x faster than Perl
- think about slab size
- many discussed namespaces in a future memcached
- new Perl XS lib
- cache db, page components, sessions
- Brian Aker says look at MySQL cluster NDB
Building Search Applications With KinoSearch
Marvin Humphrey
- stemmer snowball
- stopwords snowball
- put stemmer last
- use same analyzer at index-time and search time
- google prefers non-stemmed now
- plucene is “profligate wastrel” oo code
- stemmer is not i18n, one language at a time obviously
- kino,xapian,swish,plucene, look at CPAN
- utf-8 safe – tested
PHP Data Objects (PDO)
Wez Furlong
- PDO ships with 5.1, 5.0+ needed
- very fast
- looks nice (convenient and complete)
- Detailed talk by PDO author, though he said a half day would be needed to do it justice.
- PDO Wiki
The Damian Conway Channel 2006
Damian presented 2 modules that he wrote.
List::Maker
- source filter module that DWIMs list syntax for you
- my @list = < 10 .. 1 >;
Contextual::Return
- replacement for wantarray in your code that DWIMs.
Damian: “I’m the high plains drifter of perl. I come down from the hills, shoot people, give them weapons to shoot themselves, then back to the hills for 10 months.”
Sun zones and zfs BOF
Channing Lovely
Brian Utterback
a dozen other Sun employees!
- impressive demo of zones and zfs (23 MB for new zone) via shell script
- 10 zones have noticeable overhead
- global zone (top can see all processes and run dtrace)
- non-global zone (restricted privileges like cannot see other network traffic)
- solaris 10 update 2 206 needed for latest updates
- had the balls to ask the audience, “what’s wrong with Sun?”
- open bar (nice!) with cheese and crackers
subversion
svnadmin hotcopy
autoversioning for users by dragging into SMB share – save to a fs and it versions it
dervish
A young Ruby programmer mentioned these Ruby and vim links:
vim talk
MVC testing suite for Ruby
mongrel ruby web server has good or adequate performance
MySQL BOF
Mostly talked about improvements that MySQL needs for GIS, data warehousing (materialized views, stable indexes), query optimization improvements (i18n may have introduced bugs). Got a free book, Pro MySQL. Monty, Kai, Jay Pipes and Arjen were there.
Greant said he liked the closing keynotes, including Damian’s CXAP (pronounced CRAP) rant about Web 2.0.
The wireless Internet (sponsored by IBM) worked great in the Convention Center. Plus free wireless Internet at PDX. Nice.
Registration and Schedule Area
Convenient Starbucks next to Registration Area
Larry Wall and Damian Conway at book signing
Lloyd Center Mall’s Atrium
View from Convention Center of DoubleTree Hotel
Convention Center Skylight Detail
Convention Center Skylight
