It is strongly recommended not to fly as a required crew member or passenger with a head cold, ear infection or sinus problem by medical and aviation experts.

Upon takeoff and especially landing, you cannot equalize pressure between the airplane cabin and the passages inside your ears and sinuses.

As a result, the following injuries can occur:

• pain, sometimes excruciating
• ruptured eardrums and middle ear problems
• damage to sinuses.

The best advice is to either cancel the trip, or take surface transport like a train or boat if possible.

If you’re really stuck flying, here’s some further advice that can help if you’re a passenger:

• short flights under 2 hours can cause less problems, as they typically stay under 25,000′
• You will need a nasal decongestion drug to open your sinuses and ear passages. See an ENT doctor before flying if possible.
• in the USA, take a Benadryl (pseudoephrine) capsule 5 minutes before takeoff and landing (if you have normal blood pressure)
• in some Asian countries, Tremenza (pseudoephrine with triprolidine) tablets are available, but they take longer to become effective than capsules (if you have normal blood pressure)
• Drizine (oxymetazoline hydrochloride) by Schering-Plough is a nasal spray that can also be used.
• carry or request a bottle of water and drink it on takeoff and landing. You will be swallowing more than usual to equalize pressure, which you won’t be able to continue with a dry throat.
• if you’re experiencing pain, especially on a USA airline, notify a flight attendant so that they understand it’s a minor medical issue and not a security problem.

Note that pseudoephrine is a controlled substance in the USA and other countries, so if you have a prescription, carry it with you when going through Customs, or discard the drug in a place safe from children.

I used the above techniques to fly 6 legs as a passenger with minimal discomfort, but I’d imagine luck was also on my side this time.

If you have chronic sinus problems when flying, then see an ENT doctor and request an endoscopic examination to look for blockages from polyps, infection or waxy buildups.

Traditionally, New Year’s in Bali is celebrated with a fireworks display near Kuta Beach. And lots of beer.

Bintang Beer comes in 2 bottle sizes, the 330 mL “Pint” shown above, and the 620 mL “Bremer” typically carried in each hand by Australian tourists – “Just in case, mate.” The brewer is advised by Heineken.

Bintang means “star” in Bahasa Indonesia.

Angry Birds is a cultural phenomenon in Southeast Asia, with t-shirts, backpacks and plush toys featured at many stores.

wikipedia: Pint

One would think that privatization might be the answer, but there’s 2 points to consider:

1. Caltrain service was private until 1980, when Southern Pacific gave up due to on-going losses and it was “nationalized”
2. the Caltrain right-of-way is planned to be used for the eventual high-speed rail system between San Jose and LA via SF. Privatizing anything before the new system is built would enormously complicate negotiations.

I suppose contracting out operations would save money, but outright privatizing of Caltrain may not be a good idea at this point.

An example of the disadvantage of privatizing an essential transportation asset is the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor and Detroit, owned by billionaire “Matty” Moroun. Any suggestion of affecting the existing traffic using that bridge results in an automatic lawsuit.

Caltrain will probably always find enough money to continue operating. Dumping 40,000 cars onto local highways is not feasible, and Stanford University commuters rely on Caltrain.

greencaltrain.org: Upcoming Funding Choices for Caltrain
wikipedia: Caltrain, Ambassador Bridge

It was held in parallel at the Oregon Convention Center with the O’Reilly OSdata and OSjava Conferences at the beginning of the week, and then later a knitting conference.

The conferences were well-managed, as usual. Great economy: lots of job notices and recruiting appeals. There was some chatter about Tim’s anti-harassment blog post.

Executive Summary:

• HTML5/CSS3/AppCache are what should have been available 20 years ago, and are significant improvements that allow both desktop and mobile development in HTML. Although the HTML5 video tag gets a lot of press, HTML5 includes equally important forms improvements.
• DNSSEC is complex and new signatures should be generated every 30 days or less (to reduce replay attacks by limiting the signature validity period), which is a burden on companies without a full-time DNS hostmaster. Third-party DNS hosting companies are salivating over DNSSEC.
• MySQL long-term stewardship is still in question, with Oracle hemorrhaging MySQL developers and closing access to their bugs database, but MontyProgram and Percona maintaining strong forks.

Here’s my notes on some of the tutorials and talks I attended:

Monday

HTML5 & CSS3: The Good Enough Parts
Estelle Weyl, Standardista.com
Slides

- transform-origin is key to snowflake demo looking realistic, easy to use
- background resets everything, so use individual properties
- background-position – use all 4 values
- background-size auto contain cover, handy for iPhones
- text-overflow: ellipsis
- minimal HTML5 document:

<!doctype html5>
<meta charset=utf8>
<title></title>

(head and body are implied)
- or even send tags in server headers
- changed most elements
- <i lang=”"> useful to style
- small tag useful for legal smallprint, since there’s no copyright metatag yet
- html5shim
- Modernizr
- HTML5 Boilerplate – good way to learn HTML5 and CSS3
- tabindex=”-1″ allows JS to set focus and not bother user otherwise
- spellcheck=”true” | “false”
- itemtype=”http://data-vocabulary.org/Person”
- new input types
- placeholder, pattern, required, spellcheck, validate
- a@b is deliverable for internal email servers. hmm.
- meter, progress, output widgets
- HTML5Rocks
- button generator at css3button.net
- Voronoi diagram demo
- aquarium.js
- web workers

Monday Lunch

Benjamin, Ubuntu
- loves CloudFlare
- likes Linode
- nimbula

Talked to an open mapping data fellow about various projects. Google ToS is scary when it comes to that kind of data.

Monday Afternoon

Moose is Perl: A Guide to the New Revolution
Ricardo Signes, Pobox.com
Slides

- detailed talk about Moose features and syntax
- chatted with other folks at break time about topics like CSS::Inliner and Mojolicious web framework (with minimal dependencies) by Sebastian Riedel.

Tuesday Afternoon

Three For Five – Functional HTML5 & CSS3 for Designers & Developers
Jason VanLue, Envy Labs and CodeSchools.com

- good training session with fun sample – a beer menu created from 1 photo (CSS3 text scaling and rotation) and HTML5/CSS3 styled text
- training class is available online for $75 (also jQuery and 2 Rails classes)

Click to Enlarge

Tuesday Night

Photo credit: Jacob Helwig

Creating a Scalable JavaScript Application Architecture
Nicholas Zakas, NCZConsulting
Slides

An AJAX client only cares about getting the data it wants, not response codes, etc.

Use layered JavaScript client architecture:

- sandbox
- application
- library (Dojo, YUI, MooTools, etc. )

www.nczonline.net
@slicknet
Author of “High Performance JavaScript”

Wednesday Lunch

I talked to Ben Golub, CEO of Gluster.

- 80% business, 20% scientific
- users include box.net, Pandora.com
- written in C
- minimum is 2 nodes for replication
- lots of people use it in EC2
- office located in Sunnyvale.

Wednesday Afternoon

HTML5: All about Web Forms
Estelle Weyl, standardista.com

- use label tag with forms to ease navigation for end-users
- use placeholder attribute, better for screenreaders than JS coding
- multiple autofocus defaults to last one in HTML5
- type=”text” is default, so tel, email, etc. degrades on all browsers back to text
- form element can disassociate parent form, useful for AJAX multiform pages
- input types good for mobile devices to show useful soft keyboard for url or email input types
- numeric step options
- test date and numeric input types for usability. Scrolling birthdays or zip codes is painful
- still need JS
- Opera is first with new UI features but last with artistic design, so currently has hideous tooltip appearance
- list and datalist like exploded select. Include select for IE backward compatibility
- meter, progress and output UI elements
- input type=text x-webkit-speech, now on Google homepage

HTML5 in Your Pocket: Application Cache and Local Storage
Scott Davis, ThirstyHead.com

- 4 million Macs, 32 million iDevices in last quarter
- Basecamp Mobile
- “Dive into HTML5″ by Mark Pilgrim online
- cookies should be called thimbles, only 4k
- HTML5 localstorage supported in IE8, FF 3.5, so practically all
- 5 MB, QUOTA_EXCEEDED_ERR, can’t increase now
- StatCounter browser stats
- gist 350433: Storage polyfill using window.name and cookies
- no version of IE or FF support web SQL and they probably won’t, FF for philosophical reasons
- cache manifest
- genManifest bookmarklet
- FF about:cache and Firebug are handy to see caches
- appcache has no expiry date
- date stamping manifest file causes re-download
- 404 causes none to be saved
- treat appcache as only slightly more secure than cookies, which are round-tripped
- webplication
- still sandboxed from local file access, could use node.js or signed app
- See W3C HTML5 offline

Profiling and Detecting Bottlenecks in Software
Bryan Call, Yahoo!/Apache Committer
PowerPoint .pptx

- usual savings (machines, moving parts, get smart)
- top, htop
- vmstat, dstat
- time cmd
- Boost logging does small writes, allocates memory when it gets behind, causing both IO and memory pressure
- profilers like oprofile and google profile cause 1% to 8% slowdown
- valgrind’s callgrind much more resources
- oprofile has script to convert output to kcachegrind
- opcontrol –deinit
- sysctl nmi_watchdog off
- opcontrol –no-vmlinux
- opcontrol –daemon
- google profiler userland, LD_PRELOAD
- env CPUPROFILE=/tmp/mybin.prof /usr/local/bin/my_binary_compiled_with_libprofiler_so
- caching: don’t do the same work twice
- choose the correct algorithms and data structures: dqueue vs. List, hash vs. trees, locks vs. r/w locks, bloom filter
- reuse memory, stack vs. heap, tcmalloc
- make fewer system calls (larger reads and writes)
- faster hardware, bonded NICs, SSDs, RAID, CPU, more cores
- read How to Profile Apache Traffic Server
- bootchart
- http_load now uses epoll
- he made ab multi-core

From kernel.txt: “nmi_watchdog: Enables/Disables the NMI watchdog on x86 systems. When the value is non-zero the NMI watchdog is enabled and will continuously test all online cpus to determine whether or not they are still functioning properly. Currently, passing “nmi_watchdog=” parameter at boot time is required for this function to work. If LAPIC NMI watchdog method is in use (nmi_watchdog=2 kernel parameter), the NMI watchdog shares registers with oprofile. By disabling the NMI watchdog, oprofile may have more registers to utilize.”

CoffeeScript: A New Hope for JavaScript
Scott Davis, ThirstyHead.com

- trainer, author, worked on Comcast/Time Warner TVs which mostly use WebKit
- little language that compiles into JS
- JS V8 headless, like node.js
- PhantomJS is headless HTML, handy for testing
- Google GWT compiles Java to JS
- “transpiler”
- install node.js
- install npm
- npm install -g coffeescript
- –tokens, –nodes like java p
- immediately invoked function expression IIFE
- coffeescript: string interpolation #{name}, “”"
- objects with left-hand spacing like python

Thursday

DNSSEC @ Mozilla
Shyam Mani, Mozilla Corporation
Slides

- BIND 9.7 is nice for DNSSEC
- Keys are everything, protect them. Have a backup plan.
- Cisco core routers by default don’t expect large DNS transfers:

policy-map global policy class inspection_default inspect dns maximum-length 4096

- DS was live, no signed zones
- watch log levels, can be chatty and quickly fill disk with logs
- DNSSEC has no immediate benefit to end-users, since resolvers don’t honor it
- their logs show 1000:1 dns vs dnssec queries for last 6 months, but growing
- IOS Firewall DNSSEC

Ask Google Engineers Anything
Chris DiBona, Google

- 55 Google employees attending OSCON this year
- mostly end-user questions about Google+ circles and API
- or running Go on android
- or why does my telco not do firmware releases for my smartphone
- or not happy with Google search results this month
- I asked about original reason for GFS. Originally, the hardware was really that flaky, and Google even actively bought bulk refurbed computers and RAM, sometimes off the back of a truck. Got a gopher plushie in return.
- also some good feedback complaints: google groups UI inadequate for managing 350 groups in an Education scenario
- inadequate data import tools for non-profit users of groups, mentioned by a religious charity.

How Not to Design Like a Developer: Open Source Can Look Good Too!
Chrissie Brodigan, Mozilla/Firefox

- KPI vs. git (different goals)
- @sirupsen
- story about the downloads map graphic for FF 4 – a developer silently removed social button graphics, limiting participation of wider audience. Marketing needs to explain why and how other staff fit into outreach programs.
- hang out on #projectdesign
- design contests are a good way to get them to come out of the woodwork
- designers hang out on twitter, not irc
- programmers should avoid big red buttons that scare users, and improve accessibility
- Inkscape, Blender, HTML and CSS are some Open Source tools for design mockups
- do AB testing or survey users
- designers want to be martyrs, so be careful they don’t offer more than you are willing to accept (start with 1 icon rather than the whole set)
- take a look at graphics libre for icons
- Quitestrong.com 5 girls who do design

Gearman BOF
Brian Aker

- Gearman polls, beanstalk busy waits
- nice to have feature to give up to another thread
- monitor projects handle launching of workers
- Gearman has durable and non-durable queues
- is a superset of the crap you handrolled. Most of the homegrown apps peak at 50% to 60% of Gearman’s features
- Gearman is production ready, but the postgresql driver less so because of fewer test cases and Brian’s lesser familiarity
- setup ntp and use Gearman coalescence for redundant cron servers
- can inspect queue
- agnostic to backend
- 99designs.com looking at this, same use case as original developer
- I still think that if you already have a database app, adding a status column gets you a lot of Gearman functionality without one more moving part.

MariaDB BOF
Monty Widenius, MontyProgram AB

- Monty mentioned that the latest release of MariaDB 5.3-beta has faster replication from group commit and performance improvements on the master, which also help the slave. Also subqueries and joins work much better.
- Monty talked about his Aria storage engine, which is a replacement for MyISAM that has both transaction and non-transaction modes. It’s intended for users who want the space savings of MyISAM. Over time it may compete with InnoDB.
- Monty’s responsibility is to convince Percona to merge into 1 source base sometime
- it’s estimated that although Oracle still has the InnoDB team, they may only have 1 general MySQL server programmer left.
- he explained that MontyProgram developers work 50% on feature requests from end-users, and 50% Open Source-related. So paid requests for 1 week of work really need to cover 2 weeks of developer time for that model to work. Typically a medium-sized change is roughly $12,000 and includes development, testing and documentation.
- Zmanda got FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK NO CHECKPOINT for a beer, though. Monty was able to find a code path that could be locked to prevent Aria and MyISAM from writing anything during the backup.
- I sponsored WL#232 for USD$100 to add a SHUTDOWN statement to MySQL
- Monty explained that MERGE tables may be a better choice than MySQL partitions for logging applications.
- attendees from MontyProgram, SkySQL, Percona, DeNA

AskMonty: MySQL “Wishlist” Session from an online travel agency
MySQL Manual 5.5: FLUSH Syntax

Perl Lightning Talks
Hosted by Geoff Avery

- a talk on why arrogant community members telling others that “they need a thick skin” is unhelpful
- a talk by a young Perl community member on getting commit access, and how others can get the spirit and contribute
- Larry did several talks, mostly encouraging backporting Perl6 features to Perl5 it seemed, perhaps as a replacement to going Moose
- nice song on the importance of public libraries, which face shutdown due to economic budgeting problems in Australia and USA
- nice comedy juggling act comparing programming languages. Perl6 was omitted as “nothing has been updated in 5 or 6 years”, prompting Larry to say that he was happy he has a thick skin. See above.
- afterward, I talked to a booking.com rep about why a European company needed to actively recruit in USA and world-wide. He said that European developers are happy working where they are now, and it’s easier to recruit in places with mobile workforces like the USA. He would like to hire a couple developers per week to meet their development schedule.

• Airbus/Air France used wrong/defective pitot tubes for that aircraft
• Three Air France pilots with 3,000 to 11,000 hours of experience unable to recognize and recover from a stall for 3.5 minutes, killing 228 people
• Airbus avionics with confusing alerts that suppressed the stall warning horn
• French manslaughter charge required to motivate parties to recover the black boxes almost 2 years after the crash.

The A330 has standby instruments, but I wonder how they’re configured. A simple electric Attitude Indicator (AI) ($1,000 and up) and a working stall warning horn are enough to recognize and recover from an incipient stall, even in IMC.

So far authorities have lied about the passengers being killed upon impact. At 120 mph vertical and 100 mph horizontal, likely there were many initial survivors, especially in the back of the aircraft.

The cockpit voice recording hasn’t been released, so stay tuned.

cnn.com: Air France crash pilots lost vital speed data, say investigators
wsj.com: Crash Report Shows Confused Cockpit
avweb.com: Air France 447 – How Did This Happen?

“According to the policies of the DGCA [the Indian equivalent of the FAA], if a pilot plans to go around it can lead the pilot to report right up to the DGCA.”

From April to August 2010, airplane go arounds in India were violations, and investigated by airlines and reported to the DGCA, .

After the Mangalore crash, that policy was supposedly ended, but I suspect they only mean de-formalized.

For those who aren’t familiar with landing procedures in an airplane, an attempted landing can result in either a landing or go around for another landing attempt.

The crew is supposed to be mentally equally prepared for either possibility, since there are numerous reasons for discontinuing a landing attempt.

Some of the reasons are: ATC instruction, animal or vehicle on the runway, loss of navigation signal, microburst or variation in wind, lack of stabilized approach, landing gear or indicator malfunction, insufficient flight or runway visibility for landing, or conflicting flightpath with another aircraft.

By classifying a go around as a violation, the Indian aviation system was attempting to micromanage pilots, who are the final authority during operation of the aircraft. As a result, pilots would be tempted to push a landing in a bad situation, or delay the go around – both of which happened in the Mangalore accident.

I think the thought process behind the policy was that the DGCA wanted to know why an airline, presumably on an IFR flight plan usually ending with a straight-in approach, would need to do a go around. And the airlines went along since go arounds cost a couple grand in fuel and cause delays, so why not discourage them?

The Mangalore runway is 8,038′ long. Visibility was reported as 6 km with temperature at 27C and dewpoint 26C with clouds at 2000′. Local time was 6 am. Both pilots were familiar with the airport and had previously made 19 and 66 landings respectively.

The Mangalore accident revealed multiple weaknesses in India’s airline system:

1. bad policy regarding go arounds
2. weak cockpit CRM
3. and a crew who couldn’t fly an approach or do a go-around to save their lives.

The 158 passengers that died deserved a lot better.

topnews.co.uk: DGCA for More Security in Air
currentnewsindia.com: After Mangalore plane crash, co-pilots empowered
currentnewsindia.com: The last 30 minutes of the plane that crashed at Mangalore (ATC transcript)
avweb.com: Report: Fatal India Crash Pilot Had “Sleep Inertia”
avweb.com: Landing Exposes Fake Indian Airline Pilot (Captain for IndiGo Airlines with forged ATPL)
Indiatimes.com: 25 Indian Pilots May Have Bought Their Licences
Indian Pilot licence scam: 2 more DGCA officials arrested
flightglobal.com: Air India 737 captain deeply asleep shortly before fatal approach
DGCA scraps special exams for pilots
SpiceJet fire: Parcel was not on cargo list

There were a handful of talks on the subjects of DNS and IPv6.

The hacker Jeopardy session was a lot of fun. I think the audience got more correct answers than the panel. I was impressed with the software somebody wrote to show the game categories – very convincing. Afterward, the EFF had an interesting fundraiser (your photo beside a “model”.)

The weather was hot but clear. The McDonald’s across the street is open 24 hours and has free WiFi.

I walked over to the Fashion Show Mall (about 1 mile.) It has a variety of restaurants on different levels, including a Maggiano’s, the Capital Grille, and a gourmet burger stand.

theregister.co.uk: Defcon speaker calls IPv6 a ‘security nightmare’

It was a good conference, and we had beautiful weather all week long.

Executive Summary

The themes promoted by the conference organizers were Cloud Computing, NoSQL, Emerging Languages (Scala, Erlang, Parrot, Go) and Android phone development.

The @oscon twitter channel was heavily used to coordinate amongst organizers and attendees. I used the TwiXtreme twitter client program on my BlackBerry.

Plug Computers were very popular in the Expo area. They are 5 watt ARM-based computers running Debian Linux that fit into a power brick-sized case and cost $99 to $129 depending on features. The Marvell booth had a few models on display, from GlobalScale (GuruPlug) and Ionics. High-end models have dual gigabit NICs, multiple USB ports, a WiFi access point and other expansion ports.

There was also continuing buzz regarding Facebook’s Flashcache SSD module (GPL v2) for linux, and also ZFS snapshots.

Tutorials

I went to the Gearman Cookbook tutorial, the first half of the Chef tutorial and some of the Cloud Summit talks.

The Gearman Cookbook tutorial was excellent. After a detailed overview of the Gearman architecture and implementations in Perl and C, a number of use cases were explored in detail, including before and after code samples. The talk was both easy to listen to as an overall survey, as well as providing immediately useful info for those wanting to deploy it.

The Chef tutorial was very detailed – too much so perhaps. I went to the first half only, since I am not planning to implement Chef soon (I use PXE and anaconda/kickstart with CentOS), and did not need that level of detail at this time. cfengine, puppet and chef are ops tools for configuring servers. Chef uses Ruby data structures for its configuration files, and has include files and other useful syntax. Basically, users can “code” server configuration, as if they were traditional apps.

I went to some of the Cloud Summit talks and BOFs, but found that anybody who has done a simple project using EC2 knew as much or more than the speakers, some I would call blowhards.

Marten Mickos, president of Eucalyptus, is refreshing in that he is always clear about being in it for the money, while also promoting Open Source.

Sessions

Some of the most memorable sessions to me were:

Introduction to MongoDB, Kristina Chodorow (MongoDB)

Kristina is the maintainer of the Perl and PHP drivers for MongoDB. She gave an overview of MongoDB, a NoSQL document store, and its command-line interface, which uses JavaScript.

Some day she will release a sharding tool for MongoDB.

Scaling SourceForge with MongoDB, Nosh Petigara (10gen), Rick Copeland (SourceForge.net / GeekNet)

Nosh and Rick gave an excellent review of incorporating MongoDB into the SourceForge site.

- SF query load is mostly read-only
- ops team benchmarked a few NoSQL candidates, and MongoDB won on performance
- original MySQL servers had 64 GB RAM. After migration to MongoDB, same server machines but only 8 GB RAM
- backup dumps are verified to be bitwise the same as masters
- have to be careful not to dump all documents in your database to the network or it will max out switches
- SF relies on first-class data centers and replication slaves, less worried about MongoDB mmap (not crash-safe)
- I personally looked at their performance numbers and site graphs (on an iPad), and the end result was impressive.

Perl Lightning Talks

As always, the Perl Lightning Talks are a highpoint of the conference.

The “cartoon” of Vincent Pit’s remarkable CPAN module(VPIT) contributions was both informative and hilarious. Vincent is a French Ph.D. candidate in advanced geometry.

Cloud BOF (3 Hours)

The Cloud BOF was disorganized, starting 30 minutes late and for some reason was subdivided into 4 audience groups. Startups and vendors trying to make a cloud sales push led the BOF, including cloud and DNS service providers.

The Health Regulations subgroup came up with a couple ways to make the Cloud palatable to regulators by using encryption on all data due to the multi-tenancy issues with sharing public VMs.

I was in the NoSQL group, which discussed general issues and particular successes. Memcached was the clearest winner, while some people also had success with MongoDB and Redis.

My neighbor was an engineer at Postrank.com. He said that they were happy with HAProxy, but much less happy with the unpredictable IO available when running MySQL on EC2. He also said to carefully look at storage volumes available to your instance, as one is a useful tmpfs. They use AuthSMTP to get around EC2 being generally blacklisted for outbound email.

Database BOFs

MySQL BOF

The MySQL AB engineering staff has left Oracle. Monty Program AB (21 staff) has the core developers, and Percona Inc. (32 staff) has the consultants. Oracle still has some of the InnoDB programmers.

The business plan for Monty Program AB is 60% commercially-sponsored MySQL development, and 40% community-request development. Monty would like commercial users of MySQL to sponsor patches that would benefit them.

Mark mentioned that using Nehalem instructions for CRC were much faster, and that Facebook was using partitions for truncating tables instead of doing multi-record deletes. (See his blog for more details.)

One person mentioned using a commercial backup tool, R1Soft, that inserts a linux kernel module to allow filesystem snapshots. He said to carefully test backup and restore in your environment, especially for filesystems greater than 1 TB which may exceed certain block counter limits. Peter said that some of his clients had used it with varying success.

It worked for him in his environment, and the file browser allows selective file restore (he uses it to restore by priority where a system runs multiple applications.) It starts at $299 for the Standard Edition, and also has MySQL Add-on and Enterprise Editions.

PostgreSQL BOF

The PostgreSQL BOF talked about 30 or so changes that went into version 9.

One of the most exciting new features is a native replication feature, called streaming replication (block-based.) The advantage over Slony-I replication is that Slony-I is trigger-based, so has a variety of issues included inability to replicate DDL commands.

Some of the developers mimed replication events, which was rather amusing to watch. Yes, it was taped.

PostgreSQL is released under the PostgreSQL Licence, which is BSDish.

Peter Zaitsev, co-founder of Percona, organized 3 BOFs, including XtraDB, XtraBackup, Maatkit, Percona Server, Sphinx Search and Running Databases on Flash Storage.

Sphinx Search BOF

Andrew Aksyonoff, the original programmer of Sphinx Search (GPL v2), couldn’t make it to OSCON (the good excuse was that he was busy coding), so Richard Kelm (Sphinx sales/customer support honcho) and Peter filled in (Percona is a business partner with Sphinx, and many of Percona’s clients use it.)

Some of the attendees were existing users, like myself, and some from HP and other companies were looking for a large-scale search solution or alternative to Lucene.

Monty mentioned that the latest MySQL 5.1 should be used, as there have been a number of performance and reliability improvements. Full-text search is supposed to be 10x faster than 5.0, and replication is nearly bug-free by now.

Sphinx Search now has real-time index updates in version 1.1.0 beta. Another very nice feature is SQL+FS indexing.

Here is the full Sphinx 1.1.0 changelog.

Running Databases on Flash Storage BOF

The Running Databases on Flash Storage BOF had a combination of MySQL and Postgres users who have tested or used most of the SSD products: FusionIO, violin, Intel, OCZ, etc. Everybody was happy with SSD IOPS performance, but less so with cost and metadata RAM requirements with the add-in boards (FusionIO may require 4 GB RAM for metadata.)

Peter said that 20% to 30% of his clients are already using SSD – across the spectrum of vendors and models. Some are also trying “massive RAM” solutions, like Cisco servers with 384 GB RAM.

Some users had 1+ TB Postgres databases with very thorny backup and mgmt. issues. One solution was to start a snapshot, but not do the copy operation.

Expo Notes

I had an enjoyable talk with Austin Hook, who has operated the OpenBSD Store for many years. He lives near Calgary, the center of OpenBSD/OpenSSH/PF development. He mentioned that some perennial financial contributors had stopped because of the recession, so here’s the donations link.

I also talked to some reps from a Brazilian outsourcing firm, ActMinds. They currently have 400 employees across Brazil and a sales office in Philadelphia. Brazil is only 2 hours ahead of EST. They said the minimum project size is 2 developers and developer turnover a low 5%/annum. Their pricing is $35 to $45/hour.

And I had fun handling the plug computers on display at the Marvell booth. The Ionics boards are amazingly densely populated.

Discussions

I had the opportunity to talk to a long-time Portland resident who works as a computer consultant. He said that the Portland economy is not doing great, and really hasn’t done well since old-growth logging was stopped after 90% of the forests were cleared. And although hundreds of miles of fiber optic has been laid downtown, it’s not available for residential use. However, the Beaverton area does have ubiquitous FTTH.

I also talked to somebody who attended the Emerging Languages talks. He’s working on his M.Sc. in Computer Science, so found those talks fascinating.

Twitter Humor

There were some humorous tweets:

- “my MongoDB and CouchDB mugs are fighting each other.”
- “I got one MongoDB mug, but need two to safely store coffee.”

Notes

Note to self: skip the nightly parties unless you have a date. The bars are too loud to talk to anybody.

Note to the O’Reilly conference organizers: use meetup.com for the BOFs like ApacheCon does. The average audience was about 10 people, and with meetup it would be 4x that.

OSCON 2010 Slides
Tim Bray: Desperate Perl Hacker
Youtube: OSCON 2010 videos
blip.tv: OSCON2010 videos
wikipedia: Plug Computer
Jeremy Zawodny: MongoDB Early Impressions

Easier said than done.

What drugstores and office supply stores call a “first aid kit” is just a box of 100 bandaids and 100 tylenols – totally inadequate for any kind of trauma.

It ends up that anything useful is called a “trauma bag” or “EMT first responder kit.”

Those have basic surgical tools, such as shears for removing clothing, bandage scissors and forceps, gloves, epi for allergic reactions, in addition to bandaids and tylenol.

Beyond that, your trauma kit needs to be customized for the expected environment.

Hikers need a light-weight kit than contains blister and snake-bite aids.

Airmen can carry a heavier kit that contains burn aids and splints.

Make sure your kit, like any luggage, is adequately secured in the aircraft. (In Cessnas I use a seatbelt instead of dumping items in the rear baggage compartment. Otherwise in a quick deceleration, such as a crash or noseover, heavy objects will strike the pilot and front seat passenger. Ask Martha King what a toolbox to the head feels like.)

And last but not least – don’t forget training on what to do with all that gear when the occasion arises.

In the past, Bali was regarded as an inexpensive place for young Australians and others to vacation.

For the first time however, I would have to say that is becoming a memory of the past.

There are the occasional local hotels still available for under $25/nite, but none of the newer hotels, which are aiming for $100 to $200/nite.

If you can afford it, the new Holiday Inn Baruna Bali in Tuban at $120 to $200/nite is awesome – opening right onto Tuban/Wanasegara Beach. The style is more modern than Balinese, but you can visit the Risata Hotel Bali down the street and see lush Balinese gardens and stonework.

Taxis have greatly increased in price recently. The fare used to be an afterthought, typically less than $1 within a city.

There are 2 classes of taxis now:

1. Bluebird – great service and fair prices – old (cheaper) argo meter settings, worth calling in
2. other companies – average service and high prices – new (higher) argo setttings, or even 40 ribu minimum pickup fare from Galeria Mall. Indonesian visitors are scared of these prices.

To save money, use an ojek (motorcycle taxi), or try carpooling and scheduling multiple stops on the same trip.

Or pick a hotel within easy walking distance of sites that’s also near a major travel artery. In Kuta, that would be at the exit of Jl. Legian near Jl. Pantai Kuta (easy walk to the Legian nightclub scene, memorial and Kuta Beach as well as near taxis to Tuban or Denpasar.) In Tuban, that would be on Jl. Wana segara or Jl. Kartika Pl. (easy walk to Tuban Beach or Discovery Mall/Mal Centro.)

I talked to some merchants in Tuban, and asking rents for storefronts have doubled in the past 12 months.

All of the computer stores selling PCs in Kuta, Tuban and Sanur have closed, likely due to high rents, low margins and lack of capital. There are a few Mac stores, such as PC Max and one in Carrefour. Otherwise, you must go to the large Rimo Computer Mall in Denpasar. Rimo is pretty good for basic parts, with new releases lagging Jakarta by 2 to 3 weeks.

The most comprehensive selection of DSLR batteries and accessories in Kuta-Tuban is in the Zoom Digital Kiosk in Discovery Mall, Tuban.

If you’re a computer or business person and need to stay in touch online, visit Internet Sartika at Jalan Wana segara No. 29, Tuban. It has dual broadband connections (1 Mbps DSL and 1 Mbps fiber optic) and new 3 Ghz Intel Duo Core 2 computers, for the quickest Internet connections.

Several tourists asked me what’s worthwhile to see in Bali.

One of my favorite places is still GWK Cultural Park, which has massive stone monuments, great views overlooking Kuta and local dances starting at twilite. It’s a photographer’s paradise. GWK is only 30 minutes from Kuta or Tuban by taxi and can take anywhere from 2 hours to a day to appreciate.