A couple of weeks ago I read Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and The Bazaar, a collection of essays about Open Source software. Raymond writes quite well for a techie (either that or he has a superb editor), and the book is coherent. I didn’t agree with most of the book, but I think it’s important […]
Jeremy Zawodny spoke Friday morning about MySQL Scaling Pains. I’m still just waking up, so here are some abbreviated notes. Security administration (don’t just GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO someuser, but think seriously about delegating privileges to separate users) Size Limits (MyISAM default 4GB limit can be modified, you just need to know the […]
After lunch and a little bit of work-related email, I went to Randy Ray‘s Why XML Hasn’t Cured Our Ills or Saved the World (slides). The talk centered around five things Ray thinks we do wrong with XML: People are too quick to use XML. You have to aks yourself if it’s really necessary. Is […]
I stuck around for local software guy Phil Tomson’s Ruby for Perl Programmers talk. This session was more technical, with the first code example showing up on the 4th slide. Phil’s slides are online, so I won’t attempt to replicate them here. Something listed as a “gotcha” actually seems to be a feature to me. […]
Yukihiro Matsumoto spoke about The Power and Philosophy of Ruby on Thursday morning. The talk was all philosophy, no code. Very entertaining. We started off by discussing natural languages and the Tower of Babel, with a comparison of Japanese and its use of ideograms versus English. Matsumoto said that he was heavily influenced by the […]
Wandering around after lunch, I stopped by the Perl Lightning Talks (slides) session. I was delighted to hear Autrijus Tang‘s five-minute rap These are 1% of my favourite CPAN… in Chinese, followed by an English translation sung to the tune of These are a few of my favorite things… from The Sound of Music. It […]
I bounced around on Wednesday between a bunch of different sessions. In the morning, I did some last-minute touch-ups on my slides, then caught the tail end of John Coggeshall’s Interfacing Java / COM with PHP. After my talk on One Year of PHP at Yahoo! (slides), I grabbed some lunch in the speaker’s room. […]
Tim O’Reilly gave this morning’s keynote address, “The Open Source Paradigm Shift”. The talk was reminiscent of last year’s Watching The Alpha Geeks keynote at ApacheCon, although now he is able to say the phrase “paradigm shift” with a straight face. Largely the talk was trying to make the case that we shouldn’t try to […]
Slides for my talk tomorrow, One Year of PHP at Yahoo! are now available online. The talk will be from 11:30am – 12:15pm in Salon D.
John Ashenfelter spoke about Building Data Warehouses with MySQL. After surveying the audience with some questions about what database technology people use and how much data they store, he described what he felt was the one and only reason to create a data warehouse: to answer business questions. The first two-thirds of the talk discussed […]