OSCon: Commercial OSS Business Panel
Favorite quote: "Larry, why don't you have corporate sponsors for your clothing?" (Tim O'Reilly to Larry Wall, in a discussion where top atheles were compared to top OS developers)
A couple of point that I found interesting:
-if support is business, conflict with writing good software?
-Morgan Stanley: probably will be 90% Linux-based in infrastructure in next couple of years. RedHat offers better services and support because thaty's what they're selling; MS gets money just letting people use software
OSCon: High Performance PHP
Talk by George Schlossnagle
Most of the stuff in his talk is stuff available elsewhere... The only thing I thought was original was what George called "George's Law":
George's Law: In any sufficiently complex system, no one person can know how everything works. Corollary: If your system is slow, there's a good change you won't know why without looking.
OSCon: PHP 5 + MySQL 5 = Perfect 10
Talk by Adam Trachtenburg
-mysqli: oop version as well as procedural
-variable binding, both for queries and results
-SSL connections
-subselects (MySQL 4.1)
-character sets (MySQL 4.1)
-stored procedures (MySQL 5)
-Cursors: Current Set of Records
-refer to SELECT results
-works within procedures and functions
-Views (MySQL 5)
Sounds like MySQL will finally be catching up in terms of features... I look forward to it.
OSCon: Encounter with the Wall
So I was standing around in the exhibit hall talking to Martin about something trivial (like why people use MySQL) whene I noticed Larry Wall standing there, apparently listening in on our conversation (which I was surprised since it wasn't a particularly interesting discussion).
Then there was a lull in our conversation, and I turned to Larry. He looked up from his Japanese-English dictionary, and asked "governor stone?" (To clarify, "chiji" could mean governor, and "iwa" means stone, so phonetically he translated my last name to "governor stone".) So we started talking, mostly about Japan and how it was an interesting society, with his daughter chirping in every now and then (in a jester's hat, no less, although she seemed pretty cool). Apparently he's been studying Japanese for a few months ("to keep those neurons working" he claimed, "but only when he doesn't want to work" according to his daughter).
Anyway, for the rest of my life, my first real memory of Larry Wall, The Perl God, would be of him looking up from his dictionary and going "governor stone?"
P.S. I never got around to telling him that I was more of a PHP guy. But maybe that was for the better.
