Punctuating The Silence

Looking through my blog’s archive, I never did blog about my getting started with Facebook, but I’m blaming, er, crediting the 2008 O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). They had put up a note that Facebook was to be the social network of choice for that year. Previously, I had been avoiding Facebook, but with that final nudge, I relented and created the account. And Facebook has been great for reconnecting with people, and glimpsing little bits of peoples’ lives you wouldn’t necessarily see.

There’s a new social networking concept that I’ve dabbled with, but never really got into, called “microblogging”. This is where you make short posts, usually only a sentence or two, or a link. The site that’s been around the longest and is the most successful is Twitter, and no, I do not have an account there. Yet.

I just finished reading an interesting entry on the TED Blog called “How To Talk While People are Twittering“, and it discusses an article on how, as a speaker, being aware of the backchannel communication of your audience can benefit both the audience and you. The point for me is that I’ve been going to OSCON for several years now, and it was only a few years ago that I discovered the traditional OSCON backchannel: IRC.  From that, many of the points this article enumerates, I know first-hand to be true.
So, going to the 2009 OSCON site, seeing that the very first icon in the list of social networks and media to be used this year is Twitter, I have very little doubt that in addition to IRC, Twitter is going to be heavily used and will be another great source of commentary and information (we *are* talking about a group of notorious early adopters).

I know I can easily follow the twittering without an account: there are lots of aggregators out there, but I’m guessing that I’ll create an account for 2 reasons: the first is to be able to participate in the discussion, and the second is that I’ve been saying for the last few years that I’ll blog the conference, and while last year I did ok, I don’t have the greatest track record. Twitter might not be great, in-depth prose, but it will be (micro) blogging, and it will provide a trail that will serve as a memory aid should I then go back and write real blog posts.

Look for me on Twitter. Coming Soon. Summer of ‘09. Maybe before.

The weather is cooler today (about 10° cooler than the norm, according to the local station), and the walk over from the hotel (about 5-10 minutes) was a great way to start the day.  I actually read the schedule, and went to the right place for breakfast today (almost missed it yesterday!), and got caught up somewhat on blogging and news.

My first tutorial was “PHP: Architecture, Scalability, and Security” by Rasmus Lerdorf.  Rasmus, who created PHP, is always inspiring when he talks about the internals of PHP, and using available tools for getting under the hood of what your code is doing at the system call level, and getting optimizations that you might never have thought of.  The first part of this talk was a refresher for me of what he talked about last year, but I never get tired of listening to him, mostly I think because his philosophy toward writing PHP is very similar to mine (or vise-versa: I don’t mean to sound egotistical; Rasmus could code circles around me).  If nothing else, this talk is entertaining: Rasmus runs a web vulnerabilities scanner of his own making against various websites, starting with the conference site.  This year, the talk got a visit from an O’Reilly organizer and their main web guy, hoping the “attacks” were coming from him!  They were nice about it (an change, Rasmus said, from previous years), and even stayed to hear more of the talk.  Other sites scanned were from audience volunteers (at their own sites), and one shouldn’t have: his site had every vulnerability Rasmus’ scanner had a rule for.  Fun stuff.

The afternoon tutorial was “TCP/IP Troubleshooting for System Administrators“.  The speaker, Darren Hoch, was energetic, engaging and funny, making what could be a dry topic (some other word for entertaining).  Most of it covered tcpdump and netstat (although using using some tools (or variants) that I hadn’t heard of: tethereal and dsniff), and using them in different case studies.  The handout will be a useful reference.  In all, some interesting information that can be used in everyday network issues, and a good refresher.

In a few minutes, I’ll be heading to the airport to fly to Portland, OR, for this year’s O’Reilly Open Source Conference. I’m really looking forward to this year, and I hope to be blogging about it regularly. For those not going, but wish they were, check YouTube - the organizers have resolved to post as much video of the sessions as possible.

More Later!

At OSCON last month, I entered the annual HP photo contest with a few entries, one of which used a Make-inspired, door peephole fish-eye lens. Turns out, I won the contest! Now that I’m an award-winning photographer, I plan, er, to take more photographs! I won an HP Photosmart 475 photo printer, which I’m really happy with! Thanks, HP! And O’Reilly for another great conference!. You can see the winning photo on my Flickr photostream, here.

A free minute, and still no post of any substance. *sigh*. I have three blog articles pending, that I’ve been trying to finish and post, and no time to do it. I don’t quite have that same blown-away, I’ve-got-so-much-to-try-when-I-get-home feeling, but this year’s con is certainly keeping me busy. Hopefully more later!

In a few minutes, I’ll be off to Portland, OR, for this year’s O’Reilly Open Source Conference. I was there last year, and it was a great time. I hadn’t been in a few years, so it was interesting to see the changes, and now that I know some of what to expect, I’m really looking forward to this year. I also have the added bonus of travelling with a friend and colleague who hasn’t been to OSCON or Portland before, so I get to do a bit of tour guide. Promises to be a great week! Stay tuned, more here as the week progresses!

This was my second O’Reilly Open Source Conference (the first one was 2001 in San Diego), and it has come a long way in 4 years. This was an amazing experience: great speakers, lots of stuff to see and so, a great location, and information overload. You (well, OK, I - I guess I can’t speak for anyone else) come away with so many great ideas and so many new things you want to try, the problem is finding the time.

I would definitely reccommend this conference, and I’ll be going back next year for sure.

If you want more info, check out the website - they have links to everything that went on, a wiki that had lots of attendees contributing, and you can find most of the presentation there as well. Not to mention all of the blogs that can do the conference so much more justice that I could here…enjoy!