OScon Video

<lj-embed id="5" />

http://blog.envylabs.com/2009/08/5-days-of-oscon-day-2/

I'm at 5:13

Syndicated 2009-08-11 22:33:18 from Mark Atwood

LOLsnail. He looks so proud.

Syndicated 2009-07-24 17:45:54 from Mark Atwood

Burning Eyes

Julian Cash is again shooting portraits at OScon.

Syndicated 2009-07-23 15:53:45 from Mark Atwood

OScon so far

Sunday morning, in the wee hours of the morning, while packing, I discovered that I didn't know where either my DL or my Passport is. After spending an hour searching, I gave up, and decided to throw myself on the mercy of the TSA. Which I did at the airport. The TSA supervisor checked my credit cards, FlyClear card, corporate ID card, and CostCo card, and then stamped my boarding pass. I only need to do this 3 more times on this trip, and then do a very deep search of my room when I get back.

After I landed at SJC, I discovered that Tim Lord has shared the flight with me. If I had known that ahead of time, I would have let him share my taxi ride from Capitol Hill neighborhood to the SEA airport. As it was, I let him share my ride to San Jose Convention Center. I was actually too early to check into my hotel room. So instead I checked in my luggage, and then went off to find the Postgres Day.

Meeting up with open source community geeks, watching lightning talks, hacking, taking pictures.

I accidentally left my jacket in one of the meeting rooms, and ended up having to bid for it in an auction. So now I owe $20 to the Postgres Foundation. :)


Monday, I spent hacking and geek socializing, hanging out in the speaker room. Some of the tutorials, but I didn't end up going to any of them. Lunch was at the Good Karma cafe, which I had stumbled across the last time I was in San Jose.

Also on Monday, I hooked up MontyT with someone who may have a solution for automating the build of Drizzle on Windows machines, without manually maintaining Visual Studio Project files, or porting Autotools to Windows.


Tuesday, I went to the Gearman tutorial, and while in it, started working on http://forge.gearman.org/ and also started implementing a bunch of basic "plumbing" gearman workers that need to exist, to link together filesystem, mogilfs, couchdb, amazon web services, memcached, and Erlang.

Right now, I'm sitting in the Ignite talks. BrianA just won an Google O'Reilly Open Source Award.

Syndicated 2009-07-22 03:15:17 from Mark Atwood

Review: Erlang books

The fine folks at O'Reilly sent me reviewer copy of two books on Erlang

• Erlang Programming: A Concurrent Approach to Software Development by Francesco Cesarini and Simon Thompson
  
• Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World by Joe Armstrong.
  

I am currently in the process of learning Erlang for a personal project. These books both measures up to the high expectations I have come to expect from Pragmatic Programmers Publishing and from O'Reilly Books.

Erlang is a difficult language to "sell", and is a challenge to learn.

Both books assume you have decently good programming skills, and don't need your hand held too much about the idea of programming, and instead show you how Erlang is different, it's unique and interesting features, and some of "how to think in Erlang".

Both are very good books for learning the language, and gaining basic skill in using it.

Both of the cover pretty much the same territory, in pretty much the same order. You only really would need one of them, but they are both equally good, so I can't recommend one over the other. Either get both, or pick one at random.


I wish there was more on "how to think in Erlang", especially since most programmer's intuitions about multiprocessing and concurrency, born of battle scars with multithreaded programming in C/C++, will be wrong.

Syndicated 2009-07-20 23:27:10 (Updated 2009-07-27 15:01:01) from Mark Atwood