Right now I’m in the MySQL Storage Engines talk by Peter Zaitsev of the MySQL Performance Blog. Should be interesting.

zomg mindtouch win @ booth babe. Think a mix of Bridget Monahan and Morena Baccarin.

I was working during the keynotes, so I didn’t pay close attention, but O’Reilly was talking about the popularity of some languages and frameworks, CakePHP was not on the list.  This is A Good Thing.

Yesterday I encountered a bug in Cake that gives me the rage.  I was doing a $model->findbySomething where the argument for something is a random generated string like `48784231410e978`.  Cake was like “oh an exponent, and since it’s a number I’m not a gonna qoute it in the SQL.”  Oh fuck you Cake.  Now I’m getting a MySQL error because you are passing a massive number (e978 is HUGE) to a varchar column.  WTF!

Anyway, the first session I went to was Terry Chay’s “The Internet is an Ogre“. It wasn’t that educational, but it was fairly amusing. I like that Chay said “shoot” when something with the presentation went awry, but dude was all “fuck” and “shit” during the presentation.

Right now I’m in the “Metaprogramming in Ruby” session. Too much Ruby this Ruby that, not enough meta-programming so far. Also, dark blue font on black background does not show up well on projection.

Of course, OSCON is same as always. Over 9000 nerds, but only 3 of them are female.

Today OSCON lunch was brought to us by Google. It was so much classier and better than previous years. And like I said to Montana, it probably cost about five seconds of Google’s revenue. (It’s probably less, but I’m too lazy to do the math.)

The dude from Google doing the Code Review session I’m in right now mentioned this book. This guy <3 peer programming.

Code review tools: rietveld, review board, codestriker, java code reviewer (written python and reviews more than just java code).

So far the dtrace session was the coolest. It spilled over by 14 minutes and almost everyone stayed, so you know people were into it.

The file IO talk was pretty interesting. One trick the speaker mentioned is to write to a temp file, fsync, close, and then rename. So if the write fails, the original file is still intact. Of course, don’t do for large files. Apparently Evolution does this trick even if your mailbox file is huge.

Also, on OSX fsync() doe NOT sync your shit to the disk. LOL

The speaker also recommend using sqlite when appropriate. This way you don’t have to worry about all the data integrity stuff.

Dude said WIN and FAIL way too much though…like, over 9000 times!

Whoa whoa whoa, free beer and wine during after hours? Too bad I’ve got this headache. (I’m staying after for a while because there are no internets at my parents’.)

EDIT: regarding the CakePHP thing I bitched about–it’s not totally Cake’s fault. is_numeric(’48784231410e978′) in PHP returns true. Perhaps Cake should check the column type or somethin’.

EDIT II: Cake 1.2 is totally checking the column type yo!

Oh god, I just hope we won’t start yelling memes after over 9000 beers…

Yep, that’s over 9000!!!1

The ad is here.  And no, I am not looking for a job in Milwaukie, WI.

I hear some people apologize for their inability to express themselves, and pretend to have their heads full of good things which they cannot bring out through lack of eloquence.  This is a delusion.  Do you know what I think?  These are shadows cast upon their minds by some half-shaped ideas which they cannot disentangle and clear up inwardly, and therefore are unable to express outwardly; they do not yet understand themselves.

- Michel de Montaigne, as translated by John M. Cohen

Fuck, he’s right.

And since it’s springtime, a reminder.  Ladies: burn your capris.  I’ve disliked capri pants since I first noticed them back in high school.  They are possibly the first fashion item I worked up enough energy to actively dislike.  Not quite shorts, not quite pants, completely half-assed and look silly.  More importantly, they tend to make girls’ legs appear shorter.

During the course of conversation, Jeff, my friend Steve’s fellow SCCA Time Trial racing and Subaru STi owning friend, mentioned a couple of open source projects that allow him to flash the Engine Control Unit (ECU) of his car, which is friggin’ sweet.

I was slightly surprised later to find that neither of my friends knew what open source is.  That was because I know a bunch of geeky people who work on software and know what open source is and know IE is responsible for the death of Jesus.  (They are also left leaning, Democrat voting, socialist-commies!)  It was a reminder that outside the circle of software developers, CIOs, and tech company executives and lawyers, not many people know what open source is.  Or even care.

That’s totally okay.  It doesn’t matter.  The only thing that matters is the quality of the software.  How many among the millions of Firefox users use it because of it’s open source?  Or even know that it is?  (Please save Jesus by using Firefox.  Or Opera.  Or Safari.  Or…OmniWeb?  Just stop using IE!)

Anyway.  I don’t think I explained open source very well.  I used a counter example with Windows.

How would you explain open source to people who don’t know about software development?