Tag: oss

At OSCON Day #1 and “Learning Node.js”

Playful Exploration of Public & Personal Data

I arrived, just after the keynote, because I was being lame on this Monday. Sounds like it was a great keynote with some great people speaking.

The first thing I did was get my directions straight for where all the rooms and expo area is. Once I did that I headed to Playful Explorations of Public and Personal Data that Andrew Turner was giving. His presentation showed some great information and data for or from GeoIQ, Geocommons, and others. The areas in which data can be used to overlay crime, friendly or unfriendly areas based on that, where there are dogs, coffee shops, and what can be derived.

I did notice though that a lot of the data is at a very high level. Leaders can make decisions on this kind of data, but it is dangerous making decision based on one or two of these data points. Leaders need to truly understand events and triggers at a macro level also. At the end of the session Andrew actually hit on the note that users of this data must be careful in what they correlate.

Architectural Anti-patterns for Handling Data

I’ll let the tweets I tweeted tell the tweet of the presentation.  🙂

Adron Hall#oscon #oscond RDBMS antipattern – Email data stored in databases. <- Can get VERY nasty. Couch? Mongo? NoSQL anybody? BigTable? 😐
Adron Hall#oscon #oscond RDBMS antipattern: “Stoned Procedures” i.e. Stored Procedures, Triggers, etc… Bad! Lock in and horrible maintainability.
Adron HallOooh! #oscon #oscond Another antipattern, are you ready for this one? ORMs. Impedance mis-match w/ RDBMS. The cure as bad as the disease! :/
Adron Hall#oscon #oscond Another antipattern. Tables as a log file. 😮 Hmmm. Yup, I’ve done that. 🙁 Probably wasn’t the greatest idea…but meh. 😀
Adron Hall#oscon #oscond antipattern The Alignment creating columns “a1, a2, a3, a4…?!?!?!?!” WTF!? If you do this – STOP NOW! k thx.
Adron Hall (originally posted on yfrog)

Click for larger image
Click for larger image

antipatterns w/ RDBMSs… #oscon #oscond

Adron Hall#oscon #oscond antipattern RDBMS “Dynamic Table Creation”… yeah, not a good idea. 🙁 makes sad pandas.
Adron HallAnti-pattern for RDBMS: “Not everything fits on/in a RDBMS…”#oscon #oscond
Adron HallOH: “What is the main mySQL tuning technique used in panic situations?” A: “Install PostgreSQL” :O Doh! #oscon #oscond
Adron Hall@LusciousPear En route now… 🙂 to @gleicon session.
 by adronbh  If you’re at #oscon / #oscond head NOW to C123 to see @gleicon‘s talk on “Architectural Anti-Patterns for Data Handling”. There’s lulz + win

As described on the OSCON Site, Learning Node.js

Presented by Tom Hughes-Croucher (Joyent). Learn how to build scalable Internet applications with Node.js, the event-driven server-side JavaScript framework. You’ll see how Node.js solves many scaling and speed problems that weigh down other web application frameworks.

This is the first session I lined up for myself. I’ve been on a Node.js kick lately and have still found myself not having much time to work with the technology. However, having a clearcut session dedicated to the topic, and tomorrow is Node.js day, I’m pretty stoked to really get to using the technology hard core!

Tom did a good job with this session, with a bit of lively retort thrown in here and there. The session covered installation, the basic apps that are displayed on the Node.js Site, and then into additional exercises that got us all running the bits like pros (ok, like total newbs I’m sure). The session was a decent pace, it gave me time to work through the exercises and also wrap up coverage of the 1st day of the conference. However, I’m still going to have to sit down and go through the exercises again and actually determine what Node is actually doing. There are some interesting going ons behind the scenes that I know I’ve missed, but sure will pick them up ASAP with a quick review.  🙂

Day Number One Summary

This is my first full size OSS Conference I’ve attended. I did attend OS Bridge, which was similar, but this one has a large price tag to it. So expectations are different. Overall I’ve been very happy so far. The Swag is awesome, the sessions have been good, and the Node.js Intro was very informative and taught me a few things I didn’t know. The one thing I regrest, is that I can’t attend more of the sessions. This however tends to be the problem with any conference that is worth the time! I’m looking forward to day two, for now, I’m off to socialize and try to do a few non-computer related things.

Keeping Up With the Conference

To keep up with today’s events, and ongoing events during the Conference follow/search the Twitter feed with the #oscon for the main conference, #osconj for the Java Track, and #oscond for the Big Data Track!

Watch the live streaming feed.

OSCON Impact!

OSCON 2011OSCON, one of the most exciting and largest Open Source Software Conferences, is kicking off this Monday. If you’re into closed source, open source, or software creation, design, coding, or otherwise you should be paying attention! I’ll have coverage, interviews, and more here so stay tuned!

Also check out live streaming!

For more information about the conference, check out the tracks…

OSCON 2011 Tracks

…or check out the Node.js Day!  Anyway you look at it, the conference is going to be jam packed with great info, work, learning, and more. Check back soon, I’m sure I’ll have more tasty tech bits each and every day!

OS Bridge Day #1

Keynote: Hacking for Freedom

(Description of Hacking for Freedom)

Day #1 has kicked off with a bang. A keynote that really pulled at the heart strings for the love of freedom and liberty! The notion of technology being involved directly to those pushing for their freedom. Below I’ve snagged a part of the description:

Description

A first-hand talk about the politics, technology and ethics of hacktivism. I’ll give an overview of some of the active groups, including Anonymous and Telecomix and discuss some of the projects I’ve worked on in the past few months. See this blog post and video of lightning talk from Pycon.

  • organizing protests in support of WikiLeaks and freedom information. Over one hundred cities in two weeks.
  • supporting communications in the Middle East: working 20 hours / day for a week for Egypt without dying
  • When the Net is up: proxies, mirrors, VPNs, encryption, retweeting
  • When the Net is down: dialup modem pools, fax blasts, ham radio
  • Works in Progress: two-way radio HOWTOs, Intranet LiveCDs

This keynote really made me realize I’ve gotten disconnected from a lot of things that pulled me into technology. The connected aspirations of people to change the world for the better is massive. The efforts that are going on around the world were described well by Peter Fein. Putting emphasis on the importance of having cell phones that can take video and get the word out when a regime is getting out of control. Having this immediate communication to call out the evil in the world has grown exponentially.

Peter Fein
Peter Fein

To learn more about what Peter Fein (@petewearspants) is up to and learn more about hacking for freedom check out Anonymous and Telecomix.  Also be sure to check out his blog at http://i.wearpants.org/.

Cloud Scaling: High Performance Even in Virtualized Environments

(Description of Cloud Scaling: High Performance Even in Virtualized Environments)

After the keynote I attended the Cloud Scaling Session by Gavin McQuillan (@gmcquillan) who works at Urban Airship and blogs at Omnifarious.

Gavin spoke about how to design an architecture, primarily using Amazon Web Services, to build for scalability and uptime. Some of the main take home points I tweeted:

Adron HallThe ongoing problem with the cloud is high volume/throughput/iops w/ storage. < Is there a pending solution? #osb11 #aws
Adron Hall#osb11 Only get ~10G of true local storage? <- me: why are you depending heavily on this? Use S3, SimpleDB, or other?
to which I received a follow up…
Vanessa Alvarez@adronbh interested in the answer to that, if anyone dares
Vanessa Alvarez@adronbh yes, would agree on #EMC #Isilon, still kind of hard and expensive;-)
…to which I ponder also, who is working on a legitimate price conscious, reasonable, high volume and high throughput storage medium that can be utilized via cloud computing?
All that and tons more, before lunch. :) Stay tuned for more coverage of the OS Bridge Conference.  Cheers!

OS Bridge, What is it?

I’m headed down to Portland, Oregon today for OS Bridge. OS Bridge is a conference for the open source community, by the community. The conference is one of the premier events to learn how open source really works, learn from others, and meet people that are also learning about and involved in the open source community.

The OS Bridge Conference, like almost all of the conferences that I attend these days, is all volunteers. There are no major sponsors shoving some message or product down your throat. There is no overhanging air of elitism (even though I’ll admit, for newcomers it is sometimes intimidating, but don’t worry we don’t bite ;)). It is simply about the community and about the software that individuals of the open source community work together to create.

The tracks are organized in an interesting way for OS Bridge. The OS Bridge Tracks are split in a way to encourage cross-pollination and in depth discussion. The tracks as I know them are:

  • Business – This focus will be around open source as a business, how to work with and interact with open source entities, pick licensing models, and other related facets.
  • Chemistry – The chemistry of open source revolves around setting up environments, infrastructure, and assuring the systems we build are working the way we expect. This track embodies getting your fingers dirty with a good hands on chemistry set. 🙂
  • Cooking – Recipes are essential to cooking. Keeping well organized recipes for system administration, software development and deployment, and other courses is key to a good meal of software development.
  • Culture – Within the open source community are individuals of many alignments, but one thing that really connects people in the community is the culture of learning, building, and working together to create things that are greater than their individual parts.
  • Hacks – Experiments. Nuff’ Said. 😉

Why Am I Going?

Over the years I’ve written a ton of software. As anyone in this industry might relate with, some has been thrown away and some is used currently. I’ve saved companies thousands, hundreds, even millions of dollars. I’ve been saddened by some software I’ve built and euphoric with other projects of software I’ve built. The things I have been consistently throughout my career is that I love to learn and am proud of what I do.

Over the last few years, because I like to learn and am proud of what I do. I have wanted to improve my development practices. The more I work toward improving and using new and better ways to do development I keep working with the open source community. There are a number of reasons;

  • The open source community is focused on learning and creating.
  • Open source software does not close or hide information, knowledge, or actual software.
  • The community is often the first to try something, often first to market, and is almost always pushing new ways to develop things.
  • Open source software bridges all technology stacks, even the once resistant Microsoft Stack has active and ongoing contributions to open source software now.

There is also one other fact that really pulls everything together. Just as we breath air, software developers share ideas and information. Regardless of legal obfuscations or otherwise all software developers, in some way, are involved with learning and furthering our trade. In the end, to do that, we work with each other and freely share information all the time.

That’s just a few reasons why I’m going, I could go on. Over the next few days I hope to put a few more blog entries about my experiences. I hope my insights are useful, Enjoy!