Ruminations, Haunts, and Errors

I decided to start avoiding talks that look like they walk through source code, as that gets boring quickly unless you have a vested interest in the particular code.

• The keynotes today didn’t grab my attention like yesterday. Freeman and George Dyson brought up some interesting points that the similarity of open-source technology to biological systems is its strength and that its momentum can be maintained better if people periodically step out of the usual techie modes to allow their brains to wander a little more. Bdale Garbe pointed out that successful Community Development is as much about enhancing the Group as it is about group enhancement of some Thing.
• Sean Lynch described how Ticketmaster keeps lots of servers going. Mostly similar concepts to server management systems at other large organizations—no surprise there, the same issues recur everywhere—but his take that standby systems aren’t the best idea, since you can’t guarantee there in a known state when they need to be pressed into service, was interesting. Probably wouldn’t work at a large, conservative Swiss bank I know.
• Hmm, ‘system cannot resume due to a read failure’ isn’t what you want to see when your laptop is about 2000 miles from anyone who can restage it if necessary. Fortunately it was just a Hibernate glitch.
• Joel Noble gave a nice case study of how OSS can be used to manage big hairy migration projects, even in a Microsoft environment. Get command-line tools (so you can script ‘em), don’t let your tools guess (hand ambiguities over to humans for resolution), and aggregate more (up-to-date) data than you think you’ll ever need.
• Jim Abbott presented a lot of information on Novell’s efforts with OpenWBEM. Too much, too fast; I got that Novell is using OSS to build monitoring tools. One nugget was a comment that system health monitoring is most useful when combined with some sort of policy engine.
• Jeremy White’s Wine review was certainly heartening. He stressed that it’s an implementation, not an emulation, of the Windows API, and seems to be proceeding nicely with lots of apps working (to some degree). Even iTunes is almost working! An interesting point is that a number of ISVs see Wine as a way to dip their toes in the Linux waters before deciding whether to go more fully into that market. Overheard in the hallway afterwards, "Debugging Wine must be a pain since you’re usually lacking source code on both sides."
• Mmm, Haagen-Daas ice cream bars. And over in the Apple corner, their rack servers look quite nice with their clean lines and blinky lights and well-engineered mechanism for accessing the innards of installed boxes.
• A works-in-progress session was interesting but too eclectic to summarize. Perl folks certainly are a varied lot.
• Perrin Harkins gave a 45-minute talk on making websites scalable that essentially said: cache whatever you can, and there are several Perl modules to help you do it. Plenty of resource references, though.
• 1500 attendees, two people serving drinks, one 3’x10’ table with appetizers. Hel-lo! Thanks to Apple for the refreshments, but really bad planning on the part of the catering staff.
• Cool stuff from the Mars Exploration Rover team on the mission data and control software (even if it is Java :). Interplanetary Open Source, yay!