Another day at OSCON and lots of talks. I decided to go to small talks and see new speakers and it was a good strategy.
I started off by seeing "The Power and Philosophy of Ruby", by matz. I haven't seen matz speak before and he is a very good speaker, kind of like Larry. He explained the principles behind ruby and had lots of great quotes. Ruby rocks. The room was completely packed. After that I attended a very similar talk, Allison's "Perl 6 Design Philosophy". Looks like both teams are on the same track and it's a running themes throughout OSCON is that language design makes a huge difference to programmers.
After that Arthur dragged me to a talk on OpenSSI:Single System Image Linux Cluster Project. I mostly hate hardware and just want everything to Just Work, and it looks like SSI will cope in the face of lots of adversity. They had lots of blade servers with flashing lights, mmm.
At "One Perl to Bind Them All", Merijn explained the problem of handling Perl and modules on thousands of servers around the world. This is a problem that not many people have but that even we are reaching at work. Looks like global file systems might be the way to do it.
A quick set of Python talks (where Dan and Guido officially announced the Pie-thon), and I sat in Craig's talk where he described how Ticketmaster is managed. They have lots of servers and lots of code and was remarkably similar to James' talk at the same time (although James goes more into the social aspects). That was a very interesting talk.
In the evening there was a DynDNS and Onyx Neon party and later on an auction, with proceeds going to TPF. It was mad and crazy. There were books and tshirts, but then there was the fun bit: auctioning off the colour of search.cpan.org. There were two groups: the orange group and the "keep it as it is" group. We started bidding at $100. Increments of $25. Up up up, higher higher higher. It got hectic, we got more money. Eventually, I made a bid of $1000. They made a bid of $1025. I stopped. They won. They paid $1025 to keep the site as it is. Mad. However, in a gesture of good faith, Graham decided to let search.cpan.org be orange for one month. Thanks Graham!
