Trip to Downtown Seattle

So today Geoff had to work (jerk :) ) and thus I slept in till 1030 and then slowly decided to go into the downtown area around Pike Place Market. So I ventured to the bus where I missed it by a minute (saw it pass as I was walking to the bus stop) so I was in no hurry and chilled for 30min until the next one arrived. I arrived downtown about a block from the market and decided to see if there was anything I wanted to eat when I spotted fresh made doughnuts ... oh I love me some doughnuts. They were small ones so I bought a half-dozen and ate them while I watched the Pikes Place Fish Co do their thing. Nothing too exciting though.

I was hoping that someone would be selling some ball caps around in seattle but no such luck. I couldn't find a store in the area I walked and checked one out that I found from google. Oh well hopefully my head doesn't burn too bad.

While I was at the Pacific Place Mall I saw another one of these crazy pig sculptures and this one had wings so I decided to take a pic as no one was in my way. I am not sure if they all mean something but if they do this one could be "when pigs fly". So after that I cruised through the mall and saw the AMC Theatre and decided to entertain myself by seeing "Sunshine" this movie was alright. I think it could have been much better. It reminded me of other movies that I had seen about going to mars and other space types. Nothing too creative except the ship they were on.

It's a party in Freemont

Well last night was a blast. We went to the High Dive and watched this Ska-ish band play called the "Smoking Bills". It was a hoot as they had a few chicks come in wearing only their lingerie and danced for us a couple songs (sorry I didn't take my camera with me, I really need to learn to do that).

This morning has thus far been pretty laid back. Just got some brunch then off to the dog park where Rio was a crazy pup.

So yea... right now we are chilling before Geoff's kick ball game (we will see if I go... I am still a bit tired even after an energy drink).

Aloha Seattle

So Friday I was able to fly to Seattle on my round trip ticket to detroit to portland and the return trip had a layover in seattle... so of course its like derp lets go visit my buddy Geoff. Well I purchased a one way on Frontier airlines (a less shitty airline than NWA) on Wednesday.

Friday night Geoff and I had a chill night. We went to see "Election" on a Free Movie on the Lawn event. It was a good movie. Today we went into Freemont and got some breakfast then took the boat out sailing (winds were ok). After that we went to the beach and met up with some of Geoff's climbing buddies and did some slack lining, ate some grub and dicked around. Then then next event was a first for me as we went to see the Rat City Rollergirls (Roller Derby). This was great to see as there were two fights in which punching was involved and some good there was also some good slamming. Hey what guy doesn't want to see girls in a skimpy outfits beating the crap out of other girls in skimpy outfits.

And finally we do what we always do and that is going to the bar. At least this time I know where geoff lives from where we are off too and I won't have to drive around for 2 hours (thanks Geoff).

Sorry no pictures this round... speaking of I should prolly start taking some.

OSCON - The final frontier

So today is the last day of OSCON. We are slated to go see the keynotes and goto a session on Subversion Wost Practices. There is also one called Hack Your Manager which seems interesting and possibly useful.

The keynotes this morning are on Open Source systems.

• Second Life (a game that has exploded into a communications meeting network)
• Wikia (a new wikipedia that is striving to be the sum of all human knowledge)
• The state of PHP, Perl & Ruby (comparison to people)
  
• How to make use of old hardware

Subversion Worst Practices:
This was a good session. It made me rethink a couple thinks on how to handle the svn setup at work. We need to discuss / test some things a little more but I think we can come up with a usable VCS for us to use at work.

Ruby on Mac OSX:
I never got into ruby... well I never attempted ... I think it turned me off when all the crap started with Ruby on Rails. So overall this session I am definatly not going to get anything out of. This guy is not a very good speaker, another one that reads from his slides.

Finally we went to the last keynote. This keynote talks about Open Hardware design that goes under the similar concept of OSS. Its kinda interesting and could give the major manufacturers a run for their money. It could also do the same thing for hardware design that OSS has done for software.

Anyway this was a good conference. There were many good speakers (and bad ones). I think they could do a better job of screening their speakers to bring in high quality ones. If they did that they the conference could be so much better and I think attract tons more people.

Red Lion Hotel

So the hotel is definitely a hit or miss hotel. But in this case its a miss when it comes to their organizational and clean staff skills.

The Bad:

• Our rooms were not ready when we got here
• After we left and came back our rooms were still not ready and we had to change our booked accommodations because they are unable to meet their end of the deal.
• They told 2 of 4 of us that we could have a late checkout but the other two (Sarah and myself) told us not a chance without even looking at our reservations.
• The cafe for breakfast is slow at acknowledging your existence.
• Some of the cleaning staff couldn't make a bed if their life depended on it.
• After you checkout they won't accommodate your trip to the light rail except with the shuttle to the airport (WTH?)*
  

The Good:

• They are pretty quick at taking us to and from the TriMet Max Light Rail.
• The rooms seem to be clean all the time.
• You get a free newspaper (USA Today) every morning to your door
  
• They are holding our bags for free*
  

* added the morning of checkout

So yea... the internet gave the hotel a 3.9/5.0 and I would give them a 2.9/5.0. It might be kinda harsh but when you have a reservation you should be able to figure it out and get someone to clean the rooms you need. And if you can't do that then don't let someone place a registration for that type of room.

So now if James and Rex are unable to keep their late registration that means we are going to most likely have to take our shit with us downtown which is going to be annoying as hell.

OSCON - in a nutshell

So today we saw some good sessions. The one about VIM for PHP Programmers was great. There was a ton of information in the slides (which I think I got). So much stuff that he was rolling through the things faster than I could remember them. So I am going to dig through the slides and find the ones I like. He had ways to check the file through the PHP interpreter and another to have code completion and those were just the tip of what he showed.

We also went to a Cache session which was more of the guy just talking about his cache system called APC. Overall it was all right .. I am sure his slides could come in handy when we start looking at using it or another opcache.

Then I went to a source control session and the room was packed. People crammed into about every possible space in this room. The speaker was from New Zealand and was defiantly the class clown in school. I didn't really get out of it what I wanted. My understanding of distributed version control systems is not really any better which is unfortunate. But oh well not every presentation can be perfect.

After that I went to see Chris Shiflett again with his Security 2.0 session. This was pretty much a recap of his Essential PHP Security Tutorial session. I was hoping that he was going to go more in depth into XSS and CSRF but alas he didn't stand up to my expectations that he set forth in the tutorial when he mentioned it.

Then I completed my day by going to Prototype and Object.prototype JavaScript session. This one was interesting I have a better understanding of the prototype JS attribute and how some of the JS features I have seen works.

When I get back next week I want to gather everyones slides and take some time and go through the sessions that I was unable to goto.

Extending my Trip

So after some working of several options I have figured out a way to stay in Seattle for a few days. Since NWA won't do anything except delaying the flight with the same departure and arrival points I decided to take the flight to Seattle and then just not get on the connecting flight. I then purchased another ticket for a Wednesday morning departure back for $300. Its a little pricey but its still less than the cost to come back out another time and there will be plenty to do while I am in Seattle.

Hopefully when I go back to work on the 2nd I won't be greeted with people annoying the crap out of me about stuff they don't or want to understand.

So yea... I guess some of the things planned for Seattle are:

• Roller Derby (I have always wanted to see one of these)
• Block Party ( Capital Hill I think )
• Lawn Movie
• Some weird boat thing where the dog is getting dressed up as Mr. T.

I am sure there are more things that will go on but thats all I know thus far.

OSCON - Dinner

So tonight James, Sarah and myself went to a restaurant in downtown Portland called "Mama Mia Trattoria". This if you can't tell is an Italian restaurant. I had chicken fettuccine Alfredo and it was pretty good. After that we decided to goto China Town and see the Chinese garden park. After getting there we were presented with a disappointing "Private Party" sign. However we were able to take some pictures of the inside (which I will put on the flickr tomorrow and post them here).

OSCON - Day in a nutshell

So today I went to a few sessions on PHP and AJAX. Found some new useful tools and got alot out of the ajax sessions. Learned some good practices to create ajax systems that at least should appear to the user as fast and responsive. Also Yahoo! released a new plugin for firefox called YSlow. This tool will make profiling ajax apps much easier. In addition to this we wrapped up the day with the worst speaker ever. First he couldn't operate KeyNote (I can understand having some issues with it but not as much as this guy). Also he read directly from his slides and was not prepared at all. When people asked him questions he was unable to answer them in a clear manor. He may very well be smart in the subject but he does not know how to give a presentation on it.

So in addition to this we went to the exhibit hall where we obtained some more swag. We got a bunch of stickers and got ourselves entered into some drawings. Oh and most importantly I got several O'Reilly pins for the different OS langauges. There was a sign that said "What kind of animal are you?" with a able of pins. Of course all the perl ones were gone (poor rex).

I have more pictures and swag coming ... I am just too lazy to take pictures and upload them tonight. So just keep an eye on my flickr for all the latest and greatest photos.

OSCON - Breakfast

So today Rex, Sarah and myself went to the craziest doughnut shop ever. These people will try about any combination you can think of and seem to always have a variety of choices that are out of the norm.




Here I ate a Captain Crunch Doughnut. It was packed full of sugar (almost an overloading amount). The cereal was a little stale but it was an interesting combination.




And here is sarah with her voodoo doughnut that is being stabbed with a pretzel. Also rex found a doughnut that was named after him. "Diablo Rex" it was cool looking but you would have to ask him how it tastes.

Airlines Suck

So I have gone through what seems to be every option I can think of and I can't find a feasible solution for staying in Seattle for a few days. I have checked into:

• Delaying the Seattle leg of the flight ( this is a no can do <3>
• Moving my departure city from Portland to Seattle ( I wouldn't get a dime for the return flight ) and taking a train to Seattle
  
• Taking a train to Seattle and then back to Portland for an 8am flight
  (this doesn't work because amtrak has no midnight trains)

So overall I am out of ideas ... I think this is a sign to throw in the towel and just plan another trip out here. But with my buddy Geoff's schedule and my schedule I am just not sure if I am going to make it back out here this year.

OSCON - Essential PHP Security

Well this afternoon we got our learn on from Chris Shiflett who a couple years ago taught some people at work how to program the pee-ach-pee's. So overall this is a smart guy but the session was a little on the low end of what I wanted. The only thing I got out of this one was Cross Site Request Forger (CSRF *C-Serf*). Its interesting enough that he is giving a talk Thursday that will go in depth on this type of attack. I need to check our schedule to see if anyone is going to it if not then I am.

However I did realize today that I need to do more work on making sure that the output variables are taken care of just as much as the input variables.

So I think if I got anything out of todays sessions it was more of redirecting my focus on areas that I never put as much thought into. This will help me create more secure systems. Oh and its always great when a PHP Security expert won't say even his own work is secure. Because I tell people this all the time and I just get weird looks from them.

"When someone looks at my code and is not impressed I know I did a good job" - Chris Shiflett

OSCON - Lunch

So today's lunch was disappointing for me. It was so disappointing that I only ate a bag of chips and a cookie that I traded with rex (ginger for a chocolate chip *yuck*). I would have eaten the turkey sandwich (that looked good) but it had mayo on it and OMG I can't stand shit like that on my food.

However I did accomplish something else and I got everyone except the airline squared away on me staying in Seattle for a few days on vacation to hang with my buddy Geoff. He has all sorts of stuff planned (roller derby, park movie, dress up boat outing and who knows what else) so here is hoping that I get NWA to let me delay just the part from Seattle to Detroit.


Here we are waiting for our next session.

OSCON - Morning Session

So today I was slated to goto "Technical Management of Software Development" and after two hours of listening to the mono-tone guy and getting nothing out of it I decided to head over and join the rest in PHP/MySQL Best Practices. Of course when I got there I went through the slides to see what I missed and there were some interesting topics on there but was like ok lets see what these people have to say. Well they just couldn't talk about anything useful. They talked more on the DB functions out there than talking best practices. It would have been a good talk if they would have talked about what the session was about.

OSCON - Morning

Today we (james and myself) decided to sleep in a bit. Sarah didn't know this because she doesn't stay online and Rex figured it out apparently by james away message. Rex decided to go into town to find breakfast and when Sarah knocked on my door this morning we decided to get breakfast at the hotel cafe. Sorry I forgot to take a picture of it but it was a basic eggs has browns and toast meal.

After that we made our way to the max light rail and down to the conference center where we made it there 5 minutes late (oh well).


The max rail travelers.

OSCON - The Swag

So after an eventful first day I now bring the swag (mostly advertisements) that we received:



And here are some of the ads in the Oreilly program guide:



So thats it for today. I figure I will get more stuff come wednesday when I goto the job fair ... err I mean exhibit hall.

OSCON - Scalable Internet Architectures

So the SIA session is not what I expected. Its more of a server administrator lecture. I thought it would be a little bit different but alas it isn't. I think frisco or rex might have gotten more entertainment out of it.

The whole thing seems to be related around

• Load balancing
• Redundancy

granted I like these but this lecture is just not very interesting for me. If there was another decent lecture I would go to it as this is not going to bring any good to the college... well at least having the 3 web developers at it.

Oh well you hit some and miss some.

OSCON Lunch

Well here is what we had for lunch:
I rebuilt my sandwich with only chicken and ate the chips. Other than that I was not too keen on the rest of the crap it came with.

OSCON - MySQL Optimization Session

The MySQL optimization tutorial session was an enlightening experience. I have learned a few tricks to write better queries for SCT Banner's shitty database setups at work. Hopefully these queries will be at least cut in half if not more.

Things we went over:

• EXPLAIN command and all the fun filled data it supplies us with.
  
• How by using a function on a field with an index renders the index useless as the engine will ignore it.
  
• a couple examples on how to convert a subquery in the where clause as an inner join subquery.
• Query caching where it can be beneficial and problematic
• Schema guidelines
  
• benchmarking tools
  

So overall this has been work the money the college has spent sending me to it.

Day 1 of OSCON - morning

This morning I woke up with my eye hurting from something managing to get between my contact and my eyeball. I think its time to go switch my contacts with something else that maybe can take a "no-rub" solution as I am lazy.

OSCON 2007

So I have finally been given the opportunity to goto a conference that has a ton of sessions in things I am actually interested in.

So I have ventured to Portland, OR on WCC's dime. With a ton of pestering to get plane, hotel and conference tickets and spending more than we should have because people simply take too long to make a decision and fill out some simple paperwork. But anyway we flew NWA and they were alright. So far I have recently flown them and Frontier and I like Frontier better. The ride was rough with NWA but I guess that could be due to the fact we were at the back of the bus (thanks tom). We also thought we would stay on the plane while in St. Paul, MN yet after some confusing and late messages by the flight attendants/pilot we had to deboard the plane and wait 1.5 hours to board another plane on the opposite end of the terminal (seriously this seems to be a pattern with my flying). Then our landing in Portland I think was done by a new pilot because it was a little rough not to mention we had to sit on the runway for 10 minutes till we could get to the gate (traffic).

So after our flying fun we got aboard the Hotel shuttle and were greeted to the Hotel Check-in clerks telling us that only one room was ready (ok its only 2pm and check-in is technically 3pm). So we decided to toss our crap in Rex's room and go find dinner and the conference center. While looking for food we ran into and entertaining Drag Queen contest in which they were dancing to "I am coming out" (I guess they <3 stereotyping). So after getting out bearings we arrive back at the hotel around 6pm and were greeted again by our rooms STILL not being ready so we downgraded our King bed rooms to regular double queen rooms.

Either way this trip seems to be going good and bad. The hotel is a little sub-par which is why I am seeing the rating they were given. But hey there are still 5 more days in this adventure.