Here’s a quick overview of my first OSCON.

Portland

Portland seems like a nice city. The weather was very reasonable for July. Cool at night. Warm during the day. It did not rain.

The MAX is a nice train system. It makes everything in downtown Portland pretty easy to get to. There’s even a fareless zone.

Portland’s brand of pan handler seems to be chatty young idealists with Save the Children binders. They are much harder to get rid of by tossing a quarter on the ground and ducking into the Rite Aid. I pushed mine in front of a bus.

Tutorials

Because of plane issues and company obligations, I could only attend one tutorial. But it was Randal Schwartz talking about Seaside. If I could only get to one tutorial, that seemed like a pretty good one to make. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that great. Half of the tutorial ended up being intro to smalltalk. The format was live demo, which makes me feel like I’m the third wheel in a pair programming exercise.

When you’re talking about Seaside, and you don’t get to continuations until the last seven minutes of the talk, then all you’ve presented is how to use smalltalk to generate HTML.

I might just be a little bitter because I was looking forward to seeing the Magritte and the Glorp stuff.

Keynotes

Danese Cooper and Nat Torkington were both very good. One of the MySQL guys said MS is irrelevant. Moving along.

Breakout Sessions

Laika tests for interoperability between EHR’s. It’s part of the CCHIT certification process for 2008 (suckers!). I plan to have more to say about this in another blog post.

Hadoop and EC2 are cool and make a nice pairing. Furthermore, this session attracted more women then all of the other sessions I attended combined. Advice to lonely, single nerds: work on your Hadoop.

Subversion worst practices.

memcached is a cool, simple way to scale your webapps. However, it’s very difficult to talk about with reggae music blaring through the connector wall.

Sam Ruby is the most patient presenter I have ever seen. Perhaps that comes with having to deal with Ruby programmers. To be fair, Sam said he’d like it informal. It was.

Meta Programming Ruby was a good talk, but there wasn’t much new there. Except proof that, given enough Ruby programmers with too little to do, someone will eventually try to recreate Tapestry. The presenter was a cool guy though.

Other

rosscooperman pointed out that the random arrangement of motion sensitive soap dispensers in the restrooms would consistently produce a soapy wrist, unless one was diligent.

update – I was a tad more snarky then I had intended in the original post. I think the post as it is now constituted contains the correct amount of snarkiness.

What could be so stupendous as to merit sharing a title with The Best of Tesla?

The paperwork is finally done and everything is official, so I guess I can talk about it. I’ve got a new job with Collaborative Software Initiative. I start the first full week in July. I’m really excited. This is going to be a big change for me in a lot of ways.

First of all, since the company’s in Portland and I’m not, I’ll be working from home. People like to talk about the ups and downs of working from home: how you can never get away from work that way; how it’s hard to keep your personal life and your work separate; how you’re going to miss human contact. I think those people are jealous or nuts. When I’ve gotten to work from home in the past, it has ruled. I really think I’m going to eat it up.

The client is in Utah (well, the client is Utah), so I will be traveling a scosh, which I’ve never done. I’m looking forward to getting to see new places, but this is the aspect of the job that has me the most anxious. Since my daughter’s birth, I don’t think I’ve ever been away from her longer then twenty-four hours.

The product is a JRuby on Rails application, and it’s being developed in a lean/agile manner. I’ve been looking for a chance to work in an environment that was Ruby, or Smalltalk, and was agile. I’m not as fond of Java (the language) as I used to be, and my current company just doesn’t seem to be ready for agile development (if this post is any indicator).

The product is open source (or will be soon). This represents a huge change for me. A few months ago, I don’t think I appreciated how important this would be to me. Back then, I was trying to set up a talk about some work I had done in our software using JRuby for eRubyCon. I thought it would be a good talk and fit right into the eRubyCon concept. I was eventually shut down because there was concern amongst the powers-that-be that I would be exposing too much of our architecture and we’d be giving up a competitive advantage.  That was when I realized that I’m an open source guy, and I need to be making my living writing open source.

That is lot of change for one guy with a family to feed to make. I feel like I should be nervous. I’m not. I’m excited and I can’t wait to get started.

Friends! Let me free you from your complicated lives. From the complicated
part, not the lives part. -Bender

I managed to get SLIME and CLISP to play nice on Windows. As is often
the case when trying to get something interesting working on Windows,
I couldn’t find a single comprehensive source that explained
everything. I’ll document what I did here, and maybe that will save
someone else some time.

Oh yeah, and I did know about Lisp in a Box, but that felt like
cheating.

I already had cygwin installed. I did a full install (I had some
time on my hands). So I already had CLISP installed, too.

You’re going to need emacs to run SLIME. I use the Windows emacs
build, rather cygwin’s build. The cygwin build of emacs 22 is pretty
flaky on my machine.

When you go to download SLIME, make sure you grab the cvs tarball
and not the 2.0 tarball. The 2.0 release is not compatible with the
current CLISP release. The SLIME readme contains the magic incantation
to load SLIME into emacs. This goes in your .emacs file:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.site-lisp/slime/")  ; your SLIME directory
(setq inferior-lisp-program "/bin/clisp.exe -K full") ; your Lisp system
(require 'slime)
(slime-setup)

Change the paths so that they work for your system. Make sure that you
leave the “-K full” on the clisp executable.

There’s a path error that occurs if you run SLIME now. This is caused
by the difference between cygwin paths and windows paths. Note that I
don’t use any of that cygpath crap in my .emacs file. I also didn’t
want to write the elisp functions that would make Swank (it’s a SLIME
thing) work. I liked this suggestion from CLiki better:

mkdir /c
touch /c/NOT_MOUNTED
mount C:\\ /c

Start up emacs and run M-x SLIME. You should get the CL-USER> prompt
if everything worked.

I think that’s everything I did. If I missed anything, drop a note in
the comments.

There’s not a whole hell of a lot I can do about the platform I’m
stuck deploying on. Right now I wouldn’t recommend deploying the
jackrabbit.rar to a Glassfish Server running on Windows.

I’m using jackrabbit version 1.4. So far, I’ve gotten pas a few
pitfalls.

* Once the rar’s been downloaded, crack it open using 7z or WinRAR or
something. Then crack open the nekohtml.jar and rename the LICENSE
file to LICENSE.txt (or something).

* Download jcr-1.0.jar and copy it to the Glassfish lib directory.

* Then you should be able to follow this post from the jackrabbit
mailing list.

Everything seems great, but every time I grab this Jackrabbit instance
from my servlet using JNDI, I get an error. Jackrabbit won’t create the
session because it’s already locked by another process.

I’m not going to give up on this, but I’ve get to get something
running by the weekend. For now, I’m just going to embed the
jackrabbit stuff in my servlet. If anyone has any ideas, leave a
comment.

I’ve been tagged, so here’s my list:

1) I first used kofno as my web handle while playing Total Annihilation online.
2) The most recent usage of my handle in a video game was as a Rebel Trandoshan named Khoffnno in Star Wars Galaxies.
3) I sometimes wonder if I would be smarter if my brain wasn’t cluttered with caffeine and Futurama quotes. But then I remember that one episode where Frye roomed with a monkey who was super smart because of an electronic derby, and I think about how happy he was at the end when his hat was only working at half capacity. Then I giggle and say “Monkey”.
4) I know more about Drew’s Test Tees’ then any man should.
5) I wish I could sing.

I’ve shared my five facts. Now I’m supposed to tag five others, but I’m going to cheat a little. So Drew, Justin, and everyone at anchorbutt who’s not Drew, Justin, or me: you’ve been tagged.