My parents instilled upon me many values that I keep with me today. My twin brother and I are the youngest of four children, coming from a lower-middle class background. We children had the inevitable fights over material possessions, screeching “Mine! Mine!”

My father’s response to this was to look at us and say “These toys are mine; I bought those toys with money I worked for. What’s yours is what you make with your bodies.” While the sentiment is arguably harsh, crude and bordering on vulgar, I cannot argue that he had a certain point.

If you do not truly own something, you will be left squabbling like a child when your perceived ownership is threatened. When you assumed you owned something and the truth comes to light, you will be massively insecure and have a sense of injustice.

A few points from OSCon are haunting me and getting me …

I had a great time at O'Reilly's 10th annual Open Source Convention aka OSCON08.  I will post later about the conference itself including the podcasts I did, the announcements we made etc.  For now, here are some pics I took from the Sun Zend bash that was held in the Double Tree parking lot (which actually isn't used as a parking lot).

Above -- Row 1: (L) Tim Bray all dressed up with no place to go; (R) …

I had a great time at O'Reilly's 10th annual Open Source Convention aka OSCON08.  I will post later about the conference itself including the podcasts I did, the announcements we made etc.  For now, here are some pics I took from the Sun Zend bash that was held in the Double Tree parking lot (which actually isn't used as a parking lot).

Above -- Row 1: (L) Tim Bray all dressed up with no place to go; (R) …

I had a great time at O'Reilly's 10th annual Open Source Convention aka OSCON08.  I will post later about the conference itself including the podcasts I did, the announcements we made etc.  For now, here are some pics I took from the Sun Zend bash that was held in the Double Tree parking lot (which actually isn't used as a parking lot).

Above -- Row 1: (L) Tim Bray all dressed up with no place to go; (R) …

I got to actually speak to Brian Aker for maybe a total of 5 minutes after his micro-presentation about Drizzle, which took place at the Sun booth at OSCON 2008. I was a bit nervous to ask what questions I had out loud, because the things I had wondered about were things I really didn’t see too much discussion about out in the intarweb. I’m happy to report that, if Brian Aker is to be considered any kind of authority (hint: he is), my ideas are not completely ridiculous, so maybe I’ll start talking a bit more about them.

UPDATE: lest anyone get the wrong idea, Brian Aker did, in fact, state that views are not on the short list of priority items for Drizzle, but he did say that views are one of the features he finds most useful, and that they’d probably be higher on any future priority list than, say, …

Brian Aker gives the “zinger” lightning talk about the newly announced “Drizzle”. This short (under 8 minutes) video captures Aker’s highlights of why he started the Drizzle project and how Drizzle is different from MySQL — both in what has been removed from MySQL and what features Drizzle can accomodate.

Play the video directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/576/play or download the 116 Mb file at http://technocation.org/node/576/download.

The last keynote of Tuesday evening at OSCon 2008 was entitled “Temporarily Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming in Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces…..Made Easy!”

Damian Conway is a speaker that should not be missed. He spends his time hacking perl to do fascinating and obscure feats of technology such as time travel. This video is just over an hour of rolling laughter that will entertain you into realizing what a genius Damian Conway is.

Now, most of my exposure is within the MySQL Community, so if folks could pass the links to the video along to other communities, that would be great.

(This video is at 1.0 Mb/sec. Watch the video online at http://technocation.org/node/571/play or download it at …

Launching a Startup in 3 Hours was a great talk given by Andrew Hyde (of techstars.org) and Gavin Doughtie (of Google). Both of the speakers are heavily involved in the recent trend of doing “Startup Weekends”, and techstars.org is an organization that hosts startup weekends all around the US (and I think internationally as well - Andrew mentioned one in Germany if I heard correctly).

The first half of the talk was about the general concept of a startup weekend, the problems it avoids (”we’ve been working for 9 months and haven’t launched anything”), the problems it brings up (”If you’re not using Java, you’re an idiot, so count me out!!”), and lots of details about how to organize, how to assign roles, and some common tools they use (like Basecamp and whatever your IM of choice is). There was also talk of legal issues, how (basically) to think about forming the company with the people involved, and decisions that need to …

The evening plans didn’t wait for talks to be done. The IRC channel (#oscon on irc.freenode.net) was alive with talk of prospects for dinner and drinks after the conference. I myself was torn between a group going out for Lebanese and another going to Henry’s, but opted to go with my buddies from home to Henry’s.

It was worth it. If you haven’t been, Henry’s Tavern boasts 100 beers and hard ciders on tap (oddly, the beer list is the only menu *not* online - guess it changes too frequently). There are a ton of local beers that you can’t even get on the east coast just waiting for you to try, but there are also some rare treats, like the Belgian Lambic beers, which you don’t often see on tap. The food is a little pricey, but is really good, and the staff is very friendly. A couple of us …

I think I have pictures of most of the basic parts of the conference at my OSCON Flickr set, and I thoroughly enjoyed day 1 of the conference. Of course, while *day* 1 is over, *night* 1 has yet to even begin. There are lots of BoF sessions, and maybe even more smaller meetups going on, as smaller groups take to discussing things over dinner and a beer or three.

I have to say, that I occasionally pop into irc channels for conferences I’m not even at and follow up on that because I’m involved a bit in conference planning as part of my work with Python Magazine (I’m helping to organize the PyWorks conference in November). This conference seems to have a pretty happy audience, if IRC chatter is any indication (and it usually is). Sure, there are a couple of weak spots in the wireless network, there are some fuzzy projectors, and there was a little …