tech ramblings

Tutorial days.  I had planned on blogging yesterday but Typepad, my blog overlords, had kind of a bad day along with a bunch of other companies hosted by 365Main.  The root cause of this failure was of course issuing a press release earlier in the day talking about how they had 100% uptime for the previous two years.  Murphy was listening.  I believe Terry Pratchett has something to say about standing in a shallow copper basin of water on a hilltop during a thunderstorm, cursing the gods.  Anyway.  It’s up now.

I attended a couple of tutorials: on Monday Wez and Marcus on Extending and Embedding PHP, and on Tuesday Michael Schwern on Simple Ways to be a Better Programmer.  They were at absolute opposite ends of the spectrum in a lot of ways: Extending was digging into C, and Better Programmer was largely about people hacks, but both were excellent tutorials.

In the morning Luke and I gave our tutorial on PHP and MySQL Best Practices (and I uploaded the slides).  I think it went ok but a little long - we had too much material as usual.  Email me if you have any questions, particularly about the bits we didn’t get to in the time.

I love OSCON; I always feel like my brain is expanding the whole time I’m here.  This time I keep hearing about parallelism, something I haven’t spent a lot of time on since doing pthreads stuff in  my final year at college.  I have been thinking the last couple of weeks that it’s time to refresh some of the things that I have long forgotten, and acquire some new skills.  OSCON is a great place for all of that.