Rhonabwy

Im really jazzed to go get the recent release of SOLR and try it out. I attended the talk on it (completely packed room) today and I’m fully convinced on the functionality. I really want to stress it a bit now and see how it holds up. The default distro comes with a jetty servlet container, and most intriguing was the ability to request JSON packaged results - I’m thinking of Ajax style search with this critter. The notes from the talk are due to be posted on http://webdevradio.com/ in the near future.

I’ll be heading into the talk on hadoop when I get back there shortly.

One of the things that I like about this convention is how open and diverse it is. That has its drawbacks too- there are several sessions that I see today that I wish I could be in at the same time. I ate lunch yesterday with several folks from Norway, and there is a noticable number of woman here. Not just wives or the like, but people involved in the community for their own. Its still skewed heavily towards men, but after having come a number of years I think its a growing percentage.

One of the strangest bits about this convention is the accumulation of different communities. In other places its all one group, but this has many groups together - with some overlap - but still very distinct. Perl, python, rails, php, mysql, sun, java, apache, mozilla, django, … I’m sure the list goes on much further. The cross polination is pretty darn effective. It can also be overwhelming with the diversity of groups and interests too.

I’m trying to post a few pictures from OSCON (taken with my not-so-hot-but-okay iPhone camera) - but hey, they’re not too bad. You’re welcome to take a gander at my Flickr feed.

Day 1 of OSCON 2007 is done, and we’re working into Day 2 at this point. The afternoon tutorial “Django Master Class” was excellent, and the details of the talk are conveniently available on Jacob’s web site. Jeremy, Jacob, and Simon did a terrific job of it, and there was a lot of great tidbits in there that I hadn’t seen earlier. Since when did the testing framework get so tremendously improved?! It’s really impressive!

I also got a chance to meet Paul Bissex, who wrote briefly about the first day of OSCO. He’s in the Python WSGI session with me now.

Speaking of which, I’ve now learned about FAPWS from William (downloads) which was one of the WSGI servers mentioned, and apparently tested with Paul’s simple wiki code. It uses PyEvent under the covers, and apparently achieves some very nice performance characteristics.

When it comes to public (and mass) transit systems, I adore Portland. They’ve done a great job, and like some other Seattle-ites, I growl periodically when I think about how short sighted this city was when thinking about its future some 10+ years ago and we had the relevant vote.

But as I’m getting set to head to Portland on Sunday for OSCON, I can’t help but think they missed a link. I know I’m rare in this, but I’m taking the train down… and the Amtrack station is 5 blocks from the nearest light-rail link in Portland. The light rail goes right out to the airport - so they definitely hit the more used choice, but I still like rail transit, so I use it. And while it’s not impossible to drag the luggage through five blocks of Portland’s downtown area, it is a pain in the butt.

Ah, well. I’m looking forward to OSCON and catching up a few folks, seeing some fellow Django-nista’s there, and generally taking it in. Here’s to hoping that we avoid record breaking temperatures this year… last year was kinda hellish. Especially when the hotels couldn’t keep their AC running.

Well that’s just stupid. You can’t restore the iPhone back to a working setup without the AT&T activation system working - and I didn’t learn that it was down until AFTER I’d done the restore. Now I’ve got to wait with a non-functioning phone until tomorrow around Noon (3pm EST) for the AT&T crew to get their shit back working again.

To be fair, it makes sense that you’d need to activate the phone again from a fresh restore - but it’s damned annoying that they didn’t even warn me and now my phone is completely out. Damnit.

Update:

With the activation system back online, the restore process works faultlessly. Unfortunately, I’ve also come to rely on that phone for a lot more - amazing how fast that happens - and missed a few rather important points over the past 12 hours. Ouch. My fault, obviously, for missing on my own calendar - but damn that sucks.

Well, I’m downloading the restore image and hoping that’ll resolve this. I’ve managed to wedge an email in the outbox that the iPhone can’t send (the mail gateway rightfully complains that it’s not a legitimate “from” address) and I can’t seem to get at the thing any other way.

I was goofing with moving mail around, and took a received message, managed to push it into drafts, and from there “send it”. That’s left it in the unmarked, unavailable “outbox” queue where I can’t get my little mitts on it to delete it. Ah well, interesting experiment.

I did try replacing the email sync with data from the computer, but that apparently didn’t nuke the outgoing queue. I’ve got everything sync’d down from the phone (except for notes - but then I don’t use them since I can’t sync them) - so I guess I’m good. The restore image is 91.2MB and coming down the pipe slowly tonight.

In general, the phone was incredible while traveling in LA last week. I wore down the battery the most during the flights (watching some movies that I ripped from DVD) and a few hour long conference calls - light duty otherwise. (The heavy days took it to 50% charge). It’s really held up well. I just hope the battery continues to keep up the good work.