Greetings again from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in beautiful Monterey, California, where skies are overcast and the temperature is a comfortable 62 degrees. I'm loving Monterey because it's a wonderful 90 degrees cooler than my hometown of Austin is right now.
Tuesday's sessions covered some new and exciting territory for me. First was Chris Petrilli's Zope for Developers tutorial. I have to admit I am fascinated by Zope, in part because I have absolutely no idea how it works, but here's what I do know: Zope is an object environment similar to Enterprise JavaBeans. It connects to a database, which brokers persistent objects to Web pages using DTML. DTML is markup similar to HTML that you can insert inside of web pages to embed content from these objects dynamically. The whole thing looks pretty interesting, but I think they need to be more compliant with standards, such as XML for DTML.
Chris's talk could have been more concise, but he helped me to pick up some of the more fundamental pieces of this bleeding-edge technology. On the other hand, Chris interjected a comment halfway through that nirvana would be achieved when no documentation is needed for the Zope project. This caused the air in my lungs to suddenly be replaced by a good portion of my soft drink, while editor in chief Frank Willison simultaneously stumbled over a chair behind me. Suuurrre it will.
I bounced like an ILOVEYOU virus among several afternoon tutorial tracks, but the two I enjoyed the most were Simson Garfinkel's Linux Security and John Terpstra's Configuring Samba to Integrate Enterprise. Simson's talk was extremely basic, and probably should have been renamed "Understanding Security Fundamentals," but he scattered some good points through it about the state of modern crypto algorithms. The Samba talk was excellent because it included a tidal wave of technical discussion of common problem areas for Samba users. And believe me, when you're creating a product to work with Windows, that tidal wave analogy is pretty accurate.
One of the most common problems that users face is encrypted passwords with SMB when they install Samba to work with Windows 98 or NT. Another common issue is setting up Samba to work flawlessly in various Linux distributions (startup scripts are a real pain). Mr. Terpstra handled both with the elegence that only a member of the Samba team could do.
Shortly after I talked with a prospective Perl author, the O'Reilly PR group snapped a few unsuspecting pictures of me. The key word here is "unsuspecting." You'll never see any of them. Just pretend I still look like the picture above.
An update from our eye-in-the-sky reporter Andy Oram:
The number of people who squeezed into one hotel room for the ActiveState hospitality party Monday night exceeded the number of current ActiveState employees -- both impressive numbers. ActiveState, which makes Open Source tools for Perl and Python on multiple platforms, passed the 40-employee mark this year. The number of people at their party -- including many of the folks most closely associated with Perl, and a couple who play an important role with Python -- reached 45 while I was there, and I left before the drinking contest. I did, however, rub on my gecko tattoo, and I found someone who has a real tattoo of a camel on his arm. I asked, "Is that a trademark violation?" Personally, I can't imagine 44 people in a hotel room having a drinking contest. I bet the hotel management loved it.
A little later I met O'Reilly Perl/Tk author and tattoo afficionado, Nancy Walsh. Nancy was instrumental in helping me place the ultra-cool ActiveState gecko tattoo on my arm -- I was too dumb to figure out that you're supposed to wet the tattoo first. After a few tries, including sitting in a chair, squeezing a ball, and wrapping a tourniquet around my forearm, we were able to successfully hit the muscle and paste the tattoo onto my skin. This was my first time, so shortly thereafter I fainted.
Perhaps it was the rebellious nature that the tattoo unleashed, or maybe it was the fact that I'm such a klutz, but I spilled a Coke on my shirt. I quickly rushed to my hotel room and replaced my "Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell" 100% cotton advertisement with my sleek O'Reilly Java shirt. "Wait," you say. "A Java shirt among a conference of Perl people? Don't do it, Bob! They'll call Kerberos out! If they catch you, you'll be handcuffed and repeatedly whacked over the head with regular expressions!"
Not to worry, folks. The Perl people welcomed me with open arms to their evening function, and I got to meet some great folks in the front rows, none of whom had wrinkled impressions of blow dryers with scopes on them.
The evening function was, of course, Jon Orwant's Internet Quiz Show, and the White Camel and Appaloosa awards for the Perl community at large. This was the most engrossing and entertaining portion of the convention thus far. Jon's unique blend of dry wit and slanderous humor makes him the perfect host of such an event. If Jon turned his quiz show into a weekly, or even monthly event streamed across the Internet, I'd tune in early for every show. Yes, it was that good, and the crowd was rolling with laughter at each question. Here are samples of his questions:
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