CmdrTaco's Journal: Gnomedex, Apple Support, Banzai, Memcached

This weekend Kathleen & I went to Des Moines Iowa for Gnomedex. I hadn't really heard much about the show- going in, I thought it was more of a developer conference, but it turns out that it was more of a general purpose geek show. Very little about Linux GUI development at all- the name was purely coincidental ;) Anyhoo, they put on a nice show. A good turn out by any measure- they had hundreds of attendees. Unlike most shows, they only had a single speaker at a time, so everyone at tho show stayed to hear my speech. This is pretty unusual for me: Slashdot is kind of a niche thing at most shows I speak at, so anyone that wants to hear me talk, is typically a Slashdot reader, and in most questions, have some stuff they want to talk about.

I don't think my talk went particularly well. When I speak, I don't show up with a pre-prepared presentation & slide show. I'm just not good at that sort of thing. Besides that, I feel like such things could often just be downloaded, and read at your leisure... so what is the point of having someone read it to you at a show? So I just wing things. This gives me the flexibility to address issues that people want to discuss instead of being locked into a pre-planned agenda. Depending on the crowd, we can discuss the technical infrastructure upon which Slashdot operates, or we can cover editorial functions, ethical issues, feature plans, etc. I like this method because in many cases I can actually get good feedback from people who might not actually think I read my email, and thus wouldn't bother emailing feature suggestions and so forth.

Anyway, I didn't feel like my talk went all that great. Some good questions. Mostly pretty typical fare. I can rationalize it by saying it was a captive audience instead of people who selected "My" talk over 4 other talks (which means they are really interested in Slashdot). Or maybe I was just tired from getting up at 6am, and then flying to Des Moines. Maybe it was because I was like the 4th speaker that day. Or maybe it just wasn't what people expected from my talk.But hey, I'm honest. I'm not a public speaker. I do it only because it goes with my job. I hope people weren't hugely disappointed. But I felt like my words were falling on deaf ears. Several people were very nice to me, and several people gave me very positive feedback, but I personally felt like it didnt go all that well. Ah well, not every speech can be solid gold ;)

The show itself was quite unique. Besides being in Des Moines (people are nice! Things don't feel so rushed! I'm from Michigan, so I love midwest mindset. And I loath California ;) But Chris and the rest of the folks involved put on a damn fine show. Good parties. Good talks. Most interesting to me was the stuff from Microsoft. They demod xbox stuff, and discussed the future of media player and their video editing tools and such. I'm really interested in their plans to enter the video distribution market. They showed clips in the afternoon, and full movies later that night. I checked out the files on the free CD they were giving away- 500 megs for 10 minutes of HD video. That seems somewhat large to me, but up on their big screen it was pretty sweet looking. Absolutely crisp, theater quality video. I lust for the day when this capability is in my basement. And simultaneously, I fear that crippling DRM will make it difficult to actually use.

I bought a 17" Powerbook not so long ago. My second Mac. I need to give my 15" to Kathleen (hers is absolutely ancient- I'm amazed she still can use it!) but the 17" (I named it Ebichu ;) arrived with a DOA airport. I tried a few things to get it to work, but when you boot from the Apple Test CD, and THAT tells you the device doesn't exist, you KNOW something is wrong. Which means, for the first time ever, I need to contend with apple support. I did what any sane human would do... I asked my wife to call them for me :)

If you haven't partaken of 'Banzai' on Fox, I highly recommend it. You can watch an episode in about 18 minutes, and it lends itself to drinking-game style games very easily. I was to tired to actually drink my way through it last night, having just returned from Iowa a few hours earlier, but MAN is that show great fluffly entertainment.

On the Slashdot front, it looks like we're really close to tagging a release version of the code, so anyone feeling like upgrading could do that. There is just so much new stuff in there, it blows me away. Much of it is extreme optimization more intended for millions-of-page-views-per-day install of Slash (which I assume number in single digits ;) but there's some great stuff. Jamie has been researching memcached, and even installed it to test out. It looks like this could be the missing piece in the Mysql/Perl/Apche trio that really makes everything scream at long last. It is very cool. Plus we've recently been doing some benchmarking & profiling in Slash to really find out where the weak spots are. Every fall we get some sort of growth on the site, and I want to be ready this year, so we don't slow down when it happens.

That MySQL Issue

[fm6]

I still wonder at your continued use of MySQL. OK, I'm not a DBMS expert, but it's my understanding that a more sophisticated engine might be able to handle all those gazillion queries more efficiently. Have you looked at Firebird or PostgreSQL? Maybe run a few benchmarks? I won't bother suggesting the various closed-source engines.