OSCON day 1

I'm at OSCON this week. I flew here yesterday (without incident). There were at least three other OSCON'ers on the DFW->PDX flight. The goodies aren't as cool this year: the bag is a canvas tote (we got nifty backpacks last year), and there were no really fun toys inside. Oh, well. I registered early, so I got the _AJAX Hacks_ book.

The wireless access is pretty spotty. I remember it being more reliable last year. Maybe it'll improve as the week goes on. The internet connection in my hotel room didn't work yesterday afternoon, but it's good now (it's how I'm doing this).

My room is a lot smaller this year (which is fine). But it's a nice view--I can see Mt. Hood. We actually flew right past Mt. Hood on the way in yesterday (I was surprised by how close the plane flew to the mountain).

This morning's tutorial was MySQL optimization. It was very informative. The speaker took the approach of optimizing queries over server configuration tuning (although he talked about that, too). Lots of good information. Looks like there's a possible InnoDB replacement engine coming out later this year called Falcon--that's good news, in case Oracle changes the InnoDB licensing or something (that came up in a question this morning--the speaker [Jay Pipes] said that it's "business as usual" for two years).

This afternoon was 'Higher-Order Perl' by Mark-Jason Dominus. He's really funny. The first half of the talk was really good (lots of the second half went right over my head). He talked about iterators, which was very interesting (good alternative to File::Find). He started his talk (which he gave barefoot) by throwing two chairs off the podium.