Pythian Group

[yanick@enkidu shuck]$ perl -MGit::Wrapper \
    -E'say for Git::Wrapper->new(".")->show( "master:shuck-and-awe-9" )'

First this week we have John Anderson filling us up on the Perl high drama of OSCON of earlier this week. In a nutshell the organizers provided, as it’s the tradition, ribbons to the attendees, and the Perl Mongers in the crowd got one reading Desperate Perl Hacker. The epithet, coined in an XML article written in 1997, was meant in good fun, but was received with a distinct lack of glee by the Perl hackers. Which is no surprise, considering how mongers already have to fight tooth and nail to dispel the heavy baggage of preconceptions that our language accumulated throughout the years. Quite a few blog entries sprouted to discuss the whole hooplah, with Piers Cawley‘s being one of the most eloquent, explaining that, yes Virginia, Perl can, and is, often used at the 11th hour to save someone’s bacon and, consequently, has instances of code that are less than perfectly pretty. But, it’s also much more than an emergency fire extinguisher and and has flip side that consists of a strong, solid and modern ecosystem that can, and is, definitively used for bigger projects.

Buuut enough about that. Let’s return to our regular parade of technological goodies, shall we?

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This is the 150th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Someone accidentally left Dave Edwards’ cage unlocked, and he escaped, thus leaving me with the pleasurable duty of compiling the 150th weekly Log Buffer.

Many people other than Dave are finding release this week. Read the rest of this entry . . .

As part of a project of Technocation, Inc I took a whole bunch of videos at OSCon 2008. The conference was about a month ago, and about 2 weeks ago I’d finished processing and uploading all the videos, but it was only today where I had the 5-6 hours I needed to finish posting all the video, and making this matrix of video.

The video may not be the quality that the O’Reilly folks took and put up on blip tv’s OSCon site, but all the videos here are freely downloadable or playable in your browser.

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My parents instilled upon me many values that I keep with me today. My twin brother and I are the youngest of four children, coming from a lower-middle class background. We children had the inevitable fights over material possessions, screeching “Mine! Mine!”

My father’s response to this was to look at us and say “These toys are mine; I bought those toys with money I worked for. What’s yours is what you make with your bodies.” While the sentiment is arguably harsh, crude and bordering on vulgar, I cannot argue that he had a certain point.

If you do not truly own something, you will be left squabbling like a child when your perceived ownership is threatened. When you assumed you owned something and the truth comes to light, you will be massively insecure and have a sense of injustice.

A few points from OSCon are haunting me and getting me to think about what FLOSS means to me, and what I want from it.

— Open source is important even if you never read one line of source code or make one modification. The fact that anyone can read and write the source code is critical even if nobody besides the original engineer(s) ever does.

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