Once one of my favorite restaurants, you and I simply don’t get along anymore.
I had food from Rubio’s for lunch today, brought in by the company hosting my colleagues and me for some technical training. Not long after lunch, my asthma began to act up. Since going Paleo several months ago, my daily inhaler and I have practically parted ways. However, this evening I felt that I needed it.
A few weeks ago, I had dinner at Islands, where I indulged in some corn chips and salsa. The following day, I needed my inhaler. I, perhaps wrongly, concluded that grains, at least corn, were a trigger and have been much happier to avoid them ever since.
It should go without saying that I passed on the tortillas served alongside lunch today. Nevertheless, not long afterwards I felt that all too familiar tightness in my chest, resulting in the use of my inhaler tonight, after two weeks without.
If I had to guess, I’d say it was the liberal use of soy in the cooking (is it to save money or demonstrate that the food is supposedly heart healthy?) that proved today’s trigger. I don’t know what specifically was the cause, as it could be any one of soy’s negative properties, or even several in combination. In the end, this is just further encouragement to avoid eating out.
Except for Elevation Burger (their site appears to be Flash-based, sorry). That place is awesome.
Friday marked the last day of the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), and my last day in Portland, Oregon. Unlike previous trips, I traveled home on Friday night instead of Saturday morning. In the past, I’ve sat around my hotel on Friday night with nothing to do except finish posts about OSCON. There is one drawback, though. I’m finally finishing this post 20 days later, which means it probably won’t be as fleshed out as my posts about Wednesday and Thursday.
After my near complete lack of interest in the keynotes I saw on Wednesday and Thursday mornings, I paid little attention to those on Friday. I thought the message Karen Sandler had about open health was good, but that’s about all I can say about them.
By far I was the most pleased by the sessions I attended on Friday. First, Kevin Falcone’s Shipwright: Application Distribution Simplified. Kevin works for Best Practical, a company with the best shirts. I plan on doing some evangelizing of Shipwright at work, as it would help a lot of people, including me, to better develop and deploy their applications.
I wasn’t planning on attending OSCON this year. I was perfectly happy skipping it and staying home during the last week of July. Then I happened to be looking over the list of Perl sessions and saw, at the very end of the list, Easy Distributed Computing with Perl and Grid::Request. It seems that Victor Felix has released a module that does exactly the same thing as some of the modules I’ve maintained at work, only the design is much better. However, it doesn’t support the batch system we use. I emailed Victor to discuss some collaboration and registered for OSCON so I could meet him. So yeah, I attended OSCON for one session. But it was worth it. The module looks great and Victor seems happy that I have an interest to contribute. It will be much better use of my time to contribute to a module on the CPAN than to continue pouring effort into what we have today.
Since, after chatting for a bit with Victor, I was already standing outside the room well into the next time slot, I popped into Git for Ages 4 & Up. Michael Schwern and Ricardo Signes demonstrated the Git commands everyone should know to get started with the version control system. As an added bonus, they used tinkertoys to help the audience visualize what Git’s internal representation of the repository looked like after each command. It was definitely a different and entertaining talk.
Prior to the closing keynote, Piers Cawley was invited to sing his library song, which I mentioned in Thursday’s post, again for the benefit of all OSCON attendees.
After three days in Portland, I finally ate at Burgerville. Eating at this regional chain is something I look forward to every time I’m in the area. Though, I suppose my change in diet may have suppressed my eagerness and led me to put it off until Friday. In any case, I ordered a cheeseburger with grilled onions (ditching the bun) and a large raspberry shake. While I prefer their blackberry shakes when available, the meal was delicious.
The high point of the conference happened, oddly enough, after it had ended. For whatever reason, I happened to wander into a different area of the convention center, in which a sock knitting conference was taking place. Outside of their expo hall was the Sockgate, a cardboard replica of a Stargate. As we were waiting to take pictures with it, Paul Fenwick happened by and offered to take some photos. He’s a really nice guy and I enjoyed finally getting the chance to meet him. After the photo op, he headed into the knitting expo hall. In retrospect, I should have done the same. It would have been interesting to see what it was like.
Photo Credit: Paul Fenwick
Finally, I learned that when I attend OSCON, I really do need to go for the entire week. Apparently, it takes me about two days to acclimate myself to the environment and really start interacting with people. Of course, by arriving Tuesday night, I was ready to interact on Friday, just as everyone was heading home. It didn’t help that I was staying in a hotel way out by the airport, with MAX service ending before 11:00 PM. With a new baby at home, I certainly don’t regret my choice to be away for a shorter period of time, but if I go next year, I’ll probably go for the entire week.
Thursday was the second day of sessions at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) and my third day in Portland, Oregon. Overall, the sessions I attended were arguably more relevant to my work than those I attended on Wednesday. Still, the day left me feeling unsatisfied. At past OSCONs, I ended each day with my mind brimming with new ideas, scarcely able to wait until I could put some of them into practice. So far, this year’s conference hasn’t had the same effect on me.
In any case, the Thursday morning keynotes were far better than those foisted upon us on Wednesday morning. Gabe Zichermann’s talk, in particular, caught my attention. In Game theory applied to user engagement in Open Source he talked about using so-called gamification techniques to draw people into using Open Source software. Many of his examples had to do with using game theory to alter real life behavior, such as a lottery to reward good drivers in Sweden or the use of consumption graphs in hybrid vehicles. On a separate note, I tend to grow annoyed at the latter, having been stuck behind too many hypermiling drivers.
Getting into the sessions, I favored those more in line with the work I do as a Perl programming system administrator. Also, it didn’t hurt that The Conway Channel 2011 happened to take place during the first time slot of the day. I’m a bit sorry I passed up DIY Clinical Trials (Or: How to Guinea Pig Your Way to Scientific Truth and Better Health), if only for the reason that it would have been completely different from anything I normally do. But, I attended those types of sessions on Wednesday, so it was back to business, so to speak. Damian Conway was in his usual top form, as entertaining as he is educational. I won’t go into too much detail, only to note that he demonstrated four of his modules, using a theme I’m sure most will recognize. First, something old, updates to the Regexp::Grammars module. He then introduced something new, the IO::Prompter module, which supersedes his older IO::Prompt. There was something borrowed, the Data::Show module, which serves as a convenience wrapper around the Data::Dump module. And finally, something blue, the Acme::Crap module, which seems oddly cathartic.
I like to think I’m a halfway decent Perl programmer, but that doesn’t mean I think I can ignore things like Jacinta Richardson’s Perl Programming Best Practices 2011. The talk was a round-up of the tools and modules that are generally considered to be the best practices by the Perl community today. Yes, generally. People will have their differences of opinion, and I don’t always agree with the advertised best practices. However, if followed, the practices will lead to better code, and if violating a practice, I like to be able to back that up with a well thought out reason (it doesn’t necessarily have to be a good reason). The first of two, possibly pithy, examples of this is the local::lib and it’s default use of ~/perl5 as its include path. I prefer to use ~/local/lib/perl5 and, sure, the module allows me to do that easily enough, but it’s an extra, non-standard step. Second, the cpanm has been touted as the best way to install modules from CPAN. As a control freak with a highly customized CPAN configuration, I’ve never liked the way cpanm seems to do things its way. Admittedly, it may be customizable, but I’ve never had the need to look into it.
There’s been some noise around the office about testing Amazon’s EC2 offering. To that end, I thought James Loope’s Utility and Automation: Low Overhead Operations with Amazon & Puppet would be educational, possibly giving me some ideas about how to managing our own potential EC2 environment. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way for me. The talk was heavily focused on the way the web application was designed and pieces of Amazon’s infrastructure were used. We’re not creating or running web applications, so none of it was beneficial to me. There was nothing about Puppet aside from explaining that using it (or another configuration management tool) is vital for keeping everything running.
At this point, I was turned off from any cloud talks at OSCON. There seems to be, with probably good reason, an inextricable tangling of cloud and web applications. Because of this, I decided to pass on Achieving Hybrid Cloud Mobility with OpenStack and XCP and instead attended Piers Cawley’s Polymorphic Dispatch—It’s Not Just a Good Idea, It’s the Law. I’m glad I did, because there were definitely some very useful ideas presented. The idea, taken from Smalltalk, of passing messages to objects has a lot of merit. Combining this with polymorphism, sending a message and allowing different objects to act on it differently, vastly simplifies code. Simple code, of course, is easier to test and easier to debug when things go horribly wrong (and actually is less likely to go horribly wrong in the first place). Of particular interest to me were the Null Object pattern and what Piers referred to as the key tenant of object-oriented programming: tell, don’t ask. That is to say, if I understood correctly, instead of querying an object for information and using it to determine which action to perform, give the information to the object and have it perform the action. Finally, Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns was recommended as the best book on good coding practices out there. According to Piers, it “will change the way you think about programming.”
I was in way over my head in Tom Christiansen’s Unicode in Perl Regexes. The only thing I managed to learn is that I don’t know nearly enough about Unicode to actually understand using it. I’ll leave it at that. It was a very information-dense session and it’s possible that Tom knows more about Unicode than those who designed it. Other choices during this time slot, which may have been better for me, were Connecting iOS to the Real World with Arduino, presented by my friend Alasdair Allan, or, venturing again into the realm of health geekery, Open Source Preventive Medicine: Citizen Science Genomics
The last session I attended on Thursday had so much potential, but, for me, it fell flat. I expected A. Sinan Unur‘s Visualizing Economic Data Using Perl and HTML5′s Canvas to focus far more on visualization than it did. Instead, the majority of the presentation was about the difficulty of parsing public data published by the United States government. For this, Sinan uses Spreadsheet::ParseExcel and explained a few of the techniques he uses to extract data from tables designed primarily for visual consumption. Unfortunately, very little time was spent showing how Canvas was used. We were given one static example and an explanation that there is no method available for determining the height of text in a Canvas element. I had hoped to return to work with some ideas for using Canvas to visualize data from our batch scheduling system, but ultimately left disappointed.
After the last session, I met up with a coworker, an old friend, and a new friend to have dinner at Chipotle. Normally, I like to avoid chain restaurants—national chains in particular—when traveling, preferring to sample the local cuisine. But, we wanted a quick dinner and it was nearby. My opinion was requested, on the relative healthfulness of pinto versus black beans. I simply stated that I would be ordering my carnitas bowl without any beans.
After dinner, we returned to the convention center for the Perl Lightning Talks and the State of the Onion. As always, the talks were quite entertaining. Of note was a juggling demonstration, illustrating various programming languages and databases. Near the end, Ricardo Signes recounted a conversation he had with a couple of women from the knitting conference sharing the convention center with us. Its presence provided a wonderful juxtaposition. While OSCON is male-dominated and many don’t know how to act when women brave their way into our midst, the knitting convention is completely opposite. Ricardo’s message to us was, take the time to look up from our laptops and chat with those around us. We might just have a better time and make new friends.
Finally, Piers Cawley favored us, as he does every year, with a song. This year, however, he did not bear a tale of levity, but a message of deadly seriousness. The United Kingdom is closing libraries in an attempt to reduce public spending. As a protest, Piers wrote a song, “Child of the Library”. There doesn’t appear to be any video (yet) of Piers performing at OSCON, but I’ve gone ahead and embedded one that I found. It’s catchy, I had it stuck in my head for a couple of days after the conference.
We could easily see the same thing happen in the United States—and in fact I have already seen it proposed in San Diego. I’ll first admit that I have not set foot inside a library since college, over a decade ago (high school, if only counting public libraries). Do libraries still matter, or is the concern over their closing merely the knee-jerk nostalgia of those of us who came of age in a world that didn’t yet know the Internet? I can’t, and won’t, take a side on this issue until I’ve taken the time to visit my local library. If I can recognize it as something I saw in my childhood, perhaps it should be closed. If it has adapted to the so-called Information Age, maybe it’s worth funding.
As a final, humorous note, I almost didn’t make it back to my hotel. At least, not without finding an alternate method of transportation. At 10:22 PM, excusing myself and apologizing for staying so far away from the conference, I left Media Temple party at the Jupiter Hotel, arriving at the convention center MAX station at 10:32 PM. The schedule at the station listed 10:42 PM as the last red line train to the airport, with Google Maps concurring that a train was 10 minutes away. About two minutes later an unmarked blue line train arrived at the station, traveling east. At this point, Google Maps had decided it would rather show me its trip planner instead of the previous screen which showed the impending arrival of the red line. Forced to make a split-second decision, I hopped on the train. I knew that I could take it at least as far as the Gateway station, where I could transfer to the red line if it was still behind me. Around 11:00 PM I arrived at Gateway, after spending the ride thinking about how much a cab would cost. This station had a real-time display with train arrival times. The last red line of the day was only three minutes out. Whew.
