dalts.net Kind Acts of Randomness

Day 2.... I'm getting into this now.

I spent most of the day in the Mysql Miniconf but had a little departure to the packed sysadmin one for the session on puppet (sorry Mysqlers I was probably the one that instigated the switch of rooms as I did tell someone in sysadmin how much space you had!).

Puppet is awesome - I've already started some work on this, but I am still a little daunted by all the different ways of doing things. Anyway - there were some good tips from the Kennards...ahem I mean $client talk and I am pleased to hear that there is a good book that just came out. Looking forward to Luke's talk on Friday.

Anyway back to Mysql. Lots of talk about replication and proxy, which is of main interest to me. Proxy is awesome but I think I might have to put hold my plans to use it in production for a while (differing opinions on it's stability) which is a real shame as it solves a lot of problems for me. Very few seemless options of doing M/S selection in PHP so there will be some coding, at least a move to RoR there are a few options like Masochism.

Has a quick Esperanto discussion with Thomas and Colin at Lunch. We didn't really talk Esperanto (Thomas is the only one with any degree of spoken fluency) but did have a good talk about the future of the language. I will double my efforts to get back into it. There is a lot of cross-over between open-source community and Esperanto, so I was thinking that maybe a "Esperanto Geeks Australia" groups/list might be something worthwhile... anyway, just a thought - feel free to comment if you have any thoughts on this.

I went to an interesting talk in LinuxChix (hurray - I got to go to at least part of LinuxChix!) about Community work, training and computer recycling. Great project and there are many more around Australia. In the Q&A after, people complained about the difficulty in setting up projects, but I think the key here is COLLABORATION and the (too short) discussion was evidence of this. I hope someone has the sense to setup some sort of mailing list/group where people from all around Australia (&NZ) can collaborate and share ideas.

More mysql later in the afternoon and Black Vodka (not sure if that was a good idea). I decided to skip dinner and get an early night, but ended up spending most of the evening hacking Carla's drupal site. drupal.org seems to be down (probably due to 6 RC release), but google cache was very useful.

Anyway - managed to buy some ear-plugs so slept much better and feeling fresh ready for the main conference this morning. BRING IT ON!

(taking lots of pictures - but don't have my card reader - so will have to upload when I get home)