My Streets

Cities and circles drawn perfect, complete

These are the fables on my street, my street, my street

"My Street", The New Pornographers

Okay, my (lawyers, please note) TOTALLY ACCIDENTAL stalking of Tom Limoncelli continues. I met another sysadmin from Boston (who, BTW, is into LISP. Call that accidental? 'Cos I don't) (alsoplus he's the third guy I've met from a small shop, which is damned reassuring in a conference full o'people from multi-continent corporations/teams) who invited me along to the LOPSA hospitality room. I talked to David Parter from LOPSA about why I should join. He also gave me the sad news that the Burritos-as-big-as-your-head place in Madison, WI is closed. Noooooo!

Nice bunch of people, who'll probably be getting a membership fee from me post-haste. Totally unrelated to the free beer. I met a guy from a Scandinavian hosting company that has, like, 300,000 domains (!). We talked about spam for a while, and PHP's ability to include files remotely (he's a big fan. Oh, wait, no) ("When I meet the guy who put that in..." "You'll punch him in the cock?" "Oh, that's just the start of it."), and Perl vs. C vs. LISP vs. Dvorak keyboards vs. I don't know what all.

And who else is in the room AND stared at my badge trying to figure out who the hell I was? That's right, Tom! Still no chance to lean over casually and say, "So I hear Google's trying to figure out what to about TCP scalability bringdown. 'Cos, like, my enterprise-fu PHP taint mode will totally nebbish your gubbins. Scalable. Solution. Moving forward. Come back!"

Also went to the: Free Beer and Ice Cream BOF, PGP/CACert BOF, and the Bash scripting BOF. Last challenge: using Bash built-ins only, check to see if a given TCP port on a given host is open. Welp, I did know about Bash's built-in /dev/tcp/host/port, but totally foundered on syntax. We were told to email our scripts to polvi.net...which sounded familiar, and it should, 'cos was Alex Polvi, who works at Oregon State University Open Source Lab, they who provide bandwidth to such as Gentoo, Mozilla and Kerneltrap. At one point, a few friends of his came in and sat down close to where I was, and he came over and talked to them during one of the challenges. "I think everyone would get freaked out if they knew a Google recruiter was here," he said, laughing. Worked for me.

And, BTW, I thought I was at least quarter-decent at Bash. Hah! It is to laugh.