The Bleeding Heart Show

You looked as though I'd picked your name out of a hat

Next thing I know, you're fast asleep in someone's lap...

"The Bleeding Heart Show", The New Pornographers

Small shops BOF is coming up tonight, not last night. Wednesday's BOFs were:

• Should you roll your own config tool? I was actually looking for Tobias Oetiker's (!) (who received an award here for MRTG and RRDTool, and who I nearly tripped over at lunch yesterday) BOF on his tools but wandered into this one by mistake. I left after a few minutes, as a lot of the concepts were over my head. A shame, because apparently I missed a big discussion between Luke (puppet), the bcfg2 devels and (if I remember right) Mark Burgess (cfengine). Mark Burgess lost the fight and committed seppeku, with William Lefebvre as his second. Blood everywhere. USENIX is gonna lose the damage deposit for sure.

• Splunk: Someone directed me here because this was where the beer was. Again, all that was left was Bud (Lite). Splunk isn't really my bag, although the guy I've met who's gotta deal with 50GB of logfiles a day (or some such) was quite interested.

• LOPSA: Interesting, not least because someone else asked the question I was afraid to: What the hell is up with LOPSA and SAGE? Short answer: SAGE is about advancing the profession (research, training); LOPSA is about advancing you (professional development, support, fellowship...). Long answer: politics and tax laws.

• Streaming media at universities: Seven people including me. Everyone else was streaming terabytes of data with multiple servers; I wasn't. That was pretty much it.