The FreeBSD Diary

Three day conferences seem to be busiest on the first day and relatively dead on the last day. Linux World Expo was no different. The day started well, and continued that way. The only talk I attended today was the PHP5 talk by Dirk Elmendart of Rackspace. Dirk has good presentation skills and I admire a company who will send an employee to a conference to inform the audience but not pitch their services/products. My thanks to Dirk and Rackspace for that.

I have been using PHP for several years. I like it. I like it a lot. I have been using class based programming for much longer. PHP5 will add lots of Object Oriented Programming improvements. Of note are the addition of public, protected, and private declarations. I've enjoyed these feature in commercial products such as Sybase's PowerBuilder for years. It's good to see it coming to PHP.

PHP5 will be a huge step forward with lots of missing pieces being added to allow the OOP nature of PHP to move to the next level.

There were many people interested in Bacula. So many that I was asked to give a demonstration. So, on Friday morning, I configured a two node network with another laptop and mine running on a small network. I demonstrated a simple backup, a simple restore, then restoring to a client other than the original client. I ran a few more jobs to illustrate how you can modify the job parameters in various ways.

Everyone I spoke to about Bacula was interested. I hope they start running it.

Day three was a shocker. I was dead tired by the time 4pm. I was dehydrated and beat. It wasn't until the conference started shutting down that I realized just how much money was involved. Sure, I'd noticed how large this place was. I'd seen the size and scale of the exhibits. The amount of hardware alone would fund a political campaign. But I underestimated just how much work is involved in a convention. When shutdown time arrived, scores of workers swarmed the floor, pulling up carpet, taking down displays suspended from the ceiling, and delivery of empty packing crates to the waiting exhibitors.

Add to this cost, the employee's salaries, the flights, the hotels, etc. It's pretty easy to see why companies are involved with these conferences: they expect to make money. And lots of it.

Yes, I hit Times Square again on Friday night. Unlike Thursday night when we shared a cab, I walked there. It was faster.

This time, instead of just walking through Times Square, I was there to see some action. And I did. I watched "Kill Bill". I liked it.

From there, it was a train ride home, without getting lost.

I'll start with an observation. There were a lot of people, and I mean hundreds and hundreds, who were interested in BSD. The BSDMall was busy all day every day. People want to know more. People were spending their money and making their choices.

And now on to couple of interesting rumors I heard on Friday.

I was told that a certain Manhattan-based Red Hat instructor uses OpenBSD at home for his firewall.

I was also told of a statement by a SCO employee that SCO would have gone bankrupt in December if they hadn't started the Linux case. He was also the same guy suggesting that BSD people should be asking vendors why they are not supplying BSD native code versions of their applications.