After OSCON ended, I went to the [Oregon Brewers Festival](http://www.oregonbrewfest.com/) on Friday afternoon. This is the first time I have gone after living in Portland for five years and loving beer. I rode my bike downtown; they had guarded bike parking. The cost was $4 for the mug, $1 for tokens which give a taste […]
On Friday, I made it to the morning keynotes. None of them were really informative but were entertaining and funny. I attended [ZFS: Bringing Terabytes Under Control](http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2007/view/e_sess/12312) by Jay Edwards. He mainly talked about using ZFS on Solaris for large storage systems. The biggest advantage of ZFS is the nice management tools for creating pools […]
After staying up late on Wednesday night, I slept late on Thursday and missed the keynotes. I went to Matt Tucker’s talk on [Jingle: Cutting Edge Open Source VoIP](http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2007/view/e_sess/13134) describing the Jingle extension to Jabber that allows voice chat and other multimedia. Jingle is the standardization of the Google Talk protocol for voice chat. One […]
In the afternoon, I went to more OSCON sessions. First, I went to [Nested Data Parallelism in Haskell](http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2007/view/e_sess/14014) by Simon Peyton-Jones, the same guy who gave the keynote talk I went to. This time, he was talking about extending the Haskell compiler to do data parallelism. Flat data parallelism is when a computation is split […]
I am going to the OSCON sessions today and the rest of the week. I missed most of the keynotes this morning. I did [Transactional Memory for Concurrent Programming](http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2007/view/e_sess/14017) by Simon Peyton-Jones and Haskell guy at Microsoft. He described the idea of transaction memory as the alternative to locking for concurrent programming. Transactional memory basically […]
My coworkers and I have gotten addicated to Starcraft again. The question is how to run it since my only computers are Linux and Mac. Starcraft under [Wine](http://winehq.com) on Linux works pretty well. There are some issues with the display changing resolution that makes it hard to switch back to the desktop and resizes programs. […]
On Saturday, I bought a new grill in preparation for my annual party on Wednesday. I was tired of the using the old charcoal grill that I inherited with my apartment. It was pain clean out the old ashes, a pain to light the charcoal even with a chimney starter, a pain to grill just […]