Wow, You Wear Shorts Too?

Finally made it back from OSCON and a wonderful vacation along the Oregon coast. It has been a much needed break from all the mental gymnastics that I have been doing with work and Testopia. After taking care of the usual fires and sorting through the piles of email awaiting me upon my return, I finally have time to write about my experience.

First, a big thanks to all the Mozilla team for their work and their sponsorship of the great gathering of open source enthusiasts. It was great to meet you all. You can see some pictures of the Mozilla party from Wednesday night here. The Bugzilla Office Hours on Thursday at the Mozilla booth were very well attended and we even sold a few T-shirts.

Speaking of T-shirts, I picked up my years supply at the conference. I needed a second suitcase to pack them all home in which, was a bit of a problem considering we had already packed the car to the gills with two kids and all their stuff. I also picked up the coolest toy ever made for Linux, literally. The Tux droid from KYSOH was discounted at the conference. When I mentioned to my wife that they had a singing talking penguin for sale, she about ruptured my ear drums in her excitement. It is fully programmable with a Python API. Well, I have been looking for an excuse to learn some Python. ;-)

I attended a number of really great sessions that have opened my eyes to new possibilities in the web 2.0 world. I especially enjoyed the Ruby and Rails introductions that I sat in. Alas, if only Ruby on Rails had been around when Bugzilla was young. Tim Brunce also gave an excellent tutorial on some of the advanced functions of the Perl DBI which were also very enlightening.

Among the keynotes at this years OSCON, I found the talk given by Bill Hilf from Microsoft to be rather intriguing. Especially how he sidestepped questions when pressed for details on whether Microsoft plans to sue Linux users for patent infringement. You can view it at the OSCON07 site and come to your own conclusions.

I am looking forward to next year's OSCON. Who knows, maybe we will have enough interest by then to set up some Testopia hours at the booth.