OSCON Updates

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to post much from OSCON – the conference is really that good…and really that busy. The sessions have been extremely interesting, the speaking lineup outstanding and the number of people to meet impressive. I'll detail a few highlights here, but as I mentioned yesterday, I'm really not doing the conference justice.
Ilia gave a nice PHP session on speeding up PHP, which is something I put a great deal of time into for LQ. Most of what he went over (compiler flags, configure option, non-PIC library, etc) we already have implemented. It was kind of nice to see how much of what he said I had already dug up ;) That being said, he did reveal a couple tricks which I haven't tried out, and I'll be testing those when I get home. Rasmus also gave a PHP session, this one focused on PHP5, but also covered some other things. Yahoo! is still on 4.x for speed reasons, but PHP 5.1 should clear those up. It's likely I'll try to move to 5.1.x when we do the LQ code upgrades later this year. He also covered the different opcode caches. The bottom line was that if you want a free one that is compatible with PHP 5.1, APC is just about your only option. It's a shame Zend snapped up the MMCache author (for us at least, not for him) as that one was consistently the fastest in my experience.
Chris DiBona covered a bit about what Google was doing. He also give a few small insights into Google that you don't usually get. There was even a current picture of a Google data center, although the lights were off. The Summer of Code was a large focus of the session. One thing of interest was the Google tends to prefer the BSD license over any of the others, but in the end they usually let the engineer who wrote the code choose whatever OSI-approved license they prefer. Once again – Google gets it, from an employee perspective. Inevitably, someone brought up the Google Windows-only client app question. sound familiar? While I agree with much of his response, it seems the answer is not sufficient for some.
Other sessions I attended included talks from Tim O'Reilly, Andrew Morten, Jeremy Zawodny, Mitchell Baker, well – you get the idea…the lineup is stacked. Each one of these is worthy of at least a full blog post. Unfortunately, I'm out of time as another session is about to start. FWIW, the biggest surprise so far was Jonathan Schwartz. I was expecting a live version of his blog during his opening day interview. Hearing him speak live, I'm now not even convinced he writes that blog. He was rational, and even brought up some good points – something I rarely find in his blog posts. I have to wonder though… has he changed his tune, or did the fact that he was in front of an OpenSource-centric OSCON crowd temporarily change his view point? Only time will tell.
–jeremy
OSCON, OSCON05, PHP, Google