Day 1:
- Documents, documents, documents by Matthew Weier O’Phinney. I particularly enjoyed that this was focused on the software architectural design and was system agnostic for the document database.
- Technical Debt by Elizabeth Naramore. Her no nonsense discussion and interaction with the audience kept this discussion interesting and engaging. The ideas and concepts discussed were something that every developer and manager should understand.
- Demystifying PostgreSQL by Asher Snyder. I have been wanting to look at PostgreSQL for years, I just never seem to have the time to do it. This was a nice intro to the system and its capabilities which I have to admit, are pretty dang cool.

Day 2:
- EXPLAIN – yeah it was my own talk, but hey – I was there!
- Pragmatic Guide to Git by Travis Swicegood Travis is a gifted speaker that manages to draw you in with his enthusiasm. His clear logical walk through of the basics of Git covers all the commands that a beginner will need.
- Infobright DB by Jeff Kibler This was a talk that I originally went to mostly out of curiosity. Once they started I found myself highly interested (data warehousing and mining is an interest of mine) not just for what they did – but how they did it.
- Welcome to the Dark Side: We have Brownies by Josh Holmes. The talk was informative, engaging, and just all around fun. Turns out Microsoft isn’t so bad after all… I mean – they had brownies even

Day 3:
Umm – slept late and then just practiced my last talk… Since it was on the last set of talks on the last day..

Missed a number of keynotes – did some volunteer work manning the PHP Community booth, but really enjoyed the “Dries” and “ROI” ones.

The various parties/after-parties (official and otherwise) were awesome with more then a few hangovers showing up the next day.

And as a minor side note – I also really enjoyed the Running MySQL at Scale tech talk at Facebook while I was there. Learned quite a bit and also got to see Domas again. I missed his brand of craziness.

Anyway – the presentation seemed to go pretty well (no one ran out screaming or throwing rotten fruit and vegetables at me) and we had an interesting discussion afterwards. I will be posting my slides somewhere later for all to see and comment or laugh at later.

UPDATE: You can find the presentation here

It will be held on April 5 and 6 at Wall St Plaza. The 5th will be dedicated to Developers and the 6th to various media (film, photo, etc.). For more information on it be sure to check out their site – http://www.barcamporlando.org/ Registration is now open for any who want to go.

Unfortunately I will not be able to attend – niece will be participating in a gymnastics state championship that weekend in Tampa. Family comes before playing.

The conference ran from 8:30AM – 5PM and had 12 different sessions with 3 keynote presentations. There seemed to be about 150- 200 people (saw all together maybe 10 women) in attendance with representatives of Redhat, Ubuntu, and gentoo in booths along with various other companies both local and linux centric (like Linux Journal and the local LUG).

The sessions I attended were quite interesting. I particularly enjoyed “Software as a Service: Implications of Web Apps for Software Freedom” by Mr. Gavin Baker for the interesting questions it raised on web applications being closed source though they are built on the popular open source tools and languages. Until then I never realized how closed source a site is – which goes completely counter to FOSS like PHP.

All in all a good time and I will be back again next time.

Rather beautiful isn’t it.

Anyway when I was given this name as a nickname I was curious what it looked like (this was before I got to see the image provided above) but I hadn’t a clue how to convert the unicode codepoint to a character I could see on a page (yes i am unicode ignorant in oh so many ways).

Do some investigating and learn to change the “U+” to “&#” add a “x” to mark it as a hex and add a semicolan at the end and walla… the HTML entity. Does this work for every unicode codepoint – no clue – but it did for the ones I played with.

My page to see what it looked like (with an extra unicode character for fun):
[php]
< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">

๛ ☠

[/php]

Turns out that RegisterFly is mid-sized a registrar for domain names and by the end of the month it will have it’s accreditation revoked by ICANN for fundamental breaches in the ICANN contract. The controversy? Well according to the news sources I have read they have had deteriorating customer service that has lead to people losing their domains, being unable to transfer to competitors, having domains whois data changed, and the locking of domains – breaking the “rules” of an ICANN accredited registerer – and all of which the customers have been unable to do anything about.

The customers then turned to ICANN for assistance . Only one problem – ICANN does not see itself as a regulator and provided no public forums for problems such as this.

As one whose liveliness can quite easily be linked to a specific website – losing control of that site (and thus my ability to make money) would be incredibly stressful. Not just for the money involved – but the work involved in nurturing the site to where it currently is (not quite a child – but…). websites come and go – so it’s (and by reflection my) reputation mean a lot.

So now it seems that ICANN at a meeting to be held in Lisbon this week will be reviewing it’s various procedures amongst other things. Will ICANN change it’s purpose and role – don’t know, but it should be interesting to see what the fall out of all this will be.

The News articles I read:
Business Week
Washington Post
The Register
Internet Search Engine Database