Another day, I lost in the bangalore traffic maze. Most of the time I avoid driving, Even for work I stay at a safe distance of 10minutes or less drive. So normally I don’t venture, then again, I started and reached the venue just in time at 12pm

Getting Rich with PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP Creator
This is one of the best talks, as you can expect from Rasmus. He showed how to get “rich” by making an application and get bought by Yahoo or Google by applying PHP technology He started off with a small web application and the performance refactoring by using data from valgrind (with callgrind). Running apache with no child processes. So first the application required something like 1700+ servers for expected 50,000 users, and the application latency was 284ms. And gradually by optimizing PHP and other applications under the hood, like turning off SSL for DB (PostgreSQL on ubuntu ) he reduced the need to 2 server and latency improved to 3ms. And then he was talked about the PHP’s capabilities for creating Web 2.0 apps .. PHPs XML capabilities and APC library. Pretty interesting talk, and value for time The talk presentation is here. The 17th slide appears to be broken though.

Java EE 5 and Glassfish V2, Some one from Sun Microsystems
Why does sun send “Project Manager” kind of people to a mostly dev-oriented conferences ? May be they want to keep all the good ones for Sun Tech Days! Next February, I’ll be attending sun tech days and find out. But this is not expected. The people who are talking about the slides, don’t know half of the content. They just read it out. Then what’s the point just give us URL, we’ll go ahead and read it.

Again the slides seem to be good, but the speaker screwed up.

Makefiles – Dark Magic in Programming, Sulamita Gracia, LinuxChixs.org.br
I was not really making out any thing in the make files. But I wanted to support Sulamita for her persistent support to the open source. And the bizarre experiences with couple of sun talks, I needed a break.
Apart from monophonic pronunciation and accent the talk was good, and Sulamita touched almost all the corners in the cryptic language from hell (Mak macros and files).

Overview of Open Web Single Sign-On, Vrushali Mahalley, Sun Microsystems

This was from sun again. Kind of boringly designed presentation. The speaker continuously reading from a bunch of papers. But better then previous sun’s presentations. She tried to explain all the types and scenarios of the Single Signon using Open Web SSO. Techinical, but boring.

Which Open Source License?, Russell Nelson, Open Source Initiative
Hmm .. some one from OSI (~esr type !? ). Very interesting talk and informative about the licenses out there and their intricacies, and how to choose a license. Mostly heard and read. But the Russel was good to listen to, made it entertrainingly-informative. The main question was what is the business model for Open Source. I’m some how still not convinced how to pull the Open Source initiatives up to verticals. I’ll post my thoughts after I think little more. Back to conference, this talk helped me recover from the Sun burn.

Highlights and Side notes
Yesterday I got the “they don’t give me the source code” T-shirt. Today, Sun stall has a small t-shirt image on their stall with a very witty message “Want to change the world, here’s the source code : OpenSolaris” – Some one from Sun stall got the idea .. Wow, I was “shocked” !

Another highlight is the BOSS. BOSS is Bharat Operating System Solution. A wonderfully customized linux distro from CDAC. I’d recommend you tie it. It has the real “WOW!” factor, the 3D Desktop is included by default. Unfortunately, it won’t run on my intel laptop or parallels on MacBookPro either. May be I’ll figure that out from the people at the stall. But the GNOME theme was more cool and calm and beautiful. And they have webcam, bluetooth, Wi-Fi support. The distribution is based on Debian. May be once I push in the ATI drivers, I’ll create a full review for it.

That’s all for the day, tomorrow I plan to meet Russel and ask him a couple of questions about Open Source business model.