recap

Road Trip!

gabrielle — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:42:06 +0100

This past weekend, Selena, Mark & I loaded up Mark's car with flyers, mugs & t-shirts & headed up to Bellingham, WA for Linuxfest NW (website: http://linuxfestnorthwest.org/). Several LUGs in the area host this annual conference. This was my first Linuxfest & I was really impressed - it was very well-organized, well-attended and FUN. Mark gave his talk about ptop/pgtop first thing Saturday morning. We managed to see some other talks too - Selena checked out some Drupal talks & I went to Eric Hopper's IPv6 discussion on Sunday. We all had a great time running the booth, despite the lack of JD's entertaining presence. He was replaced by surprise guest boothster, Chris Travers! Chris showed up to give a LedgerSMB talk and we conned him into boothbeasting with us. Thanks, Chris! Even though it was crowded behind our table, I think four staffers was the right (minimum!) number to have for handling questions & greeting people. The conference was really packed. I think I talked at length to somewhere around 12-15 people. We had a HUGE range of questions, all the way from people wondering about replication strategies to "What's a database, anyway?" We also ran through the inevitable "how do you pronounce it?" Selena gave a long demo of pgadmin to someone who is currently using SQL Server. A lot of people are very interested in a MySQL -> PostgreSQL migration tool. We ran out of almost all printed materials we'd brought on the first day, necessitating phone calls to Josh B to acquire more flyers and a local copy shop to print them. Selena had the brilliant idea to get some elephant logo stickers printed as well; they were very popular. Saturday night, Silicon Mechanics hosted the afterparty at the American Museum of Radio & Electricity, a truly excellent site for a geek party! We got to dink around with static electricity machines & toys from past centuries. Selena stepped up to the theramin while Mark & I checked out the old music boxes. The best part of the evening for me was when the docents set up a small tesla coil. >:) We had a great little indoor lightning show & Selena became part of a multi-person chain that lit up a fluorescent tube. Back home now, attempting to recover from Conference Brain.

PDXPUG - Rails on PostgreSQL meeting wrap up!

selenamarie — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:44:09 +0100

Thanks everyone who came out for the meeting! Next meeting on our schedule will be about Python and PostgreSQL, courtesy of Jason Kirtland. We had a terrific turnout, and four new people. One of the FreeGeek folks came and talked with me after the meeting about how he had changed the database that FreeGeek uses from MySQL to PostgreSQL a while back. We had two people from InnoTech attend that had also seen my 5-minute schpeale. One had already planned on coming (Hi Mike!), but I take credit for getting Craig interested! The other new person, Ed, works with Mike on Rails application development. ANNOUNCEMENTS: PDXPUG PgDay before OSCON is happening July 20, 2008! We have some volunteers to help organize it, I'm setting up a mailing list. Those who volunteered, expect some email this weekend about kicking things off. PostgreSQL Conference East was a total success! ~100 people Check out details at http://www.postgresqlconference.org/ MEETING DETAILS: David's presentation was both an introduction to Rails development, and a tutorial on getting Rails to work with PostgreSQL. Some of his examples came directly from his work on I Want Sandy (www.iwantsandy.com), a web-based product that uses PostgreSQL. There was intense discussion of drivers with thank-yous to Jeff Davis for adopting the Ruby PostgreSQL driver. There were useful, detailed examples of how to create data migrations and develop queries for Rails. There was a lot of monkey patching. I enjoyed this talk so much. You can find audio of David's presentation of this talk at PostgreSQL Conference West here: http://www.postgresqlconference.org/fall2007_audio/RoR_Essentials.mp3 David is going to pass the updated slides on to me, and I'll post them on http://pugs.postgresq.org/pdx Mark also brought the T2000 that was donated to the new Performance Lab that Mark is setting up. He's working with Joshua Drake on getting the machine racked and set up to run tests! Gabrielle used her serial-fu to help him get the machine booted and running. Many of us retired to the Lucky Lab for refreshments.

March 20th meeting Recap and slides from intro

selenamarie — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 01:29:01 +0000

Just quickly uploading some slides from the meeting. Covered all the crazy conferences coming up soon, and included a plug for Summer of Code and PostgreSQL -- if you're a student, its $4500 for the summer and great experience! Check it out!! Also, a few slides about USPA and what we're up to! Check out Joshua's recap of our ice-breaker over on his blog. Ed Sawicki gave an overview of spam supression techniques he's using and gave us a few tips on tools that were useful to him. We recommended he have a look at some CIDR address types available on pgfoundry.org to help with some performance issues he found.