Officially, American Airlines are a bunch of chumps. Why, you ask? Well, I have full intents to tell you, obviously.

My first flight out from Portland was at 6:45 AM, but wasn’t on American, but actually on Alaskan Airlines. They were actually quite a pleasing airline. The flight was empty, for the most part, and I couldn’t convince them to give me a free upgrade to First Class, but they at least provided a snack on the flight, as opposed to American, who chooses to now sell their snacks for a ridiculous price of $4 (items that consist the package cost less than a $1 in total).

My arrival was in San Jose, CA - 8:20 AM, which was 15 minutes ahead of schedule. I was pleased. However, to no fault of American Airlines, the airport was under complete reconstruction. As a result, I ended up having to leave the terminal we arrived at (which used a drive-up ramp as opposed to the standard ramps), use an inter-terminal bus to take me over to Terminal A. However, rather than being provided access to the terminal without having to go through the TSA security, I was treated just like any other person coming from the outside, and had to go through security AGAIN. This was quite annoying and rather pissed me off seeing as the security line wrapped quite a way around the building. It took me about 30-45 minutes to get through security.

So, when it was time for my flight from San Jose, CA to DFW, we ended up leaving 25 to 30 minutes late. Upsetting, yes, but the pilot managed to get us on the ground at DFW right on time, giving me plenty of time to get to my next gate for departure, except for one small detail. Our arrival gate was occupied by the time we arrived, so we were holding on the ground for 45 minutes - with no other available gates available to dock at. So, as a result of 45 minutes delay caused me to have only 15 minutes to run between terminals to get to my next gate. However, once we were at the arrival gate, it took another 10 minutes for everyone to get off the plane, thus giving me 5 minutes to get to the plane. Melissa informed me that it was the last flight out that night (via Cell Phone), so I ran harder than I’d ever run before.

I managed to get there right as they had closed the cabin and already started one of the engines. So, lucky for me, the somehow ended up stalling long enough for me to get there - the plane left 20 minutes late as a result of me.

But, worse of all was the fact that both Melissa AND my luggage somehow didn’t end up on the plan back to College Station. There was actually quite a shortage of luggage on the flight - as there were other people who were missing their luggage.

I might elaborate more on this later, but for now I have other things to do. Ciao!

Day 3 ended the tutorials and began the sessions - the events that the majority of people showed up for. Keystones also precluded the days events, and the first Keynotes were rather intriguing. I heard talks from one of the leads and founders of SixApart, the company responsible for such things as LiveJournal, etc. In addition, Mr. O’Reilly gave a talk on how opensource licenses are out of date. With lack of further explanation of why he believed this, there were many members of the audience (including the other Keynote speakers) who were questioning that statement.

The sessions, left much to be desired. They were approximately 45 minutes each (some actually spanned an hour and a half - though those were rare). As such, 45 minutes hardly gave enough time to thoroughly explain the concepts being presented, but for some of the sessions it was just enough time. For example, the first session I attended was on how this developer used Ruby on Rails to create an MMO in about 45 minutes. The game, is called Unroll - found at llor.nu. It’s a rather simple game, but he explained the concepts behind the creation of his game, rather than explaining some of the methods he used - such as showing code examples, tips and tricks, etc. As such, I left with hardly an understanding of how to use Rails to create a game of my own, but his game is at least open source, so I can download the source code and figure out what I need to then.

The other sessions, which included a combination of PHP, Ruby, and Rails were rather uninteresting for the most part. I took notes in some sessions, but many I’ll have to find the slides in order to benefit from attending them.

However, despite how uninteresting some of these sessions were, I admit that I did take out a lot of ideas that I plan to integrate for my business and CIS. Such things include code caches, such as APC, using IDE’s for development and then running traces on the code to further be able to determine where slow-downs in code occur. I also found a couple of other interesting software items people were using on Macs that I have found quite awesome.

BTW, the Exhibit hall resulted in me getting lots of goodies.

Day 2 of OSCON training was rather sluggish and disappointing. There were several things that I found out that I already knew, but many things I wasn’t expecting from one of the talks, the High Performance PHP. Going into this, I was expecting to see some code examples and talks about certain functions or stylistic coding techniques that would result in improved PHP code. This was definitely not the case, as the majority of the talk was about improving applications that run PHP, or co-exist with PHP. There were also other things to avoid (such as SOAP, but for obvious reasons), but hardly any talks about how to improve your code to improve it’s performance.

The one thing I did learn through this tutorial was how to go through and trace the code, and use things like kcachegrind to make graphs and help you figure out where the slow parts of your code are laying. Percentage breakdowns of the time spent inside certain functions, classes, and objects help to show where your code is “slow”. I plan on using this on my many different projects, just as soon as I figure out how to use the damn program.

The Security tutorial was also nice, but at the same time going over many of the things I learned in my online PHP training that Paul Reinheimer gave last month.

Okay, so I decided to change my template again. The reason for this was that my previous template was causing text roll-off problems in FireFox that I didn’t want to fix. What eventually happened was I chose this theme, which had a width of 770px (because of static images), and ended up widening it to 1000px (yes, I had to edit the images to do so) so that my code examples would fit.

So, in the end, I did more work than what I originally was not going to do. But, I guess I do like the changes more.

Today: Ruby and Rails
Verdict: Better than awesome!

First thoughts: Instructor name’s David Thomas. First thing on my mind: Wendy’s. lol, sorry, had to get that off my mind.

Anywho, David Thomas and Mike Clark were the instructors for The Ruby Guidebook and The Rails Guidebook. For my first tutorials of OSCON, this definitely caught my attention and I was totally drawn into their presentation. They were excellent speakers, humorous when they needed to be, and more than knowledgeable on the subject.

For those who don’t know what Ruby and/or Rails are, lemme give a quick explanation. Ruby is another programming language out there (actually scripting language), much like perl. There are many aspects to it that really make it a powerful language, especially the fact that everything is an object, which means that everything has certain methods that can be used directly with it.

Rails (or commonly stated as Ruby on Rails) is a framework to build Web Applications that is based on Ruby. From the tutorial, I learned the basics of building a Rails web app, and it is amazingly simple. In fact, the instructor timed himself and it took 47 seconds to get the basic interface for adding, deleting, and modifying items in a shopping cart, complete with MySQL tables, and all the forms necessary and “backend processing”.

Anywho, it’s dinner time. Just wait for my next update.

Well, I am officially writing on the WIFI here at OSCON. After a long, approximate 9 hours of flight, waiting, more flight, waiting, a prezel, and more flying, both myself and Melissa made it here to Portland. I don’t thing we got checked in and situated into our Hotel room until about 1AM Pacific time.

Overall, my flying experience wasn’t as bad as Tom’s was the other day. For those who don’t know (cause I don’t think I posted an entry about his situation), he basically was held over 3 hours in Houson on American Airlines, followed by held over in Chicago for another 3-4 hours before his flight was cancelled and Tom was left stranded in the airport overnight, then didn’t get home till around 4 or 5 PM the following day. In my opinion, that is absolutely horrible service, and airlines should do their upmost best to make sure people get to their desitinations the day they are travelling - not the following day, practically completely through the day.

Anywho, I took American Airlines, but only because I had booked my flight about 3 months before he had this problem. Normally I travel Continenetal. Albeit the problems Tom had, however, both Melissa and I had reasonable flights. The last leg of my journey was on Alaska Airlines, which was the best leg overall because they at least provided a snack (peanuts). American didn’t even offer free peanuts, $4 for a “snack pack”, which would cost less than $1 at the grocery store. No way in hell.

Melissa, took Frontier, and she said they were the nicest airline she had ever been on. In-flight snack: you bet! Chips! A little better than peanuts, to some. But, eh. I’m just glad both of us arrived at the airport and had our luggage just in time to catch the last light-rail that was leaving the airport for the night. Free fare, too.

Double Tree has by far the best beds out of any hotel I’ve ever been to. I didn’t wake up with a sore back at all, and was rather rested, despite not being able to get to sleep till 2AM local time and waking up at 5:45 AM to get ready. Melissa is obviously back behind at the hotel sleeping in, *shakes fist in hotel’s direction*, but hopefully she’ll be able to find something to do to keep herself entertained. I hope that she gets out and sees the town a bit, as this is supposed to be a pretty cool area.

Anywho, time for me to get ready for the convention, and finish answering emails that I haven’t checked in the past couple of days. I’ll keep updated on how awesome the CON is, as I’m in training.

Well, in just over a week I’ll be going to Portland, Oregon to attend my very first OSCON. My boss usually goes, and since I got staff at CIS too late last year, I didn’t have a chance to go to any conferences.

OSCON, for those unfamiliar with it, is the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. From what I can tell, this seems to be the biggest coding convention on this side of the planet - especially the one that seems to emphasize open source development to the extreme. I like the attitude of open source developers, and hope to network a lot at the event. I’m planning on bringing all of my business cards to hand out, and plan to have my little Rolodex pocket holder available to stuff everyone else’s in there. I met a lot of cool and nice people at the last conference I went to (cPanel Traning Conference - Houston, TX), and got their business cards. We’ve stayed in touch since then.

My fiance, Melissa, is coming with me. It was a last-minute decision, but one I hope she’ll thoroughly enjoy. I’ll be in sessions all day most days, and some evenings I’ll be networking with people, but agree that my life has been far to hectic lately, so we plan to take a few evenings to go do some cool things such as visit the Japanese Gardens up there, in addition to the International Rose Test Garden and other things such as the Oregon Zoo, etc. During the day she’ll be meandering probably in the Hotel and surrounding Portland area, enjoying herself. For anyone else interested in a list of other things / places you might find her at, check out the following page.

My camera will be coming with me, so be on the lookout and if you don’t like to be shot, don’t be in range of my viewfinder, else bring that wonderful smile of yours. I’ll be blending in with the crowd, for the most part.

Wow, last night was one of the best concerts I’ve been to in a while. Fair to Midland, Bad Acid Trip, Hatebreed, Avenged Sevenfold and System of a Down were the bands who played. Lots of people, enthusiastic bands, and a few hours of good music made the night.

So, here’s my full scoop on the concert. Around 6:30, a band got on stage and failed to identify themselves (at all - start to finish, nothing about them was said). They were actually a very good band. The vocalist was pretty amazing in my opinion, because he was going from low tenor to almost soprano-like notes and staying on key about 99% of the time. I only found out that the band was Fair to Midland when System of a Down gave a rundown and thanks to all of the bands that were there. Go out and get some of their stuff - I highly recommend it.

The second and third bands, Bad Acid Trip and Hatebreed left much to be desired. In short - they sucked…hard. They were the yelling and screaming bands - so none of their music made any sense because their mikes were way out of proportion. All of their songs sounded exactly the same, as well, which really caused my interest to drift quite quickly. We (Melissa, Tom, and myself) were more interested in making fun of the bands than actually listening to the music. They might be more interesting if they wouldn’t yell and / or would fix the mic settings so that they could be heard above ARRRGHGHHHHHHHHHHRRRRHHGGHHH - which is what is sounded like all the time with the occasional backup vocalists sounding only like dogs barking.

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So, as you know by my post a couple of days ago, we were going to the PotC: Dead Man’s Chest. I was very enthusiastic about seeing this movie right when it came out, especially since the first one was a huge hit. I was disappointed that the movie theatre didn’t have any later showings than they did, as most everyone came to see the 12:20 showing. Melissa didn’t get off till 12:00, and by the time we got over there, the only seats where we could all sit were on the second row - I hate anything closer than the 4th row. Anywho, click the link below to read more about my personal review of Dead Man’s Chest.

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Tom’s Post says it all.