Adventures in Open Source

Just a heads up to everyone who has missed it – American Airlines has a sweet new iPhone app.

Okay, I really wasn’t going to blog about this part of the trip, but it did turn into something of an adventure, so why not?

I got a notice Friday night that, due to weather in Chicago, there would be a crew delay for flights out of PDX the next morning. Since that put me on a pretty tight connection time through DFW, I called and got myself on an earlier flight. That one, too, was delayed, but it was then scheduled to leave about the time of my original flight (if it had left on time) so everything was cool.

I took the MAX to the airport, checked my bag, got put on the waiting list for an upgrade and I went to the gate.

I’m sitting there reading when I look up and there is Jesse Vincent staring at the upgrade list. I said “hi” and he looked at me, then back at the list and then said that it was rare that he wasn’t number one for upgrades. It turns out that his name was second, behind mine. Then Kevin Falcone shows up (also from Best Practical) and his is the third name on the list.

Never seen something like that before.

Anyway, so I didn’t know that another thing Jesse and I had in common was an interest in collecting frequent flyer miles and air travel in general. He’s way more of a geek at it than me – in fact he has an active Sabre account so that he has access to the same information as travel agents.

While we are sitting there, Amber Graner shows up (it was like a little OSCON). She was on her way to DFW and then Charlotte, but then had to stay one more night in a hotel since her husband’s flight from Europe was delayed until Sunday (they were to meet up and drive home together).

First Class checked in full so none up us got upgraded. I went to my seat at 21F, Jesse went to his seat at 21D and Kevin to his seat at 21C.

I had pity on the person who was to sit in 21E, since I figured Jesse and I would be talking across them the whole way, but we behaved (I got caught up on Burn Notice and watched two episodes of Dollhouse).

When we made it to Dallas, Kevin and Jesse’s original flight to Boston was backing out of the gate, so they had some time until the next one. We hit the Admiral’s Club and had some lunch, and then they took off. My own flight to Minneapolis was still an hour or so away, so I made some calls and caught up on e-mail.

As I was leaving, I noticed a couple sitting nearby traveling with two small dogs. I like dogs so I couldn’t stop myself from talking to them (yeah, yeah – I know). It turns out that they were originally from West Virginia (I spent some time in WV back in 1986) but now lived in Los Angeles, and that they traveled about as much as I do. There names were Scott and Kristan, and they had met while in WV, gotten married and now were both working in television. Since Kristan had “model” good looks I asked her if she was someone famous that I should know.

They both laughed and said, well, maybe. Kristan had worked with Rachel Ray for several years and she is a host of the HGTV show “Design on a Dime“. Since I only have “over the air” television (no cable or satellite) I could plead ignorance at least, but I must say that they were both incredibly easy to talk to, so much so that I had to run to catch my plane.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. I watched two more episodes of Dollhouse (three more to go) and while the plane was a little late as they had to route around some thunderstorms, both myself and Alex landed pretty much at the same time. Mike Huot met us at the airport and we headed toward UMN and Dev-Jam.

My trip to OSCON was pretty uneventful, with the exception of getting hassled at airport security. Well, hassled is too strong a word – the TSA folks were friendly and professional – but I did hit a snag with my new contact lens solution.

I am extremely nearsighted (about -7 for those keeping score at home), but I manage by wearing contacts. However, as I have gotten older I’ve run into problems wearing them, so my doctor has me on some strange no preservative contact solutions which includes a cleaning product called “One Step” by Sauflon.

First off, One Step only comes in large bottles (you use about a half ounce a night so the TSA approved size won’t last a week) and second, it contains hydrogen peroxide.

Of course, the highly diluted hydrogen peroxide solution for my contacts is perfect bomb making material (sarcasm mine) so there is no way I could take it on the plane. I ended up having to work my way back out of security to check my bag. It made it to Portland with no issue (it was the third bag off the plane) so no harm, no foul.

Plus, it is delightfully cool and unusually dry in Portland which is a welcome change from the 100F+ days back home.

Note: While I haven’t used Twitter in a long time, I do ‘dent occasionally if you are in to that sort of thing.

Monday morning I set off for the Convention Center. Along the way I saw a guy who just struck me as a computer geek: jeans, dark t-shirt and walking with a backpack, and then I realized it was Eric Evans (OGP), an old friend from Rackspace. He is giving a tutorial on Tuesday on Cassandra, and it was nice to see him again.

My morning tutorial was on git. Considering that OpenNMS has a large number of developers spread out around the world, managing all of the code and merging it into a common repo can be difficult. We used to use subversion but switched to git last year, and I have to be honest that it is still a little bit like black magic to me.

At the tutorial I ran into Ken Eshelby, a long time OpenNMS user who manages about 100,000 interfaces with the application. It turns out that of the four tutorials I am attending, he is in three of them.

I wish I could say I got a lot out of the tutorial, but while it was obvious that Scott Chacon knew his stuff, he went through it so fast that it was almost impossible for me to keep up.

For example, I remember at one time he asked if people knew what “rebasing” was, and he followed it up by asking how many people used it. He then laughed and said more people used it than knew what it was, but the fact was that we couldn’t get our hands up fast enough in response to his first question before he asked the second.

The second tutorial, at least for me, was better. Josh Berkus gave a talk on keeping databases healthy (with a focus on PostgreSQL). I know Josh from SCaLE and he, too, really knows his stuff. Since OpenNMS currently runs only on Postgres, we often have to maintain our client’s database instances to insure that OpenNMS is optimally responsive. We are moving toward database independence by using Object/Relational Mapping (ORM) in the form of Hibernate, and of course Josh was against this from a performance standpoint, but I argued that since OpenNMS is a network management application platform versus a plain application we want to offer as many options to our users as possible, including choice of database. This allows for them to leverage in-house expertise to build truly custom solutions, and that flexibility is worth the performance trade off.

That evening Ken took Eric and me to a place called the Kennedy School. This is an old schoolhouse that has been turned into a rather unique collection of bars, a restaurant and a movie theatre (among other things). We sampled some of the local brew and then saw Iron Man 2, which was okay for $3 (not being familiar with the “Avengers” mythology I have the same neutral feeling about both it and the first movie) and my only complaint was I wanted more screen time for Scarlett Johansson.

It was cool that part of the movie took place in Monaco, where I managed to visit back in May.

If you’re at OSCON and want to meet up, let me know.

Yesterday I arrived back in the US after nearly three weeks in Europe. It was nice to be home, and I was amazed that through four countries, all nine flights I took were on time, if not early, and I was mercifully spared from both strikes and volcanos.

On my last full day in France I decided to take a bus ride over to Monaco. Every time I think of Monte Carlo I can’t help but think of James Bond.

It was fun to walk around, and being somewhat into cars there were a number of amazing specimens to be seen, such as a Ferrari with Gumball 3000 graphics.

I don’t have any more international travel planned with OpenNMS for many months, but there is some domestic travel, such as the upcoming SELF conference in June. Hope to see you there.

I got a late start to the conference on Wednesday. Since I have Internet access at l’apartment there is nothing preventing me from working, and we’ve been extremely busy lately. It’s all good, and much better than having too much time on our hands.

I’ve also been writing a lot. This week alone I filled out a long survey, wrote a 2000 word open source business article for a website in Canada, and made time to complete another long survey as part of the Robert X. Cringely Not in Silicon Valley Startup Tour.

The idea is to create a reality television show profiling 24 startup companies which will air on a cable television network. They’ve had over 400 nominations (ours came from Tanner Lovelace who I first met working at Oculan) so we have, what, a 6% chance out of the box of making it? I hope my answers to their questions upped that a bit.

You can check out our nomination and comment on it if you like. I did mention that I live on a horse farm so since he’s bringing his kids maybe visiting the farm will be an extra draw. Plenty of RV parking, too.

I arrived at the conference early afternoon and spent most of the day chatting with people about OpenNMS and our work at the TMForum. Did I mention that this is a suit-heavy conference?

I was even wearing one.

I’d like to be able to point you to some information about our open source interface project, called JOSIF, but all of that is locked behind a membership wall. One of the frustrating things about trying to bring open source concepts to the TMForum is that they are very conscious of intellectual property of any kind and trying to free up some of our information is a bit of a struggle.

In the evening we met up with some people from Swisscom in Bern and went to a delightful restaurant called Le Maison de Marie. We then walked back to the apartment along the waterfront.

As I looked out and over the lights of Nice, I had this one surreal moment where it hit me that, although I work in open source (which is often associated with “cheap” and bare bones), here I was, a country boy from North Carolina, walking along the French Riviera on a warm spring evening.

Not bad, not bad at all.