CB1, INC.

The second day of tutorials started with New Parallel Programming Tools for a Multicore World which essentially was a plug for Intel's new Threading Building Blocks project. Basically they re-wrote threads on all platforms, added a bunch of neato stuff like memory allocators, concurrent collections, and schedulers. Some of the thread synchronization functionality is pretty nice.

Before I even entered the room, I was cautious that this might be some proprietary crap, but they have dual licensed it under GPLv2 and a paid license for redistributing your program without having to give away the code. In coordination with this release, O'Reilly published a book about the Threading Building Blocks. I picked up a copy, but I haven't read it yet.

The next tutorial was Linux Performance Monitoring by Darren Hoch. He gave a great talk that discussed tracking down issues common utilities including CPU, memory, and I/O. His booklet was very well put together, so it made his talk easier to follow.

Later that night I went to the PHP and MySQL and the Google O'Reilly Open Source Awards party where I got to meet and hang out with lots of great people including Peter Zaitsev, Jay Pipes, Darren Hoch, Matthew Eernisse, and many more.

I attended two tutorials: one on Pthreads and one on Linux performance monitoring.

The Pthreads talk was pretty basic. The speaker, Adrien Lamothe, was great to listen to. He would interject interesting comments and stories. 30 minutes of the talk was lost due to power issues. Actually, a whole section of rooms supposedly lost power. It's mildly amusing to see the power go off and see 30 or so laptops still working away. I would have like to see more in-depth coverage of Pthreads. He just scrapped the surface of thread synchronization and didn't get to more advanced topics such as thread pools.

The Linux performance monitoring talk was excellent. Darren Hoch talked about how to identify performance issues with your Linux machine using tools that come standard with a distro. Using these tools, he showed us that you can quickly identify if the issue is a CPU, memory, or I/O issue. He was a very energetic speaker and had great real world examples.

It was also fun to run into a number of familiar faces that I've met at past conferences.

About 2 months ago, I wrote that I was heading to Portland for the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. It turns out that O'Reilly is also hosting another conference about Ubuntu, a very popular Linux distro.

When I signed up for OSCON, I elected to go to the tutorials, which consists for 4 tutorials spanned across 2 days. Well, 2 of the 4 tutorials I signed up for were canceled. Needless to say, I'm pretty bummed out. But O'Reilly was nice enough to get me into the Ubuntu Live Sunday, July 22nd, 2007.

So, here's the plan thus far for the first part of the week:

Sunday, July 22nd - Ubuntu Live

Monday, July 23rd - OSCON Tutorials

Tuesday, July 24th - OSCON Tutorials

In the spare time, I plan to hit up the Expo and see if there is anything good. I'm going to follow this plan, but if something else better comes up, I'll change things up a bit. Stay tuned for more coverage of both the Ubuntu Live Conference and the Open Source Conference!