I arrived last night. The trip was remarkably smooth--so smooth, in fact, that I'm not entirely sure that I’m not in an alternate dimension. International travel shouldn’t be that easy. Oh sure, I went to the wrong terminal at SFO, but the right terminal wasn’t even a long walk away, I was so completely early that even if the line through security had been as long as usual that I would’ve had plenty of time. As it was I was at the gate a full hour before boarding started. I wasn’t yet feeling up to doing any reading, so I played solitaire on my Hiptop, joked a bit with my sweetie via IM, and hung out.

The plane was already at the gate, parked and ready to go. The lobby wasn’t full. I was able to use the self-check-in process; I had no bag to check, so carried everything aboard just fine. There was an overpriced Peet’s coffee right by the waiting area for my plane.

I did end up with a window seat, which sucks for someone my size, but the person in the middle seat turned out to be a very thin girl who didn’t seem to mind that I took up a couple inches of her seat; she had plenty of room, an ipod, and took little notice of me.

The flight was slightly bumpy, but mostly due to the age of the plane. It was otherwise smooth, though the landing was way more bouncy than I preferred. I blew through customs, got some Canadian monopoly money at the ATM, grabbed a taxi and found my hotel. Got checked in nicely on schedule, had a beer and a bite to eat at the irish pub attached to the hotel and then crashed, due to not really being ready to interact with people. Combination of being tired and anxiety for a couple of reasons.

I was up bright and early the next morning. Slept relatively well, and hit the conference on time. Yes, this is a minor miracle.

Ok, this is the point where I express the joy of having my ego stroked. Seriously, I’m an egotist. I have to admit it. I love it when people admire my work, and it started very early and there have been a steady stream, throughout the day, of people telling me how wonderful and useful either Views or Node Queue have been for them. I’m a sucker for that kind of attention, and it provides a core for the sorts of things that make me happy. In fact, that very thing became a topic of a political rant that I now have to write for AssignBlame about competetiveness, faith, religion, and our non-religious religions that are still based very much on faith. More on that another time.

The first session I went to discussed the URL Alias table, and discussed a few interesting issues. chx tried to get some volunteers to help with some of the preliminary work that needs to be done (notably getting rid of arg() calls and $_GET[’q’]) calls but of course, most people there either felt not capable or are already pretty booked.

The most interesting thing that came out of it (to me) is that one member of the session, who works on another CMS whose name I cannot currently recall said that his system solves one of the URL lookup problems by storing them as an MD5 hash; by translating them this way, the string lookup slowness in MySQL is greatly curtailed. This has very interesting ramifications and I am curious to see how we can make this work. The other obvious issue is that nodes need to know their own path, and it should not just be node/NID, (though that path should be available if necessary).

The next session I went to was on workflow, which started off with jvandyk explaining what workflows are. Workflows present an interesting problem in understanding, similar to Views but magnified, in the sense that workflows by themselves do nothing. It is the layer that is built atop workflows that actually do work. However, in understanding, people naturally want to know what something does. Getting that disconnect into people’s minds can be tricky. It took awhile to get it, and I’m not sure everyone there really understood the system, but I know a lot of people did get it after some of the right questions were asked.

I ended up in a workgroup about workflow access. We managed to define some of the problems, but I don’t think anything like solutions were achieved. It was a very small group compared to what some of the others got, and we were not entirely prepared to actually accomplish anything.

One thing that did get accomplished is that I scheduled an ad-hoc Views session for 10am on Thursday.

Then we went to lunch, which consisted of 2 or 3 of us indicating we were going to go find lunch, and leading a train to the lunch place. We found this wonderful little pub with absolutely amazing food. Seriously, the food was fantastic. Don’t remember what it was called, but I was extremely pleased with everything, and our server was very very good at her job. She was attentive, fast, courteous and very patient in dealing with us. She also brought us separate checks. I tipped her well.

Then there was a long sort of double session on bzr and a sort of pitch to try to get Drupal to use bzr. The real problem there is that there aren’t really the tools in place to make full use of it, and the tools require buy-in and buy-in requires the tools and…yea there’s a circle there. I’ll sit by the sidelines and see. It doesn’t address the problem I most have with the current system, but it probably could.

Dinner follows. Memorable only because it included nachos with bolognese beef. Not as bad as they sound, but not really all that good either. The linguine vongole was nothing to write home about, and therefore I won’t continue on that.

What followed was a keg of very nice opensourced beer at the Bryght office. Much talking was done, including a political rant, and yet more people told me how much they appreciated the modules I’ve done. The thing here, and yes it’s ego stroking, but it’s also generally very nice to see that there are needs out there that are getting filled, and that not only can I help fill them, but that at least at the moment, I can easily make a living doing this.

Oh, there was also a fair bit made of the fact that I’m still a relative newcomer to Drupal.

Finally, there was the sleeping.

Now, I don’t want to do a disservice to anyone, but I’m about to. I’m going to list a bunch of names of people that I met today and throw out a “Good to meetcha” but I’m going to leave some names off, because there are a lot of people I met today, and it’s 12:34 am. (That’s a very good time to be asleep, and it’s also a nice sequence).

So shouts out to: jvandyk, JonBob, Vertice, chx, edrex, Sami Khan, Robert Douglass, Boris Mann, hunmonk, ae2005, thinkinkless, Dries, UnConeD, Moshe…ok, names are swimming. There’s a lot more. My apologies to names that are not immediately coming to mind. More apologies to those whose faces I may have trouble remembering tomorrow. Mea Culpa.

One final note: chx got a great photo of me in mid-rant.

Day 2 begins in just about 6 hours, so I should head for bed.