Category Archives: community

pdxpug, postgres, postgresql, sysadmin, user groups

ptop – meeting summary from last nights pdxpug

Last night’s meeting was about ptop and Mark Wong’s efforts to make an interactive, command-line tool for monitoring the current status of a PostgreSQL database.

For our meeting, Mark set up a test operating system on a USB drive, and bravely demo’d his new software.

Mark got the idea for ptop a few months ago, and went looking for the source code to top to get started. After a few days of hacking, he had a some useful features he wanted to share. So, he’s set up a project and started gathering developers:

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/ptop

The features currently supported include displaying:

  • Current queries
  • Query plans
  • Locks
  • User table statistics
  • User index statistics

Continue reading →

handsonportland, nola, volunteering 1 Comment

back from the gulf coast

dsc_0143.jpg

My trip to the Gulf Coast with volunteers from Hands On Portland ended on Sunday. I wrote continuously while I was there, cataloging every experience so that my leaky memory wouldn’t fail me when I wanted to reflect.

Lawrence’s House

I had a wonderful time and made some lifelong friends. Karol wrote eloquently nearly every day. While there, I worked on mold removal in a house the owner had built himself, spent a day talking and telling dirty jokes with people living with HIV at the Lazarus Project, and spent a day cleaning out cages in a no-kill animal shelter. I also toured the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards, St. Bernand Parish and drove out to a Katrina-specific landfill located in the middle of a national preserve for wetlands.

I’m working on sorting out pictures and some of the words, but I’m not quite ready to write about what things were like in Biloxi and New Orleans. Maybe I just need a few days.

Maggie

There’s so much to do there, still, two years later.

conference, pdxpug, pgconference, portland, postgres, postgresql 2 Comments

conference audio is up!

PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007 audio is now available! Check it out.

I didn’t edit much, other than to eliminate break-time chatter. My apologies to Neil Conway — I missed about 10 minutes of his talk. Thank goodness for redundancy! Once I rip the video, I will update the audio and publish the whole thing.

I’m leaving early Sunday morning for a week. I’m taking a break from the interweb while I’m away. So, I look forward to catching up with everyone when I return.

igniteportland, portland

ignite was fun, some links

Last night’s Ignite talks were awesome. My thanks to MJ for encouraging me to drink a FULL glass of wine before my talk.

I posted my slides here. Those of you wondering who that handsome man is on slide 3, here’s the wikipedia entry for Benjamin Bloom. He was an educational psychologist whose learning taxonomy (Bloom’s Taxonomy) is still used today in grad school education curricula. He’s mostly known for the Taxonomy and his study that said 95% of all test questions given to students only addressed the bottom of his taxonomy – knowledge questions, or questions that only tested the ability to memorize facts.

My presentation was about making better questions for community-oriented surveys. One caveat is that I am not a statistician! My suggestions sprung from a series of surveys I’ve seen and a small amount of work I’ve done on the Perl Survey data.

One good thing that came out of the talk was that Audrey agreed to have a look at the perl survey data with me in a couple weeks.

Another great thing that came out of it was a friend of mine saw the How Chickens will Save Your Life presentation, and now, I think he’s going to get chickens. How awesome is that?

Thanks all fellow presenters. I enjoyed meeting you all and was thoroughly entertained.

conference, pdxpug, postgres, postgresql 3 Comments

conference aftermath: tired, happy

The conference was insanely great. We had incredible speakers, plentiful coffee, good food and amazing volunteers. I met so many new people and heard about a number of interesting projects that I’ll be following up on and writing about soon. Thank you to Joshua Drake and Josh Berkus for helping organize all of the big and small details.

Thank you to the sponsors:

  • Command Prompt, Inc. – and Joshua Drake for his talk on PL/Proxy
  • Continuent- and Robert Hodges in particular for giving his talk about uni/cluster
  • EnterpriseDB
  • Greenplum
  • Hyperic – nice to meet you John Walker!
  • OmniTi – and Robert Treat in particular for his talk on partitioning
  • Open Technology Group
  • Sun Microsystems, Inc. – and to Josh Berkus for his keynote on what’s new in version 8.3
  • Truviso – and Neil Conway for his talk about Query Execution, which many people wished could have continued
  • The Linux Fund – who also brought Kristine to help manage the registration desk

And special thanks to:

  • Stonehenge, Inc. – who sponsored afternoon snacks
  • Green Frog Consulting – Allen Bernstein recorded video all day
  • Portland State University and the Graduate Student Council – thanks for hosting us and special thanks to Rafael Fernández-Moctezuma for fixing the last-minute A/V problems, suggesting a coffee run in the afternoon, and just being MVP all day!
  • Daniel Browning – he took some fantastic pictures

Thank you everyone for making it happen! There were a few people that I started conversations with but inevitably got interrupted – please get in touch.

I’ve got a week of recovery (well, except for my presentation at Ignite on Thursday!), before I head off to New Orleans. I hope to have the audio from the conference available before I leave Sunday.

conference, open source, pdxpug, portland, postgres, postgresql, user groups 1 Comment

PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007 – only two more days

We’re taking care of all the last minute details – making sure we have enough coffee Saturday morning, getting nametags printed, stuffing folders and practicing (or in some cases finishing) talks.

I created a special page for my conference posts. I’ve included links to public transportation, all the maps to find your way to and from the conference location and the party, cab info, and links to all my other posts which have more detailed information.

There is free public wireless access inside the PSU engineering building. I’ll have information on how to connect when you arrive. Please send any questions you have to the attendees mailing list (here are the archives).

We are making video and audio recordings of the conference. I’ll announce here when they’re available and make them all available from the conference page.

conference, pdxpug, portland, postgres, postgresql 2 Comments

PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007 – Friday meetup

A few people on the mailing lists and IRC are organizing a meetup on the Friday before the PostgreSQL conference. Check out the wiki page set up to select a location and say whether or not you’ll be there! If you’re a local, vote for the location you’d like to meet at.

Here are the restaurants and bars currently on the list:

  • NW Lucky Lab – 1945 NW Quimby (pretty central, good space, outdoor seating)
  • Side Door – 425 SE Washington St (great food)
  • Paddy’s – 65 SW Yamhill Street (right off the max! excellent scotch selection)

If you’ll be there, and haven’t already subscribed to the attendees mailing list, go subscribe now so you’ll get the latest updates on events.

conference, open source, pdxpug, portland, postgres, postgresql, user groups

PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007 – Where to eat lunch

Screenshot of conference mapThanks to many suggestions from PDXPUG‘s mailling list and Gabrielle Roth‘s patience with Google Maps, we have a great map of the area around the conference. She was kind enough to put the nearest parking garage ($9/day) on the map as well. If you’re looking for some parking that’s a bit more affordable but a further walk away, try Smart Park. You could also park on the East side of the river, and walk across one of our beautiful bridges or hop on a bus or the Max (you’ll need to transfer to a Bus or the Street Car from the Max to get to PSU campus). To figure out where and when to ride public transit, you can call for live help at 503-238-RIDE, or use the Trip Planner.

Portland has great food. If you’re going to be in town for a couple of days, there are great restaurants walking distance from the downtown hotels (Higgins, Typhoon!, Saucebox, many others), on the waterfront (Three Degrees, McCormick and Schmick’s), and over on NW 23rd/21st (Paley’s Place, Lucy’s Table, Serratto, Muu Muu’s). You can get directly to NW on the Streetcar, which has a stop one block from the conference. And of course there are many food carts throughout the city. If you want even more suggestions, check out the Willamette Week’s top 100 restaurants in Portland.

Those of you who have come to Portland for OSCON the last couple of years probably know about a few of the great places on the East side of the river. We’ll be on the west side, and there’s a ton of great places to explore.