FSCONS: Conversations are the conference

Just had an interesting micro-conversation, with a man who spoke with a slightly Indian accent. Cambodia: No landlines, but quite developed mobile phone networks, never bothering with the previous stage of tech. Leapfrogging. Related: Ericsson deployed a solar-powered mobile base station there. That press release hits all points in the last paragraph of the leapfrogging article on Wikipedia.

Now a guy from a company called Redpill Linpro will do a talk called “Hidden gems of PostgreSQL”. Full-text search (what used to be called tsearch2 is now called FTI: full-text indexing). Pretty neat. You can specify a language setting. Stopwords in English might be regular words in another language – is means ice in Swedish.

FSCONS 2008, Sunday

Listening to a guy in a red t-shirt. He talks about Debian package structure. People ask questions. He is reading from a tiny-font control configuration file. Not so good for my concentration. But, he has a good voice, at least it has some melody.

Yeah, a big corporation in search donated a Moleskine notebook in the goodie bag. In my coat pocket, I found some Sponge-Bob Squarepants stickers.

Talked about Istanbul with Bergie (you pronounce it like “burrdgie”). He schooled me on some facts: It’s the third largest city in the world. 15 million people. One third of the city is in Europe, the rest in Asia. He said that Orhan Pamuk‘s book about the city opened his eyes to some things. I am half-way through it. Pretty good stuff, but I’m mainly interested in the personal story about his complicated family.

About the conference generally: People here are friendly, but the conference has no centre. In space, I mean. Where you all go. Agora. Meeting place. Well. I’ll go around and be friendly now.

Roleplayers, everywhere

In Gothenburg, at the FSCONS conference. Henri Bergius, a Midgard developer from Helsinki, was here, and I asked him: “Is Finland small enough that you know Timo Multamäki?”

“Why, yes, I know him.”

And with that, Henri proceeded to tell me about Monday Night Larp, a 2-hour event, every week, that’s been going strong for 14 years (that’s fourteen!). “We started it when I was in high school, and others have taken it further since then.”

What a great little format. After school, short enough that you could even risk a so-so game (it would END, mercifully).

The talk is quite good, introduces Midgard 2 (experimental). Neat that it’s got bilingual examples (PHP and Python, side-by-side).

Python egg-serving

Once, I showed how to serve RubyGems, the distributable Ruby modules.

Serving “eggs”, the Python equivalent, is also very simple, it turns out.

In my case, the lean simplicity of “let’s have the company-used eggs closer to home” was very simple: a user-side configuration file ~/.pydistutils.cfg:

[easy_install]
# use download links on these pages before consulting PyPI
find_links = http://ollehost.dk/py

Then I plonk all my Python eggs in that folder. (Will have to go back and see what format they are supposed to be in.)

$ easy_install olle
Searching for olle
Reading http://ollehost.dk/py
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/olle/
Couldn't find index page for 'olle' (maybe misspelled?)
Scanning index of all packages (this may take a while)
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/
No local packages or download links found for olle
error: Could not find suitable distribution for Requirement.parse('olle')

Yeah, and I am back in Sweden, too.