Semasiology of Open Source (part II) is a journey with many interesting points about open source, the history of reading and the public performance of source code. But please, don't ask me what it was all about.

Kim Polese's keynote presented some interesting insights into the world of open source and some of the issues that corporations face as they use open source. Kim's presentation used the long tail to show some of the issues that surround corporate use of open source. Thinking more about the long tail in open source yields some interesting thoughts.

Brian Fitzpatrick's Subversion tutorial was the perfect introduction to the new version control system that appears to be poised to take over for CVS. He presented a number of comparisons to CVS and outlined how Subversion was designed to address all of CVS' shortcomings.

Theo Schlossnagel's Scalable Internet Architectures tutorial presented some general rules on scalability and supported those rules with a lot of examples on how (and how not to) scale an internet site. In the course of the tutorial Theo presented a lot of open source source solutions that can save tons of money compared to conventional scalability solutions.

OSCON started today in its new location at the Portland Convention Center, which gives the event a lot of space and a lot of room to grow in the future. A packed line-up and a ton of exhibitors and I'm excited to be part of the happenings this week.

My last weblog post explained that anyone can podcast on a budget. Other than my laptop I managed to start with no initial hardware costs. Recently I upgraded my equipment to improve the quality of my show. Like an elite runner I couldn't finish a marathon in my best time wearing flip-flops (we call them thongs in Australia, and I probably couldn't complete one wearing a pair of those either). I'd also still look like an idiot with stockings wrapped around my noggin.

The strangest NFS problem I've ever troubleshooted... Solaris 9 NFS serever; all clients were reporting "No record locks available."

Why is it that everything breaks before you leave town?

I've wanted to mention this in a public forum for a while, and now that my O'Reilly blog is up and running I think it’s the perfect venue. Podcasting can be cheap. I can say that now that I've spent several hundred dollars upgrading my podcast rig. When I started though, I started on a budget.

You see a fairly inexpensive Cisco router advertised to support IPv6, so you scrounge up email addresses for people you know can connect you to the 6bone, dust off that IANA (or RIPE, APNIC) paperwork with your /32 allocation information, and purchase. What a mistake that was.