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A great night at the OTN installfest for Linux and PHP. Todd Trichler took everyone through a 10g database install on Red Hat and Suse followed by the kernel team doing OCFS2 and ASMlib installs. Note that OCFS2 is a general purpose filesystem you can use like ext3 - more info is available on oss.oracle.com a great resource for Oracle's open source projects. The installfest was popular with around 100 people and 20 or so doing actual installs on their laptops. The free software is always a hit as the people you see here queued to get copies of RedHat EL4, Suse SLES 9 and Oracle 10g Release 2. I went through an install of Zend Core for Oracle and people walked away with a fully functional enterprise PHP stack. Zend Core for Oracle Beta is available from the OTN PHP tech center which is also a great resource for PHP and Oracle developers: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/php

Oracle Openworld - Day 1
With so many people at OOW the keynotes are being video broadcast in other rooms - I'm in room 104 right now watching the Intel part of the keynote. There are about 1,000 people in the foyer of Mosone North watching a video screen there. Many are sitting on the floor and on beanbags pounding away on their laptops or scribbling notes. Many people standing also. Chuck Phillips focused on Fusion and announced Oracle Applications will in the future also work on WebSphere. We are a happy to compete he said. The underlying message of his keynote was that via our midtier we can interoperate with anything that has a standard services interface. People were gathered around monitors setup throughout the Moscone complexes as I walked here. There were queues just to get a coffee. Time to check out the exhibition and drop by the OTN lounge in Moscone West to recheck my PHP session for the OTN nite this evening. Drop by the OTN lounge today at 4pm if you are at the conference it's my slot at the Meet the Expert sessions.

After OSCON waiting for a flight the next day...

I was reading the Oregonian newspaper and came across a list of dumb things people have said and done during job intereviews, the paper said these were sourced from the internet - I wrote them out, I just had to share with my friends, hope you get a chuckle.

DUMB THINGS PEOPLE ACTUALLY DID OR SAID DURING A JOB INTERVIEW
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1. The applicant challenged the interviewer to an arm wrestle

2. Candidate explained that he never finished high-school because he was kidnapped and kept in a closet in Mexico

3. Balding candidate excused himself and returned to the office a few minutes later wearing a hairpiece

4. Applicant interrupted an interview to phone her therapist for advice on how to answer specific questions

5. Interviewee wore a Walkman explaining that she could listen to the interviewer and music at the same time.

6. Candidate had gotten his underpants suck in this pants zipper and spent the whole interview with his underpants sticking out his fly.

7. Candidate asked to bring a photo of himself for a security card, came with a picture of himself covered in oil and wearing only a thong.



ACTUAL STUPID QUESTIONS ASKED BY JOB CANDIDATES
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1. "What is it that you people do at this company?"

2. "I know this is off the subject but will you marry me?"

3. "Does your company have a policy regarding concealed weapons?"

4. "Would it be a problem if I'm angry most of the time?"

5. "What are the zodiac signs of the board members?"


OTHER STUPID THINGS ACTUALLY SAID DURING JOB INTERVIEWS
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1. "Sometimes I feel like smashing things."

2. "I feel uneasy indoors."

3. "I am fascinated by fire."

4. "I would have been more successful if nobody would have snitched on me."

5. "My legs are really hairy."

6. "I think I'm going to throw up."

I thoroughly enjoyed the OSCON conference in Portland Oregon last week. As a first time attendee and representing Oracle as a sponsor I was very glad to have been part of this event. Todd Trichler, Chris Jones and myself were expecting to talk about Oracle's ongoing activities around PHP and helping those who are developing systems with PHP and Oracle, but we found ourselves answering questions on a diverse range of Oracle related topics and enjoying many discussions. Thanks to those who dropped by the stand to share their viewpoints on Open Source, Oracle and PHP. I would also like to thank those to dropped by to my session on Oracle's activities and direction with PHP. Thanks for the feedback to those who did so. I also had the pleasure of meeting Wez Furlong for the first time and we chatted about the work he is doing on improvements (more like a partial rewrite) of the PHP OCI8 extension. It will be included in our upcomming Zend Core for Oracle product in collaboration with Zend - look for a beta around the end of August 2005 on the PHP Dev Center at OTN. Wez also did an excellent presentation on PDO which is shaping up well and included in PHP 5.1. Caught up with Andi Gutmans and did some fine-tuning of plans for Zend Core for Oracle and attended his talk on PHP. The open source community is a pleasure to be involved with and I look forward to returning to OSCON next year.

A couple of pics:

















Well, now for Linuxworld in San Francisco...