Martin Krieger

On very short notice I got aware of the Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) in St. Augustin near Bonn/Germany. Unfortunately the program neglects open source projects in the .NET/Mono field. But it still looked interesting so I attended some talks there.

First day’s keynote speaker was Andrew S. Tannenbaum (his book on Distributed Systems was the textbook for the university class about this topic). He spoke about problems in the development of ever more extensive operating systems. His solution is a microkernel architecture with device drivers and services as separate, restricted, user mode processes. These processes will be supervised and, if necessary, restarted by a “resurrection manager”. Minix3 is his implementation of such a system. The performance hit caused by the numerous context switches and checks will be compensated by the gain in stability.

Heading quasi in opposite direction was second day’s keynote, Simple is Hard, by Rasmus Lerdorf. He spoke about the performance of PHP applications. In doing so he compared a web application implemented directly in PHP with applications implemented using several PHP frameworks. In his opinion, frameworks are superfluous. It is perfectly possible to create clearly structured programs without the help of a framework. The, often very high, performance costs of the overhead where unjustifiable.

Furthermore I found for example the lectures on troubleshooting, system monitoring with Nagios and on machine learning with Apache Mahout worthwhile. Also SVNChecker looks like a promising tool and one can do nice things with a wiimote.

All in all it was a valuable time to broaden one’s horizons. See you @ FrOSCon 2009 (22.-23.08.2009)!