life

Long time no post - but I just got back home from the Netways Nagios Conference 2008 where I was invited to give a talk on "PostgreSQL Monitoring - Introduction, Internals And Monitoring Strategies for postgresql.org" so I figured it is time to say something again ...

FOSDEM was a really nice and successful event for Opensource in general and especially PostgreSQL - we had a really impressive booth and a huge number of talks with a lot of attendances.
We also managed to get the initial board for the european user group voted and that will pave to wya to get the group set up as a legal entity within the next few months - YEAH!

this feels strange - my sister just told me that she is expecting a baby and that I'm about to become uncle which is feeling really strange.
However I'm really really happy for Andrea and Harry (see my brothers blog for a picture of them) and I wish them the best.
It now looks that Harry will have to take on the burden of doing all the hard work on their new apartment - but I guess thats ok :-)

pgday.it in Prato was a truly marvelous conference, but everything is eventually coming to an end and so did this conference. On sunday Gabriele and Andrea took us one a tour through Florence ending in a great dinner and a bit of a challenge to catch the last train^bus back to prato ...

Today we started at around 09:30 in the morning trying to get Magnus to the airport which turned into quite a long trip mostly due to the fact that andreas navigation system developed something that can only be described as "artificial (un)intelligence".

After we left the airport we thought we were good for going back up to Salzburg (and Munch) but the navigation system acted up again and caused so much confusion that we actually managed to get up the highway WITHOUT(!) getting a ticket from the toll station.
So just imagine what it might take to get off a highway with a fully automated toll collection system without a ticket and neither the remote assistance nor the one lone guy that was responsible for some 18+ exit gateways and not even they guy in the main office is capable of understanding a single word of german or english ...

After a somewhat interesting discussion which mainly consisted of well wild gestures and "i have no idea what you are talking about" faces we managed to get a form that probably claims (again all Italian) that we turned around on the highway or something like that - but well it seems we don't have to pay anything for "hacking" the italian highway system.

On the way back to the car from the autostrada office we met the guy manning the 18+ toll houses again telling us that there is a completely unlabeled underground crossing to the other side of the highway which would have been a good thing to to know earlier for well "making crossing a highway "easier".

So well - the official part of pgday.it is over now and today we had a lot of interesting talks from a number of international people covering everything from encoding(Susanne) related stuff over to full text search(Oleg) and PITR(Simon).
Josh did his keynote on new features in 8.3 which is something I'm a "bit" familiar with - but nevertheless it contained quite a lot of information especially the announcement of the official benchmarks sun did was very impressive and clearly how powerful and also cost effective PostgreSQL really is.
Again we got ton's of food and well there was also this guy doing interviews for a satellite TV station (boy do I hope that mine will not get broadcasted ...).
We will soon meet up at the bar of the prato linux usergroup for doing a bit of brainstorming and discussions on a possible european postgresql usergroup and afterwards we are going to have beer, grappa, wine and lot's and lot's of fun with our new Italian friends.

so pgday.it is in full swing, and it's a truly impressive conference. Andreas and I arrived after a 7h drive from Salzburg in Prato.
Andreas claims it took us that long due to the strict traffic limits in Austria (there is a 100km/h limit on the A10 from Salzburg down to Italy for "environment protection" reason) but I'm not entirely convinced this is true ;-)
Anyway - we barely managed to check-in at the hotel when we met David, Magnus and Josh who took us on some sort of "sightseeing tour" around prato. Which means that we basically had a [ guide with long hair and in short trousers taking us through half of the city (couple miles at least) looking for a place to get food and sit down in prato - well we didn't succeed until someone else (the "map guy" from [the http://www.prato.linux.it/ prato linux user group]) gave us the right hint.
Later on the Italian guys organized a very cool dinner at a restaurant serving typical local food - and we learned quite a lot about local eating and drinking habits (pictures courtesy of Andreas).
We ended the day at around 2 o'clock in the morning at the "New York" bar directly in the city of prato which is basically a float on the river after feeding fish and drinking beer ...

Today is the first day of the actual conference and one can only barely imagine the amount of work the organizers have put into this ...
The organization is very good (with a nice ) there is a lot of neat merchandising stuff available and I even got a pgday.it staff shirt for myself, and everything is free (including the fantastic food we are getting served).
The talks are pretty interesting too with real time translation of the talks into English (or Italian for the ones held in English) - though the schedule is a bit crammed and could take some additional breaks between the speakers.
If you want to see what's going on here simply look at the official website and listen to the live audio broadcasts.

ok just bought me a new (and rather expensive) toy after some people said "ok if you buy one today I will buy you a game for that".

So I went to the electronic shop and bought one (including the optional remote and two games) but I guess that might have only been the start because now a nice new LCD television would suddenly make sense ...

question: what might result in a wall looking similar to

answer: a bottle of red wine and somebody(me) who tried to open it ...