The Allentown, PA Pinball Wizard’s Convention was this past weekend. I was only able to go on Saturday, but I had a great time. I didn’t find any really great deals to bring home, sadly, but I met a bunch of great folks that I talk to on rec.games.pinball, and I got to see and play some rare machines. The only problem with going to a show like this is that now I wish it was October so I could go to the pinball show in York, PA.

I have had some more time to mess with the Arduino. Wiring is a neat language, though still lacking in some “high level” respects. Of course, you’re pushing it onto a chip with 16k of RAM, so what do you expect. I’ve been experimenting with a switch matrix, the first major component of controlling a pinball machine, I think. Progress is good, but I don’t yet have a functioning model.

I had a crazy old lady accost me at a McDonald’s on Saturday evening. It was really quite amusing, if not bizarre. First she insisted that I stole her (empty with my receipt on it) tray, then she yelled at me for sitting in her chair, then she got angry that I left before she was done yelling at me. What can you do?

I really dislike drama. I don’t watch TV shows with a lot of drama, and I have a low tolerance for drama in real life. Unfortunately, I had a run in with some friends over a misinterpretation of something I said which ended up being way more drama that I wanted to deal with. I’m sad to say that I think it’ll end up causing me to distance myself from them, but again, what can you do? You can’t control other people, you can only try to influence them. But when that is more work than fun, it’s time to walk away.

Jamaica is only 36 days away! I really need the vacation this year. It’s been a long one with a lot of new responsibilities at work and with the Spring taking forever to get here this year, I’m really ready to get out into some hot weather and chill out.

My buddy Steve bought his first house! Congratulations Steve, welcome to the world of never ending trips to Home Depot and a constant desire to putter around with something or other that’s permanently attached to the Earth.

I’m still trying to come up with something interesting to propose I speak on at CPOSC. If anyone has an idea that they think is both interesting and that I’m a good person to have talk about, let me know.

I found out yesterday that Digg uses puppet to manage their servers. So in spite of the really awful community they’ve created, underneath that is a gem.

And last but not least, my good friend Todd Zullinger has seemed to fall off the planet. I can only hope that he’s doing something interesting, which knowing Todd seems likely.

The first topic was about LimeSurvey, which is an OSS survey product designed to compete with surveymonkey.com and the like. It actually looks like a pretty decent survey tool, but is severely lacking in the admin UI as well as built in reporting. That’s a real shame, because not everyone wants to export their data to SPSS or Excel just to see how popular feature X vs feature Y is. Seems like there could be some improvement there. But, that’s probably true of nearly any OSS application; it’s always a work in progress. Once it hits “good enough” it stalls; that’s a topic for a different post.

The second topic was split between Magento, which seems to be a reasonably nice looking piece of software for a shopping cart. Bob seemed to like it, which is great, since he runs an online store and needs something that works for him. But their source control and QA is awful, and even he admitted having issues with it. It seems like it’s an osCommerce just waiting to happen. So I’m kind of confused as to why Bob selected it, considering that his primary reason for leaving osCommerce was that it was horribly unmaintainable. Lack of QA and lack of documentation of code changes just seems destined for that same endgame.

The latter half of Bob’s talk centered around VirtualBox, which is apparently a competitor to VMware Desktop, as best as I can tell. And like VMware, it has a lot of the same problems and limitations; it requires all this machinery to build custom kernel modules for your system, and it uses a proprietary disk format. It also apparently comes in a reasonably crippled “free open source” version and a full features “free closed source” version. Everyone at the meeting who had used VirtualBox said they had converted to the closed source version after having problems with the OSS version. That’s really sad, not atypical of Sun, and the fact that people are falling for it really saddens me. KVM is a powerful, wonderful solution, for modern hardware. Xen is a bit tired now, I understand. But really, if you’re dying to do VM stuff, and you don’t yet have a Core 2 Duo (at least) does it make a lot of sense to be running VM’s? Maybe it does to someone, but that someone is certainly not me.

Both talks were well thought out, for the most part, and while there were small glitches, it was good to see a new speaker as well as two people who genuinely cared about the quality of their presentation.