Joyent

Jason Hoffman's European Rails Conf Presentation

The Rails Conference in London was great fun.

The only downside is that I spent my last day there ill, and it’s only now (about 9 days later) that I’m starting to feel OK. Mind you, I still completely barfed (correction: projectile vomited) up lunch today and have a nagging cough, a cough that while better was bad enough last week that I ended up at the hospital for a bit.

Some highlights of the trip for me.

I actually aways enjoy the underground. It’s a great thing that has no equivalent on the US’s West Coast.

I stayed in a very cozy room right across the street from the venue. Perfect.

We had about 15 people come out to a pub for a Joyent/TextDrive meetup. Dean even flew over from France for the night and made it. It’s always a delight to be able to both have a beer with him and with our peoples.

I had a Stilton cheese and pickle sandwich.

I managed to capture Simon’s devil eyes when presented with the tray of whiskeys.

I did get to meet and have a 2 hour conversation about start-ups with David Axmark, one of the co-founders of MySQL. Very interesting guy. His business card says that he is MySQL’s “OpenSorcerer”. That’s quite geek-cool.

I think Evan’s (the man known as Rabble) talk about Integrating Asterisk and Rails was great.

Dave Thomas, in his keynote, showed that he’s the Godfather. Pure and simple.

Duncan not only gave a great keynote but I had the chance to have both lunch and dinner with him. There aren’t many like him out there in InternetLand, and it great to sit around and talk both shop and non-shop.

I got my hair cut at a place that could have ended up bad. But was just fine. The nice girl who cut my hair was Australian (from Melbourne).

I got to see the Rosetta Stone (an incredible stone) at the British Museum and accompanying me was Chris Heuer.

Chris happened to also be in London. Chris is behind BrainJams and both the past Web 2.1 and future Web 2.2 conferences.

And I once again got to meet and bump into one user after the other. When given a chance, I gave them a hug and thanked them for making all possible.

Ah yeah. I also gave a talk. It was about a System Administrator-kinda view of Ruby on Rails applications, and about some things we’ve both discovered, made decisions about et cetera. If you find an error or typo, or have any other questions, comments or concerns about it, please let me know.

Jason Hoffman EuroRailsConf.pdf

{download should be fixed}

How One Flies

It isn’t a complicated problem on the surface: get from one’s house in France’s Rhône Valley to the Joyent office in San Anselmo, California. Just a hop, skip and a jump, surely.

Getting a reasonably priced ticket from Paris to SFO is of course the first priority (one flies economy, because one’s Scots/Dutch heritage leads one to be cheap as all hell). One has learned never to whiffle about with the Expedias and the Travelocities and the Kayaks during the business week: transatlantic rates only ever dip reliably sometime in the middle of the night between Saturday and Sunday, and even then it’s a mad dash between browser tabs to catch the elusive combination of price, minimal stop-overage, and a rich flow of points.

There’s no really easy way to get to Paris from here: it’s either an hour long flight from Marseille, with a few hours of driving and check-in time tacked on, or a three-hour train ride from Avignon with at least 45 minutes in the car to get to the station. The train is less expensive and in many ways more pleasant, but no matter how one gets to Paris it pretty much needs to happen the night before, otherwise there’s no way to guarantee the preflight earliness one needs to a) get on the plane at all, and b) ensure a decent seat, and, possibly, c) wheedle and cajole an upgrade to one of those mythical barcaloungers way up front, where they, well, you know what they do up there.

So one rolls the Hotwire dice and spends the night at one of five or so hotels hugged around Charles de Gaulle, where free shuttles, CNN International, 22€ breakfasts and eye-crossingly overpriced wifi lay in wait to help one enjoy one’s stay. The Sheraton in Terminal 2, incidentally, represents the motherlode of CDG accommodation, and if Hotwire can get you in for $80 US for the night, as is often the case, it feels, standing in one’s complimentary terrycloth robe, watching planes noiselessly take off and land through the triple-paned windows, like a major freaking score.

The next day, at the worryingly dilapidated Charles de Gaulle Terminal 1 – all greasy tubes and sweating concrete – one somehow manages every single time to connect with the same US Homeland Security screening agent, and every single time the concept of a Canadian living in France who’s the president of a US-based company needs to be laid out, documented, flowcharted, powerpointed, written in blood, before she invariably wanders off to ‘speak to the supervisor’, who in turn flips through one’s passport, sniffs the air, shrugs his shoulders, and sends the agent back to begin the second round of interrogation: who packed one’s bags, anything resembling a weapon, and so on.

Once a boarding pass is issued and the security scans, pokes and prods are complete, one is faced with the brutal truth that, unless one is connecting through the somewhat sin-accommodating Dulles International, there will be no cigarettes for the next fifteen or so hours. Fine.

Provided the sleeping tablets have worn off upon arrival to SFO, getting through customs and immigration can be a breeze: just a matter of inching along four and a half miles of snaking queues, smiling brightly to the agent and not feeling self-conscious about the swath of dried red wine covering half of one’s nice new white shirt.

Getting home is, of course, an entirely different story.

Copenhagen Meetup This Saturday

A number of us Joyeurs – David, Johan, Marten, Florian, Filip and I – will be in Copenhagen later this week for Reboot 8. If you’re attending you’ll probably bump into us at one of the events. I’m turning 40 on Friday, so if you see me on that day please comment on how youthful and non-run-down I look.

Even if you’re not attending, a meetup is of course in the works: Saturday afternoon starting at 3pm, at the Cafe Švejk in Fredericksberg.

We’ll try to organise some sightseeing in the morning as well; check back here for details.

Mexican Coke

By way of Jason Kottke, I came up this article by Tom Ragan in the Santa Cruz Sentinel: “Mexican Coke: The ‘Real Thing?’”

It’s popping up just about everywhere in Latino communities across the United States: Mexican-made Coca-Cola in those old glass bottles, somewhat of an anomaly in the age of the plastic liter and twist-off cap.

Slightly worn and a bit gritty from all the coming and going, the 12-ounce bottles, which sell for roughly $1.25 a pop, are being bought up and sucked dry at record clips in cities across the country with large Latino populations.

The article proffers two explanations for this surge in the popularity of imported Coke. The first is that it’s served in old-fashioned tall glass bottles. The second is that it’s sweetened with sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup.

Ragan spoke to Coca-Cola Company spokesman Mart Martin (I am not making that name up), and Ragan tried his best to pin the craze entirely on the bottles

“We believe that the appeal of Mexican Coke is as much about nostalgia as it is about anything,” says Martin. “It’s like getting a piece of home in a bottle. You can’t deny the fact that it’s in a tall glass bottle, something you just can’t find in most parts of the United States.”

But it’s the “same exact product,” and Mexican bottlers are buying the ingredients straight from the company, says Martin.

“It’s not like they’re stirring it up in some backyard,” he adds. “Coke is Coke is Coke.”

The company, however, rarely elaborates on Coke’s ingredients, and the secret formula is actually in a vault in a bank in Atlanta. Instead, the company line all along has been that there is “no perceptible taste difference” between Mexican Coke and the American-made Classic Coke.

The old-fashioned bottles certainly have some nostalgic appeal, but it’s the difference in sweeteners that is fueling this craze. The idea that they’re the “same product” or that there’s “no perceptible taste difference” is hogwash.

I first tried Coke made with real cane sugar a few years ago while on vacation in the Dominican Republic. The difference wasn’t merely perceptible, it was shocking. The first few sips were more unsettling than pleasing, producing a dichotomous sensation of “this tastes like Coke/this does not taste like Coke” at the same time. By the end of the first bottle, though, I wanted more. The only thing that kept me from rotting away all my teeth during that week was that our resort’s “free beverages” policy also included beer.

For Coca Cola to claim these two beverages are the “same” even though they use entirely different sweeteners is preposterous. It’s not like sweetener is just a trace element in the Coke recipe—they’re second only to carbonated water in the ingredients list.

The simple truth is that cane sugar tastes much better than high-fructose corn syrup, but high-fructose corn syrup is way cheaper than sugar. Or at least it is here in the U.S. thanks to government corn subsidies.

Plus de Gras

Back in the air again on my way to Dallas this week. Staying at a hotel in Richardson called “The Richardson”. Telecomm corridor and all that. Lots of packets moving around. Meet for dinner?

We got back from France last week. What a trip! I’m normally in bed by 10 PM in California. Its so dark. In France, it was 3 AM. And sometimes I fell asleep right there in the bistro, a double serving of Armagnac or Calvados right in front of me. Boy what Paris can do to a man. But what shopping!

When I arrived in Paris, my bag had not. The luggage attendant even came up to me saying “Mr Young” and told me my bag was still out in the system somewhere. Uh? So I had to go clothes shopping. We found what looked to me like the French version of Old Navy: Cielo. I hate to try on clothes in a store. When I got back to the hotel I found out size equivalents (even though printed right on the label) between US and French sizes are not precise. The shirts I bought fit. So did the socks. The jeans barely fit over my ankles.

We stayed at the Hotel-le-Senat, a very respectable boutique hotel near the Palais Luxembourg. I was in a room that had an upstairs and a down stairs. Off the upstairs was a small “terrace” with a wonderful view of the Latin Quarter, the Louvre, Sainte Chappelle, and Notre Dame. Off in the distance to the left was the top of the Eiffel Tower. I got very uncomfortable standing on that terrace with five other people: especially since the whole thing seemed to sway and we were on the sixth floor. But that was at 3:30 AM.

To paraphrase my two year old daughter: “Paris yummy”. I was drawn a few times to the “Bistro Mazarin” for its liberal pours and amazing french onion soup. We also enjoyed meals at “Les Editeurs” and a turn of the century (19th to 20th) bistro whose name loosely translates to “Root Soup”. We had suckling milk pig in a restaurant down in a cave (name? something about a roasted cow) just across the Seine from the Ile-de-la-Cite washed down with some very good Bordeaux and Burgundy. The meal started with a very nice Chateuneuf du Pape. Cheese plate after cheese plate. The prix-fixe menus are adventurous. I’m a natural conspiracy theorist, though, and began to look sideways at menus offering: green salad, carpaccio of river fish livers(!), steak frite, cheese, creme brulee. One of these things does not belong. That’s like a childs menu that includes: mac and cheese, dinosaur chicken nuggets, apple sauce, oysters on the half-shell, hot dog, cheeseburger.

My travel companions were either atheists or confused technocrats so I had to visit the beautiful churches myself. I’m always struck by the relative state of disrepair of French churches compared to a country such as Italy or Mexico, even. The church of St Suplice has a meridian line place at a diagonal across the transept of the building. There is also a note denying any connection between the line and Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code”.

We met a number of Joyent customers. All very cheerful. Geeks are the same the world over. Very declarative. 1s and 0s. Shy about taking a drink at first. But passionate about the second one and through to the end. We even had Sabina and Keith come down from southern Germany to be at one of the dinners. Sabina is an oncologist in the Lake Constance region of Germany. She told me she works many different positions as a doctor. She’s strictly an end user of our stuff.

Which gets me back to why we were in Paris. While we spoke English at the dinners, there’s nothing like saying “couchon du lait”, “roudenons aux monsieur”, or “zapateros de la corona en suisse”. I just can’t translate those parts.