This year OSCON is a new venue, the Oregon convention center. I was surprised to discover that the convention center is not attached to the convention hotel. This means I need to allot additional time for the trip to the conference. I'm find with the 5 (very short Portland) block walk, but the additional time gets subtracted from sleep, which is always at a premium at conferences.

I've never stayed in a Doubletree Hotel (the official conference hotel) before, and there are a few nice touches. When I checked in, they gave me a nice warm cookie. Of course, I checked in at dinnertime, so I dropped my stuff (and the cookie) off and went to meet my party. I wouldn't pick my hotel on the basis of a cookie, though. Another nice touch is that there is a power strip behind the desk in the room. I've got a decent number of charger plugs, so I really appreciate this

Unfortunately, there is no free hi speed internet in the rooms -- there is free wifi in the lobby but the Courtyard by Marriott down the street (where I stayed during FLOSSPS) has free internet, the rooms (which have a jacuzzi in them) are $20 a night cheaper, and it's closer to the convention center. Unfortunately for double tree, I don't consider a cookie and a power strip an equitable trade for a high rate, no internet, and no jacuzzi.

I'm usually not a big fan of tutorials (cost issues aside). The three hour format is just a killer. However, this year the program looked very good. There were at least 2 tutorials in each slot that I was interested in.

The first tutorial that I went to was Anthony Baxter's Effective Python Programming. I didn't learn about any totally new major areas of Python, but there were a number of smaller things that I learned, so it was still worthwhile.

For the afternoon tutorial I went to D. Richard Hipp's tutorial on the internals of SQLite. This was a really good tutorial. He was able to cover all the internals of SQLite, in a lot of detail. I've been hearing about SQLite from various folks in the Python community, and the Core Data framework in OS 10.4 is based on SQLite. SQLite's engine implements SQL via a bytecode vm that is tuned for dealing with a transactional b-tree. SQL code is compiled into these bytecodes for execution. A lot of people are using SQLite in embedded environments, apparently down to the scale of smart cards. You can compile out many features in order to reduce the footprint.

After Hipp's tutorial I met Andrew Carter from SourceLabs. Andrew came to SourceLabs from Microsoft, which is interesting in itself, but he also helped me understand what SourceLabs is trying to do, and how that's different from what SpikeSource is doing. It's nice to see more open source oriented stuff happening in the Puget Sound area. But we still aren't anywhere near Portland...