Last night, an incredible number of people showed up to Code-N-Splode to hear about Git.

I was not at all prepared for that number of people, but grateful that a couple experts were on hand to help – Sarah Sharp, Audrey Eschright and Michael Schwern (and others) all contributed to the discussion. Thanks for all the great questions! I’m looking forward to Sarah’s advanced tutorial next month.

:bd – closes the current buffer window

CTRL-F – page down; CTRL-B – page up; CTRL-D – put current line in the center of your screen

CTRL-R – Redo (plus COUNT for redoing a number of changes); ‘u‘ is for undo; ‘U‘ is for undoing all changes on a particular line

:set undolevels=NUM – number of changes saved in memory (can set to negative number if running out of memory

:split – split your current window into two; switch between windows with CTRL-W CTRL-W

!{cmd} – run a shell command, shows you the output and prompts you before returning to your current buffer; ‘:!‘ by itself runs the last external command; ‘:!!‘ repeats the last command; :silent !{cmd} eliminates the need to hit enter after the command is done; ‘:r !{cmd}‘ puts the output of $cmd into the current buffer.

Gabrielle and I are at it again, talking about Filesystem I/O and Linux at the Linux Plumbers Conference.  Mark Wong is the evil performance genius working with us behind the scenes, and a copy of what we brought to the conference today is here.

Takeaway: Set your read ahead buffer size higher in the kernel – maybe even 8MB.

I’m learning the PostgreSQL system catalog tables right now, and was wishing that I had some catalog flashcards.  I made my wish ‘aloud’ on IRC today, and @davidfetter managed to blow my mind with this simple command-line switch for psql: -E. Now, every time I use a command, the tool tells me what the underlying SQL query is. Great for jogging the memory, and I’ll be putting off making my catalog flashcards for a few more days. Now I wonder what other revealing command-line switches I’ve overlooked!

See screenshot:

We love feedback – I’ve got alerts, RSS feeds and filters up the wazoo to let me know what people are saying. And the new feedback system for OSCON totally rocks!  We got messages about how we did instantly, and there’s nothing better for improving your presentation than getting constructive criticism right away.

But there was one message that really stuck in our craw!  Someone thought we had emphasized the social aspects of running user groups way too much.

Here’s the thing: user groups are social. The primary mission of a user group is to (wait for it…): Meet Other People.

That’s the difference between a lecture, or a class, or a job. Maybe you are coming to the meeting because you want to learn something from the topic, but the primary goal of a user group has to be about the people who are there and facilitating ways for those people to make one-to-one connections.

User groups are a way to, on a very small scale, enable the type of connections you can make at conferences. Except user groups target a very specific topic, and can in some cases be a better bet for meeting people concerned about the same things as you are in your industry!

And usually, user groups meet after hours during a person’s free time – time that they could be spending with their family, friends or just chilling out. Respect that donation of time and make it worth a person’s while! A bit of technical information never lasts as long as a new colleague or friend.

Selena & I will be giving a modified version of our OSCON talk at PLUG tonight.  Time & location on the PLUG website.  See you there!