Tag Archives: amsterdam

ApacheCon EU 2008 CFP

We’re delighted to announce that the Call for Papers for ApacheCon EU 2008 is open, and ready to receive your submissions. We’re looking for talks about any of the many Apache technologies, and the various things surrounding them.

ApacheCon will be held 7 April through 11 April, 2008 at the new Mövenpick Hotel Amsterdam City Centre. We were there last year, and it’s a great location in walking distance of a lot of fantastic places. I walked to the Van Gogh museum, but that’s probably a bit of a long hike for some folks.

Anyways, we’d like to see your submissions, so that we can make it yet another great conference.

And don’t forget that registration is still open for ApacheCon Atlanta, where I’ll be giving my half-day mod_rewrite tutorial. So register, before it’s too late!

There’s no place like home

It was a great conference, and a perfect location for the conference. But, it’s over, and I’m SO ready to go home. Or, as Dorothy put it …

… most of it was beautiful. But just
the same, all I kept saying to everybody
was, I want to go home. And they sent me
home.

All packed up, and in the morning I’ll be heading home. Going to bed, in the hopes that it will come faster.

Mobile websites

I attended a talk yesterday about Apache HTTPd on cell phones. We selected the talk because the abstract seemed fascinating, and the idea of a mobile website was intriguing.

The talk started a little slow, with lots of heavy technical details, but then it got into uses and ideas for future use, and I was really glad we had selected the talk. Utterly fascinating.

The idea that caught my attention was websites that are 1) mobile and 2) on-demand.

Imagine carrying your website with you. Your website knows where you are. Folks can look at your website, and it tells them where you are, and, via bluetooth, your phone locates other websites (phones) that are in the same general vicinity. A website is “linked” to other websites by virtue of geographic proximity. And using a camera phone, you can take photos so that your website is very context-sensitive.

The on-demand idea was even more interesting. Click on this link to request a photo of where I am. The phone-holder gets a message on their phone, and takes a photo, which is then sent as the response to the HTTP request. Viola. Content that didn’t exist before the request was made, and doesn’t exist after the request is terminated. On-demand web content.

It does mean that things like search will have to be rethought a little bit.

This was all presented as a technical project, of great geeky interest. However, I am now *certain*, that in the next couple of years, someone will find a way to make this easy to use, and will find a way to charge for it, and you’ll see thousands of mobile websites (“mobsites”) springing up and becoming a huge percentage of web content.

Strangely, this makes twitter seem slightly interesting too, if it can be brought into this kind of a model. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I am sure that someone will figure out what that means and do it.

Additional information HERE and HERE

Half way …

As usual, it’s halfway through the conference and I haven’t had any opportunity to write anything.

Unfortunately, I also haven’t had any opportunity to record any FeatherCast interviews. This is disappointing, in that David has done so many great episodes lately, and I haven’t done much of anything in a really long time.

I *hope* to record the lightning talks this evening, but I’m not certain if that will happen or not, since I’ll need my laptop to give my lightning talk. I guess I made that work somehow in Dublin.

The conference so far has been great. Both of the keynotes so far have been interesting and well delivered. In particular, I found Steven Pemberton very entertaining and informative.

This evening are the ever-popular lightning talks, where I hope to be amusing. We’ll see if anybody gets it, or if I’m the only one who thinks it’s funny.

ApacheCon Day 1

Today is the first day of ApacheCon. We had tutorials yesterday, so that was sort of day 0.

I gave a new tutorial yesterday – Apache Cookbook – and I think it was fairly well received. I apparently judged the amount of content just about perfectly, running over a mere 3 minutes.

Crowds

So, I discovered, once again, that I don’t care much for crowds. I went to get something I saw in a shop window last night, and a few other things for the kids. The crowds are quite impressive, if you go in for that thing. But they are, at least this early in the day, very well behaved. Anyways, my ankle was starting to hurt pretty badly, so I just came back to get off my feet, and ice it for a little while. Perhaps I can get some writing done this afternoon. But, more likely, I’ll go find the hackathon, and not get anything at all done.

Queen’s Day

Last night I went to dinner with a bunch of Apache guys – Robert Donkin, Aaron Farr, Nick Kew, Noel Bergman, and Bill Rowe – but I headed back to the hotel fairly early. Interesting conversations with interesting people, but I was feeling very far away from home, and wasn’t really enjoying the crowds a whole lot.

I just got done reviewing my conference presentations, and I think that they’re all ready. So I’m about to head out and … yeah, experience the crowds a little more. Today is Queen’s Day, which is a pretty big party. THere’s also a couple things that I have determined to find and take home with me, so that’ll be my quest for the next few hours. I saw one of them last night, but I’m not entirely sure where we were, so it might take me a little time to find it again. Meanwhile, hopefully I’ll take more photos.

Amsterdam, day two

Yesterday was somewhat less eventful. I worked almost the whole day, finishing up my presentations.

In the evening, I walked down to a Russian Orthodox Church that I had found online, but upon arriving there, discovered that it had closed some time back.

So I went to Rembrandtplein and had dinner at The Old Bell, and watched the goings-in in the square.

This morning my internal clock failed me, and I didn’t wake up until about 10:45. Not sure quite what I have planned for today.

Football in Rembrandtplein

It always bugs me when I go to places outside of the US, and the US influence is so strong that I can’t see the local flavor. It’s a great pleasure here that there are hardly any McDonalds, and the American stores are, by far, in the minority.

So I was sitting in Rembrandtplein having dinner, and looked across the square to see, concealed behind the trees, a billboard-sized TV screen, showing American Football, inspiring this:

Football in Rembrandtplein
28 April 2007

The screen is
hidden by the trees.
As, of course, it should be.
The view, so far,
unspoiled by
American incursions
except by suggestion.
The branches interlace to conceal
the quarterback
scratching his crotch.