* Release at least one FeatherCast
* Record a dozen FeatherCast interviews
* Record the Incubator mini-talks
* Finish writing my ApacheCon presentations before it’s time to give them
* Rest up a little from being stressed out for far too long
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Photographer
The photographer just left. He was here for about an hour, and took several hundred photos. He said that of that they might use 2 or 3 in the article. But he said he’d send me all the photos.
Shadow hammed it up and got into a bunch of the photos. 🙂
Site rollout
After much pain and suffering, and much hard design work by Chris, and much coding by both of us, we rolled out new site today. I really like how it looks. And, even more importantly (at least, from my side of the shop), it completely retires any role played by Windows/IIS in our website. Up until now, it has been Apache proxying a bunch of stuff through to IIS, which worked, but was icky.
Now, with IIS out of the picture, and the need for dozens of icky rewrite rules out of the way, we can do some seriously cool stuff in the coming months. I’m really looking forward to it.
Home automation and the New York Times
A year or so ago, I installed a bunch of X10 stuff. I believe I blogged about it at the time.
Well, someone told someone else, who told someone else. And now the New York Times is doing a story on home automation and X10. They asked me a bunch of questions via email, and I thought that was the end of it.
This evening, someone called me to set up an appointment for a photographer to come over to take photos of me with my X10 gear, and they’re running a story about my stuff in Thursday’s New York Times. Pretty cool, hmm?
Ajaxy goodness
At OLF, I got an Ajax book in the raffle. After spending about 20 minutes in the first chapter, I had a functioning Ajaxified example page. The concepts are simple. The implementation is simple. The results are very handy.
So I’m left wondering about what I’ve heard about Ajax – that it’s very impressive, but difficult to implement. Ajax appears to be yet another tech thing that I avoided for a while because I thought it would be hard, which then turned out to be almost disappointingly easy.
Does this mean that it’s just a fantastic book? (Head Rush Ajax, by the way.) Does it mean that I’m just brilliant? I dunno. What I do know is that it means that Ajax techniques will start appearing more and more often in stuff that I write, because, as far as I can tell, it’s really not that hard. And with all of the modules/libraries/platforms/factories that are cropping up to make it even easier, it seems to me that there’s really no reason *not* to do it.
Ohio LinuxFest
Ohio LinuxFest was great, as usual.
There were 5 of us there from Asbury, as well as two other folks (that I knew) from the Lexington area. And, in addition to the 7 of us, there were about 1050 other people, up from just over 700 last year.
I did a new talk – 20 things you didn’t know you could do with your Apache web server – and I had a ton of fun doing it. 20 things is really way too much material for 60 minutes, but even that worked out pretty well, as folks were never given the chance to lose interest. If one of the things wasn’t of much interest, there would be another in 2 minutes. And there was only one person in the audience who claimed to know as many as 10 things, which was very satisfying.
I did cheat a little bit, since a lot of the stuff was from 2.2, and one thing was from 2.3. But evangelizing 2.2 is, I think, pretty important. There’s lots of amazing stuff in it.
Also of great interest was the (as they were introduced) LIVE NUDE PENGUINS! Yes, two penguins came to see us. They were jackass penguins, and did indeed bray like donkies. It was very cool to see them. I’m sure that someone has posted a bunch of photos on Flickr by now.
Other excellent speakers included Chris DiBono, Jeff Waugh, Jay Pipes and Jon maddog Hall.
Jay’s talk, in particular was very valuable. However, by about half way through, he had gone past my ability to understand what he was talking about. This is, of course, one of the things that makes OLF so unique. Zero product pitch. 100% technical talks.
Also very cool was hanging out with Skippy and Owen, and putting together our detailed plans for world domination. (No, I can’t tell. It’s a secret!)
Looking forward to next year’s conference! It will be even better!
iVAN
This weekend several of us from Asbury went up to Ohio LinuxFest. The conference is another post.
On the trip up, there were two cars, and we had an iVAN – that is, an intra-Vehicular Area Network. In one car, we had an inverter, and a wireless access point. I was in the other car, running the IRC server. I also was streaming Old Time Radio podcasts from iTunes, which they were playing on the stereo in the other car.
Oh, yeah, and we had CB radios, too.
We got a pretty strong link between the cars when we were 2 or 3 car lengths away, but beyond that, it broke down pretty fast.
Mostly, though, it was cool just to do it. And very geeky. 🙂
Henry Clay
Today I went to the Henry Clay house with 40+ 3rd graders. It was quite interesting. I learned a lot about Henry Clay that I didn’t previously know. He was “The Great Orator”, and frequently spoke to Congress on many topics. He was “The Great Compromiser” and tried to bring unity between the North and the South. And he ran for president three times.
One great part of his house was the library, in which there was a wonderful collection of books. Among other things, there was what appeared to be a complete 1886 Globe Edition of Dickens. This wasn’t something that the tour guide pointed out, but I noticed it while wandering around the library and office.
Unfortunately, the tour of the HC house took a lot longer than I expected, so I didn’t get to stay around for the Mary Todd Lincoln tour. Sarah was quite disappointed at this.
Success
“You’ve achieved success in your field when you don’t know whether what you’re doing is work or play.”
(Warren Beatty)
Mo Willems
Today Mo Willems was at Joseph Beth, and we got to hear him read his book Edwina. We then got two of his books signed. It turns out that he had lunch with my mother yesterday, at an event where they were both in attendance.
He was great at reading his books, which isn’t necessarily a given with authors. And he was great in relating to the kids. After reading, he taught them to draw the pigeons from his books, and encouraged them to go forth and “violate my copyright with abandon”, or words to that effect. 🙂