Category Archives: Uncategorized

Ohio Linux Fest

I’m *finally* done with my presentation for Ohio Linux Fest. Yay. And it’s only a week from today.

If you’re anywhere near the area, you really should come. It’s great.

In reviewing my slides one last time, I discovered that at the end I made a joke about Lilo coercing me to put in the plugs for irc.freenode.net. It’s always interesting to uncover these little reminders of someone who is gone. Rob always encouraged me to softpedal promotion of Freenode when I talked about IRC involvement at conferences. If you benefit from Freenode’s services, consider sending them a few bucks.

Terry Brooks

Last night Terry Brooks was at Joseph Beth. When I got home, I spaced out on something else, and completely forgot about it until this morning. I’ve been reading his stuff almost as long as any other author, and missed getting to hear him read. 🙁

Conference TShirts

The great conference TShirt is one that, if you have to explain what it means to someone who wasn’t there, takes 30 minutes, and leaves both of you feeling like it wasn’t worth the effort.

My canonical example of this is the shirt from the first YAPC I attended. It proclaims:

YAPC 19100
Laziness, Impatience, Hubris
Pick Any Three

This has embedded in it at least 5 inside jokes/references. Or 6, depending on how you count.

Most conferences I go to try to make shirts that live up to this level of cleverness.

A good bar is like good software: Open

Trillions and Trillions Served

But I don’t think folks often live up to the YAPC shirt.

I was thinking about this while doing laundry and I came across the “hAPI hAPI joy joy” shirt from the Yahoo booth at OSCon.

That’s not what he said

I’ve heard some rather inflamatory stuff about the pope lately, but, in the spirit of Slashdot, it’s important to actually read the article. That’s not what he said. For those who don’t want to read the article, here’s my impression of what happened over the last week.

Pope: A long-dead dude said that Islam is evil and inhuman. I find his attitude abhorrent, and want greater dialogue between faiths. The important point is that violence is imcompatible with the nature of God.

Irresponsible reporters: *Gasp* The pope said that Islam is evil and inhuman!!

Millions of people who didn’t read or hear the speech: Grrr!! You must apologize!!

Pope: I’m very sorry you misunderstood what I said

Angry people: That’s not good enough! Grrr!!

Yes, obviously, I’m oversimplifying, but this is not a story of an intolerant catholic church. It’s a story of irresponsible journalism, boiling down a 7-page speech to the one phrase that would sell the most papers, but which didn’t actually tell the story truthfully.

Come on, folks, read the WHOLE SPEECH, and make your own conclusion, rather than merely believing AP, whose sole purpose is to sell stories.

Axis2 Feathercast

There’s a new feathercast, and I’m very pleased with it, because this is the first of the feathercasts that’s really the type of thing I wanted to see FeatherCast.org doing in the first place. (With the possible exception of the Harmony episode, I suppose.)

Much of the motivation for doing FeatherCast in the first place was to answer my own questions about all of those Apache projects that I hear about, which I have no idea what they do.

Clearly, the Axis2 team has a lot of energy and a lot of brilliant people. But until ApacheCon Asia, I had not the vaguest idea of what the software actually did. Now I have a general idea of what it does, and how the other projects like Sandesha fit into it, and how they got their strange names. This, in turn, makes me understand how Axis2 fits into the larger ASF.

Eventually, one hopes that we can understand what all the various Apache projects do, and we can be more than a collection of disconnected factions, but can actually be a federation of related nations.

On a related note, if you’re going to be at ApacheCon, and you work on one of those projects that always generates the comment “That’s an Apache project??!? What does it do??”, please please please find David Reid or myself and record a feathercast about your project. It benefits the entire ASF, but it most benefits your project when the rest of us know what niche you fill in the greater ecology.

A Christmas Carol, #27

I may have mentioned before, I have a problem. I find it very hard to not buy new editions of A Christmas Carol that I find. Mostly, I resist, but occasionally I encounter one that I simply can’t resist.

This new illustrated edition from P.J.Lynch is beautiful. The illustrations span a number of styles. Some are in the style of the originals, and some are unique to Mr. Lynch. Many of the illustrations span both pages, as background to the text. All are beautiful and show an understanding of the text.

I particularly like the picture of the uncountable children and the christmas present delivery man, complete with the baby and her toy frying pan.

Yes, it’s #27. But, honestly, I can quit any time I want to.

lilo

As many of you may have already heard, Rob Levin (lilo), the head admin of the Freenode IRC network, was killed by a hit-and-run driver while he was riding his bike today.

Although I had spoken with him a number of times on the phone, as well as dozens of times online, I had never met him personally.

Rob is survived by his wife Debbie, and son Benjamin. You can read a more complete announcement here, if you wish.

I don’t know what I wanted to write. One never has any words for the passing of someone one knew, however briefly. Debbie, and Benjamin, our prayers and thoughts are with you. May the peace of God be with you. Rob will be remembered as someone who made community and communication possible.

Napoleon Dynamite

Occasionally I watch a movie so that I can have some context for the movies that folks say they’ve been watching. So it was, with amazingly low expectations, that I rented and watched Napoleon Dynamite. My expectations dipped even lower when I saw that it was an MTV production. I figured I would be satisfied if there was even a hint of plot or humor.

It appears that my expectations were *far* too high.

I’m completely unable to guess why this movie was such a hit.

On the bright side it had Lazlo Hollyfeld in it.

Need longer days

At a time when scientists warn that autumn will kill us all, I’m starting to feel that I need the days to get longer, not shorter.

In addition to a huge deadline at work, I have three writing deadlines the first week of October, and two conferences coming up (Ohio LinuxFest and ApacheCon) in the next few weeks too. And two books that I’ve promised to do reviews for, including one preface.

Somehow I need to figure out how to sleep less and still be productive.

As DNA observed, “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

20 Things You Didn’t Know Apache Could Do

In just a couple weeks I’ll be giving a talk at Ohio LinuxFest titled “20 Things You Didn’t Know Your Apache Web Server Could Do.”

I picked the number 20 mostly at random. I figured that was a good number for a 45 minute presentation. It turns out it’s hard to come up with 20 things that I think most of the audience at OLF won’t know. They tend to be a pretty knowledgeable audience.

Tonight I came up with the last few things, and I think I’m mostly ready to give the talk, although some of the items require a little more detail. Not too much, because 2 minutes per item is pretty tight.

I figure that most of the audience will find 2-5 of the things to be something that they already knew, and that a few very experienced folks will perhaps know as many as 10 of the things, but I’m betting that nobody in the room will know more than 12. We’ll see. It will be a fun talk, whatever happens.

Oh, yeah, I’ll be giving the same talk at ApacheCon in Austin. Rather different audience. I imagine there will be a person or two in the audience there who will know all 20 things. But perhaps I’ll even teach them a few things.