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ApacheCon Asia summary

(I posted this to a certain non-public mailing list, but Nick suggested that I also publish it publically.)

I wanted to give a quick report about ApacheCon Asia 2006, now that I’m mostly recovered from traveling.

In short, it was a huge success. The attendance was as good as Europe, with far more non-committer attendees than we typically have in the US or Europe. There was a large delegation from a local highschool LUG, which I thought was amazingly cool. The related events (ApacheCon was part of a week of events called FOSSSL 06) drew a hugely diverse crowd, including numerous CEOs, many of whom were still in the “what is it” phase of Open Source knowledge.

The attendees were enthusiastic and eager to learn. It was a little hard to judge their reactions at times, because, as I discovered in later discussion, the local school system emphasizes the idea that asking questions or interrupting the “teacher” is hugely disrespectful. That takes some getting used to. But after-session discussions were enthusiastic and folks had good questions – just not many in the sessions themselves.

The “nearby” violence wasn’t particularly nearby, and didn’t affect things in the least – at least not as far as I can tell.

I was given a book entitled “Sri Lanka: The Emerald Island”, so it was pretty cool that ApacheCon was held on the Emerald Isle and the Emerald Island this year! 🙂

HUGE kudos to Sanjiva and his team, particularly Deepal Jayasinghe, who handled a lot of the logistics, and Rajkumar, who organized the GeekOut, which was the high point of the whole week, at least for me. But, of course, there were many other members of your team who I don’t want to overlook. Thanks for making this happen.

Sri Lanka is beautiful, and I’m delighted I got to visit. Sri Lanka has more Apache developers, per capita, than any other nation on earth. That aught to make you take notice. I don’t know if this stat is actually true, but I heard it quoted enough times, it *must* be! 😉

I hate CDG

It took me 2 hours and 20 minutes to get from one gate to another at the Paris CDG airport. I do believe that airport is intentionally designed to frustrate the traveler. In addition to which, it was as though the “security” there was an intentional parody, with everything as inefficient as possible, and as inconvenient as possible, without actually being secure.

I landed at 10:50.

There was a line down the jetway. I didn’t know what we were waiting for, but we waited a long time. Finally, at the bottom of the jetway, our boarding pass (for the flight we just left) and passport were checked by two entirely different varieties of police. One was the Frontier Police or something like that. One was the airport security folks – I guess their variety of the TSA. They weren’t talking to each other, and were checking exactly the same things.

Then my boarding pass was checked as I entered the terminal. I’m not sure why.

On arriving at Terminal 1 central (you have to look at a map of CDG to appreciate …) I tried to determine where to go next. There was a large map of the airport, with lists of what airline flew from what terminal. These lists weren’t alphabetical, they were per terminal. So to find out where to go for Delta, I had to look at each terminal, and read the list of airlines that flew from there. Some airlines flew from multiple terminals, in which case you also had to look at a list of destinations, like “Delta – USA” or “Delta – Europe”.

I finally determined that I needed to go to 2E, and headed towards the place where I could get the bus to Terminal 2.

There was a person in the hallway stopping everyone and checking tickets. I’m not sure what for, since she didn’t actually tell me if I was going in the right direction, and seemed quite annoyed when I asked. My ticket was then checked again when I got to the waiting room for the bus.

I waited perhaps 20 minutes.

The bus was clearly labeled “Terminal 1”. I asked if it was the bus to Terminal 2, and was assured that it was. They checked my ticket for good measure.

On the bus was the driver and his assistant. They argued the entire time about what terminal they were going to, and what section of the terminal was next. “2A is next!” “No, 2D is next!” Delightful.

At each stop, they checked everyone’s ticket as they got off to make sure that they were going to the right place, and argued over whether it was. Apparently this airport even confuses the folks who work there.

So, I finally reached 2E.

Did you look at the map I linked to? Notice that there’s no 2E? This should make you worry. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a map that noted this fact, so I got off at 2E.

After entering 2E, there was a long line to go through security before getting to the boarding gates. After waiting in this line for a while, my ticket and passport were checked, and I was told that I couldn’t go through until I checked in and got a boarding pass. For this, I needed to go down that stairway over there. I went down and couldn’t find any Delta checkin desk. Finally noticed a Delta logo about –>this<-- big behind the Air France desk. Ok. So I went to check in. This was the one easy part of the process. Back upstairs, I got back in the line. When I reached the front of the line, I was sent to the back of the line right next to it. I'm not sure why, and the guy refused to tell me when I asked. Upon reaching the front of that line, I was sent back to the original line. I am not making this up. On reaching the front of *that* line, I was sent to yet another line, across on the other side of the security area, for which I had to cross past 6 other lines. My boarding pass and passport were checked. I had to do the shoes-off keys-out phone-in-the-basket shuffle and go through the security metal detecter thingy. My boarding pass and passport were checked. Now it's over, right? No! Not yet! I went down to gate 2-E-82, only to discover that, due to construction, there isn't a gate 2-E-82!!! You have to take another bus from gate 2-E-80 over to another building where you can find 2-E-81 through 2-E-87. By this time, the flight to Cincinnati was already boarding. The first bus was full, but I got on the second bus and took a 20 minute driver over to the temporary pseudo-terminal. There, the TSA-alikes checked my boarding pass and passport, and asked if I was carrying anything explosive or weapon-like. I assure you, buddy, if I were, I would have used it a LONG time before now!! Then, finally, my boarding pass and passport were checked by the Air France/Delta folks, and I was let on the plane. The time was 13:10. Oh, yeah, they checked my boarding pass at the door of the plane. You know, just in case nobody had done that yet.

I left my clock in Sri Lanka

The last several days, I have been falling into bed exhausted at 9pm, and waking up refreshed and ready to go at 4am. I think I left my biological clock in Sri Lanka. I don’t recall ever having this much trouble readjusting to a timezone. But I suppose I’ve never been over that many timezones.

So, I’ve got about 5 more Sri Lanka episodes that I still need to write, which were … ahem … postponed by certain losers with nothing to better to do than deface my websites. Ah, well, it was time to rebuild the server anyway, so I suppose in a way it was a good thing. But it sure created a lot of additional work that I don’t have time for.

Which reminds me of a Goofy cartoon I saw on the plane on the way home. “Don’t end sentences with prepositions!” “What would I want to do that for?”

On The Air

We apologize for the brief interruption in service. We’re back on the air. A few things are still broken. Please notify us if you find something broken, and we’ll endeavor to fix it. Thanks.

About to leave

I’ll be leaving Sri Lanka shortly, and my internet connection is probably going to expire any minute now.

As much as I’ve enjoyed being here, I’ve reached the point where I really just want to go home.

I still have a *lot* more stuff to write about, about my visit here, including all about elephants. But that can wait another day or two.

The future of (Open Source) software

It’s easy for us Open Source “experts” to go to various places around the world and impart our wisdom on the people there. But what I realized in the past week is that it’s really only a matter of time before they are telling us the best way to do Open Source. Not to mention that it’s just the wrong attitude to take, since it’s only when everyone are equal participants that the Open Source model really works.

Anyways, I need to stew on this a little longer, because there’s a lot to think about. Mostly, though, I tend to have rather negative reactions to any model that has “us” from the west teaching “them” from the developing world what the right way to do things is.

I finally figured out what WS02 is all about, and it seems that they grasp what Open Source is meant to be as a business model. They are a software company, and their product is Open Source. So they benefit from the contributions of folks around the world, and those folks benefit in return, but they are still able to run a profitable software company based on those efforts.

It occurred to me to make the (very unfair, but stick with me) comparison to ISPs in the USA who have based a business around the Apache web server. There are dozens of them. They sell services on top of an Open Source product, but in no way contribute back to the community that makes their business possible. Quite to the contrary, they do things that subtly work against it. My biggest pet peeve in this area is ISPs who have “documentation” on their website about how to run your hosted website. Granted, *some* of it is worthwhile, and some of it even links back to the relevant parts of the real documentation. But for the most part, ISP Apache documentation is full of inaccuracies, stuff that stopped being true in 1997, confusing phrasing, and misconceptions about best practice.

If we could get all of these documentation writers to participate in some small way in the actual Apache web server documentation project, contributing howtos and documentation patches, as well as correcting their own misconceptions, imagine the wealth of howtos and documentation we would have now.

But, instead, we have 48,000 howtos that tell you that authentication requires .htaccess files and “Limit GET POST” blocks. The sheer enormity of wasted effort staggers the mind.

Hmm. I seem to have gotten slightly off track. I was talking about the future of software.

Anyways, think about this. India is making a name for itself as a place to outsource development and support. So companies in the USA send their work to India, but the vision and plan is still coming out of the USA. Sri Lanka, on the other hand, is making a name for itself in Open Source software. Sri Lanka has a higher per-capita rate of Apache developers than any other nation on earth. And, Sri Lankans are driving the vision and plan for the entire Web Services suite of projects, in addition to participating in other projects.

In an industry where geography is uninportant, we’re going to see more and more powerhouse software companies coming out of developing nations where they grok Open Source as a business model in ways that we in the west don’t yet. I’m obviously not the first person to make this observation, but having see it first hand, it seems much more real to me. Sri Lanka and Brazil are the places to watch.

Geek Out, Saturday

On Saturday, the Geek Out experience continued, with an early breakfast – traditional Sri Lankan, and very good. Shortly after this, Danese showed up, and then a little later Ken arrived, with the T-shirts that had been left in Colombo.

We all piled in the bus, and headed for the raft landing, where helmets, life jackets, and paddles were handed out. Some guys from the hotel carried the rafts down a precariously steep set of stairs, and we trooped after. At the bottom, we piled into the rafts and took a test drive across the river to a beach on the other side.

Some of the crews were better than others. I won’t say which was which. 😉

After a brief instruction on how to row, we started down the river, going through rapids with delightful names like “head chopper” and “killer falls”. I haven’t had that much fun in a VERY long time. There are a variety of different photos floating about, and I’ll upload more once I get home. The bandwidth here is not really condusive to uploading multiple megabytes of photos.

High points include jumping off of a rock directly into the rapids, and then floating downstream from there, and seeing the spot where they blew up the bridge for the movie “Bridge over the river Kwai”. Now I need to see that again, as it has been a long time since I saw it last.

When we returned to Rafter’s Retreat, wet and bedraggled, we walked up the road to the lodge, incurring the wrath of more leeches. I’ve grown to really hate leeches. Lunch was ready soon, and then I was very ready for a nap.

But Danese and Dave wanted to play Werewolf, so we gathered in a circle to play Werewolf. Folks seemed to really enjoy the game, and take a deep pleasure in indulging the mob instinct for a while. I wasn’t a werewolf.

More than half of the folks left on Saturday evening, leaving the rest of us to brave it out for one more evening. Most of us were exhausted and turned in early. We didn’t have any particular plans for the next day other than heading back to Colombo, but we wanted the relaxation of hanving out in the jungle for another night.

Geocaching and Leeches

There’s a couple of small details that I omitted from my description of Friday at Rafter’s Retreat that I should fill you in on, my loyal readers.

Russ brought the makings of a geocache, and hid it near the cottages, and then a bunch of the rest of us went hunting for it. Suchetha was the first person to actually find it.

We had been promised that the place was infested with leeches, and during the geocaching, I had my first experience with them. They weren’t the big fat leeches from “Stand By Me”, but rather were small inch-worm looking things. Which, of course, just makes them harder to get hold of to yank off. They inject an anticoagulant, which then makes you bleed profusely after the sucker comes off.

Truly unpleasant experience, and not one that I would choose to repeat.

But, of course, I did repeate it, getting leeches on my legs and feet each time we went walking out into the jungle, throughout the rest of the time we were in Kitulgala. Nasty things.

Geek Out, Friday

Aug 20, 2006
Kitulgala, Sri Lanka
Friday

The last week has been absolutely amazing, and yesterday ended it with a bang. Following a whole week of FOSS conferences (7 conferences or gatherings of some description) the LSF (Lankan Software Foundation) held the GeekOut as a wrap-up, for the geeks to get together and engage in non-geek activities, as well as a chance for informal discussion of many issues.

30 of us came to Rafters’ Retreat in Kitulgala, about 3 hours east (well, the way our bus driver drove!!) of Colombo.

The drive from Colombo was a bit of a surprise to me. The entire drive, the road was lined on both sides by shops, homes, small businesses, and other buildings. I had figured that once we got outside of the city, there would be stretches of emptiness, or perhaps farmland. But, it turns out, at least in this part of the country, it’s very densely inhabited.

We arrived in Kitulgala just as it started raining. (It has rained much of the time that I’ve been in Sri Lanka.) The bus is too large to actually pull in to the grounds of where we’re staying, so we parked across the street and down a bit, and started piling out into the downpour. We stood for a while up on the porch of a building there, waiting for the rain to slacken, but that didn’t happen.

Eventually we decided to make a run for it. We took off across the street in the rain.

About halfway across the street my backpack decided that it wasn’t zipped up properly, and came all the way open, spilling all of its contents into the street. Including my camera, cables, microphone, mic stand, and lots of papers. Everything except my laptop, in fact.

With the help of a bunch of the guys, we scooped everything back into the backpack, zipped it correctly, and hurried the rest of the way across. It seems that nothing is permanently damaged, except for most of the papers. Fortunately, there was nothing irreplaceable in the papers.

Shortly after arriving, we had some dinner. As with every meal since I’ve set foot on the island, dinner was amazingly good. The food here is sort of like Indian food, only rather different. It is fairly spicy, although at the hotel the tone it down a lot for the benefit of us soft-tongued westerners. At FOSS Enterprise, and here at the Retreat, they have been giving us the genuine article, and it is fantastic, if somewhat painful. 🙂

That evening we stayed up until 1 or so (the younger guys stayed up a lot later than I) talking about Open Source, local politics, the school system, and involvement in Apache.

Folks in “developing nations” (although more and more I wonder about this seemingly arbitrary division of the world up into categories, and the stigmas associated with it, but that’s a post for another day) *GET* Open Source in a way that we don’t in the USA. They understand that one of the core benefits of FOSS is the ability to have a local economy that isn’t beholden to Mr. Gates and Mr. Bush. By having a local software industry, they can make decisions that are in the best interest of their own nation, rather than being forced into particular decisions by multi-national corporations.

Certainly, the same is true of any industry, but software seems to be one area where huge percentages of the world are completely dependent on one company – Microsoft. And it represents a disproportionate percentage of national budgets, which increases as computers become more important in daily life.

To Be Continued … (Saturday’s writeup coming soon)