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Passion

Perhaps the best talk of the entire conference was Kathy Sierra giving her talk about passion. It was about marketing. It was about documentation. It was about getting people interested in our open source work, not for the sake of the project itself, but for the sake of what they can do with it.

She talked about the Nikon website, which shows you the amazingly cool pictures you can take with their camera, and how you can do that. Then she contrasted this with the documentation that comes with the camera which is all about the camera itself, and doesn’t at all speak to the passion of the person.

Passion is something that you spend your time, money, emotions and energy on. And it’s something that frequently looks completely irrational to anyone that doesn’t share your passion.

She asked us each to turn to our neighbor and tell that person what we are passionate about, but we weren’t allowed to mention anything to do with programming, computers, or Open Source development. Unsurprisingly, a number of people had a really hard time coming up with anything at first, given these restrictions. But after a moment, most people (it seemed) thought of something that they indeed spend a lot of time and energy on, that might not be considered rational by the rest of us.

It’s important to step back and consider why we do the things we do. Why they’re important to us. Whether they really matter in the grand scheme of things.

I find that an enormous amount of my identity is tied up in Apache-related things, and I sometimes wonder if what I do with Apache really makes any difference in the world, or if it’s just something that I do in order that people will know who I am. While Hubris is one of the Three Virtues, it’s not particularly sustainable in the long haul. But passion, on the other hand, is sustainable, even if it’s not particularly rational, at least from the external view.

I have a passion for teaching beginners how to use stuff. I’m not entirely sure why, since they are only infrequently grateful. But the few folks that seem genuinely grateful make it all worth it. I think it also has a lot to do with how folks helped me when I was beginning, and the time that they invested in me.

So, once again, a big thank you to the folks who helped me figure stuff out when this was all so new to me. I imagine that most of you don’t even remember helping me. But you never know what impact your actions are going to have.

The OSCon T-Shirt/Hat Economic Indicator

Someone was saying, the first day of the conference (I forget who, now) that over the years, the number of T-Shirts that one received at OSCon served as a fairly accurate indicator of the state of the economy, and in particular, the state of the tech world.

Last year I think I got about 3 or 4 t-shirts.

This year, I brought home 9 t-shirts, and declined several others that were offered to me. I also brought home 3 very nice hats, and there were 3 others available at the conference that I didn’t get.

All of this makes me very optimistic that I’ll be a millionaire by May. If only I hadn’t overdrawn my account while I was at OSCon …

Google project hosting

I attended the Google announcement of their new open source project hosting service. I’ve been trying to log in and create a project, and I’m getting rather frustrated. Apparently my google account isn’t the same as a gmail account, and one has to have a gmail account. Apparently I never did get around to signing up for a gmail account, and one can’t sign up without an invitation. I thought they were past the invitation stage. Obviously not. So, one of you folks needs to send me a gmail invitation so that I can put a couple of my projects into this new hosting, and see how wonderful it is.

The demo of the service was very impressive. In particular, the bug tracking system was very impressive. Simple, yet flexible. It’s a shame that the bug tracker itself isn’t open source.

Hiveminder

Jesse announced Hiveminder at OSCon. Stated simply, it’s a ticket tracking system for your life. A web-based ToDo list. Based on RT, but much simplified, it lets you put your todo lists here, export them to ical, and do the notification kind of stuff you’re used to with your favorote bug tracking system.

I somehow doubt that I’ll actually end up using it long term. I’ve tried web-based todo thingies in the past, and none of them had as much staying power as just putting things in my PalmOS device. But it’s better than most. We’ll see.

And … it’s over

Another OSCon, and all my plans of what I wanted to get done during the conference thwarted by those accursed OSCon planners, who scheduled great talks nearly every moment of the day when I wanted to get stuff done. Sheesh. So inconsiderate.

Ken and I worked on book stuff briefly, and Skippy and I recorded some CookieCasts, but apart from that, I was in sessions, most of which were very good and very relevant.

Once I get home, I’ll go through the conference schedule and figure out what I attended, and mention some of the highlights.

Intro to Apache

Gnat told me this morning that I’ve been doing this talk at OSCon for 8 years. I think it’s actually 7, but, still, wow.

Somehow, today’s “performance” was actually kind of fun. It felt *very* tired the last time I did it. But I’ve rewritten a lot of the stuff, and it’s less tedious and more interesting. It’s also a lot more up-to-date than it was last time.

And it continues to have a non-zero number of interested people, so I expect I’ll keep doing it for at least a little while longer.

Apache httpd is definitely becoming “plumbing”, and as such, there’s not much “new and shiny” that I can put in these talks. But there’s still a little bit.

Feathercast #6

There’s a new FeatherCast this morning. It came out of an attempt to interview Sally, who refused to be interviewed, and turned it into interviewing me. So I rambled on for quite a bit, although it’s not particularly clear to me that anyone would have much interest in what I had to say. But David said it was worth putting up, and there it is. Hope you enjoy it.

Keynote and Subversion

As a number of other people have pointed out, the latest version of Keynote (3.0.1 for those keeping score) blows away .svn directories when you save a file. And, for the record, it also blows away CVS directories.

It used to preserve them on save. No longer.

This means, in short, that I can’t store my conference presentations in revision control.

Given that most of my conference presentations get updated and recycled and rewritten and reused several times a year, this makes me very very nervous. Any document that’s important to me, and not in revision control, makes me very nervous. After all, laptops get dropped. Files get deleted by mistake. Changes get made unintentionally and need to be reverted. And I really need to retrieve that example that I used to have in here on slide #26, but which is gone now.

I’m really not sure what to do. I could go back to using PerlPoint (writing in POD, generating HTML – several generations removed from something TomC wrote many moons ago), but I have grown quite attached to the things that Keynote lets me do.

Oh, and when I went to the Apple bug reporting website, I got “An Exception has Occurred (click triangle to view)”.

Charming.

I guess I’m just out of luck for now.

OSCon

Tomorrow I leave for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention.

This year, for the first time, there isn’t an Apache track, and my tutorial is in the Javascript/AJAX track. Ok, a little weird, but I guess I can live with that. There’s also a Web Apps track, where some of the other stuff traditionally categorized as “Apache” has been placed.

I wonder if Apache, or web infrastructure stuff in general, is just not selling seats anymore. Or perhaps we (the ASF) confused things by insisting that “Apache != httpd”. Which, while true, also encourages people to come up with alternate naming for stuff, and thus make Apache (the web server) less visible.