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Feathercasts

As usual, the week was suddenly over almost before I had a chance to catch my breath. It was quite the whirlwind, and I didn’t really get out of the hotel much, except for a few times to grab something to eat.

I got interviews with several interesting people, for FeatherCast, but so far have only had a chance to edit and post one of them. Ok, really, David did most of the work. I still have the raw audio for several of the others.

I talked with Sanjiva about ApacheCon Asia. I talked with Bill Rowe about Apache on Windows. Justin about being treasurer. Ken about ApacheCon in general. Greg about being chairman, and what this whole ASF thing is about.

And I got to talk at great length with Brian, which I’m writing another post about. So be patient.

All these, and more, will appear on FeatherCast over the next few months, as I have time to edit.

Meanwhile, I’ve spent entirely too much time trying to get my mail client working. Apparently there’s just something in 10.4.7 that breaks Thunderbird, and I’ll have to use something else while I wait for somebody to fix that.

Or maybe it’s just me.

10.4.7 and Thunderbird

Some time during the conference, the 10.4.7 update got installed on my Powerbook, and Thunderbird hasn’t worked correctly since then. It’s a little hard to describe what happens. Some menus render as plain text instead of formatted menus. Some things don’t highlight when selected. But, most importantly, it refuses to make a connection to my mail server to retrieve my mail, which is the bit I actually care most about.

So, if you’ve emailed me in the last few days, and I haven’t responded, well, it’s because my mail client isn’t really working, and I’ve been trying to make do with elm and pine.

mod_rewrite

I just got done with my mod_rewrite talk. I recorded it, and am going to try to podcast it, including the slides. I have no idea how well this is going to work or how much work it’s going to take. I assume I’ll listen to it in Garage Band and drop in the next slide at the appropriate times. We’ll see. Should have that up early next week.

This is in preparation for my plan of world domination – um, I mean, my plan to take my training classes and turn them into online training. If this goes well, I’ll continue to do this for all my class segments until I have the whole course as m4a files.

ApacheCon Musicians

Last night was one of those great ApacheCon moments that I imagine will stay with me for a long time. Several people with a lot of talent – and me – were up until about 1:30 this morning, playing music on a variety of stringed instruments and pipes, and singing. Here’s one example of the music, and hopefully I’ll be able to extract more of them from the hour and a half of recording I have.

ApacheCon, Wednesday evening

As usual, the week is half over before I have a chance to catch my breath. I’m in an HTTP auth BOF, which is very interesting. There are things that must be done to HTTP auth if people are going to be able to continue to be able to use the interweb for secure transactions, and somehow have a digital identity that is anything like as universal as one’s Passport or photo ID.

Today I got FeatherCast interviews with Sanjiva and Justin. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll get them with Bill Rowe, Ken, Sander, and Noel. We’ll see. It’s been somewhat hard to pin people down.

Also, tomorrow, I give my mod_rewrite talk, which is always quite a lot of fun.

This evening was the welcome reception, sponsored by Covalent. Yay Covalent. We like them. And lots of interesting conversations. Which is mostly what ApacheCon is about to me, these days.

Let’s go Pembroke!

When I was going to St. Andrews School, in Kenya, 20 years ago or so, one of our arch-rivals was Pembroke House, another boarding school.

Here at the conference, one of the meeting rooms is named Pembroke, and every time I see the sign, I can hear their Rugby coach yelling “Let’s go Pembroke!”

ApacheCon EU 2006, Mark Shuttleworth

I’m in Mark Shuttleworth‘s session at ApacheCon. He also gave the opening keynote, which was very interesting and insightful. He spoke about the challenges faching free software before we achieve world domination – all the way from “Pretty is a feature” to “Grandma’s new camera”. Good stuff.

This talk is about the world view and culture of free software, and of Ubuntu specifically. The Ubuntu community looks quite a lot like Apache, but is different in important ways, among the most notable of which is the powerful place of Canonical in the project.

Mark’s a very interesting guy, to say the least. And he’s a great speaker. I’m really glad that he was willing to come to our conference.

ApacheCon EU 2006, day 0

I’m in Dublin, at the end of a very full day. Actually, this particular day was 2 days long.

I left Lexington around 2:30 pm, and went to Charlotte, where I met Joey – Danese Cooper’s husband – and also Lisa Dessault was there. We were somewhat delayed, due to storms in Philadelphia, so we were able to have dinner together, which was very nice.

In Philadelphia, we also ran into John Coggeshall, Bill Rowe and Matthias Wessendorf, all on their respective ways to Dublin. After a brief delay (about 2 hours), we left for Dublin.

I think I fell asleep immediately after sitting down on the plane. I remember waking up briefly when the captain said “prepare for takeoff”. Then I woke up again when he said something about 20 minutes until we get to Dublin. I *never* sleep that well on a plane, so I arrived much fresher than I had any reason to expect.

Danese picked us up at the airport and gave us a ride back to the Burlington. Somehow in this process we lost John, who we then found back at the hotel. Lars, John, Justin Erencrantz and I went down to the Canal Bank Cafe for some lunch, then we came back and I was able to get online and Skype call Sarah, which was very nice.

This evening, the ApacheCon planners went to Noirin’s home for a cookout and some planning discussions. Dinner was *great*. I love walled gardens. They give the impression that the rest of the city isn’t really there. I would love to have that kind of separation from my neighbors. My own little kingdom. I wonder what would be involved in doing that, and if the city zoning laws would actually let me get away with it. I forgot my camera. Perhaps you can track down Noel’s pictures at some point. Present were Noirin, Colm, Ken, Lars, Noel, Danese, Joey, and Justin.

Later this evenig (it’s perhaps 1:30am now) we went down to the rooms where the tutorials will be in the morning, and monkeyed with the wireless networking for a while.

Tomorrow I hope to do a few interviews for FeatherCast, and maybe try to even get one of them edited to a usable state. I’d like to do one with Ken about the history of ApacheCon, since he’s the chair of the ApacheCon Committee.

I should probably go to bed now.

Where everybody knows my name

For the last 4 or 5 months, every Tuesday night I go to a locally owned restaurant/pub/grill, within walking distance of home. They know what I want, and bring it to me without my having to order. They know I need a table near a power outlet, so that I can plug in my laptop, and keep one open for me. They know I like to work undisturbed, and they leave me to work, come over to chat for a few minutes while I’m eating, and bring me the bill when I’m ready to go. They don’t try to upsell, supersize, or tell me about the special of the day. They remember that I like cheese fries, and that I like a lemon in my coke.

So what’s the point of all of this? Well, it’s just this. Find your local establishment, where people actually care about good service, and about their customers, and go there regularly. Support locally-owned, locally-operated stores, restaurants, and service businesses. They are a dying breed, and they are the only thing that makes your local neighborhood any different from a million other neighborhoods in the country. Sure, it might cost a little bit more, but you’re supporting your neighbor, rather than someone that lives in Washington or New York.

And, of course, the food is better, the atmosphere is better, and folks remember that you like the garden salad rather than the greek salad. And they say “How was your camping trip? We missed you last week.” when you arrive and “See you next Tuesday!” when you leave.