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Butterflies and Postcards

249951723_f46b6a0bb9_m.jpg.jpeg (Photo is CC by Gareth Courage)

I was wondering if you, my readers, who are spread all across the world, would do me a favor.

My son’s class at school is doing a project with butterflies. They’ve put up a bunch of pictures of butterflies all over the class room, and have been studying them.

Then there’s the secret additional part of the project. Over Spring Break (that’s this week), the butterflies are going to fly away, and this is part of a geography project. We were hoping that you could help us with this part. The kids won’t know where the butterflies have gone. We need you, if you can, to send a postcard saying that you saw one of the butterflies.

The example given was this:

Dear Mrs. McQueary’s Class,

While I was out walking my dog this evening in San Francisco, California, I had an unusual butterfly land on my arm. As I observed its vibrant colors, I remembered hearing that your classroom butterflies had escaped from Picadome. I tried catching it in my hand, but it fluttered away so quickly! Could it have been your butterfly?

As they receive these cards, they are going to put marks on a map of the world to show where the butterflies ended up.

Would you be willing to send a postcard for them?

The address is:

Mrs. McQueary’s Class
1642 Harrodsburg Road
Lexington, KY, 40504

The Prince

I finally read The Prince, by Machiavelli. I have tried a couple times before, and found it somewhat tedious. I suspect that it’s a question of what translation you choose, since this time it was a very easy read, and made a lot of sense, and the last few times it was very very hard going.

I’ve long thought it a great injustice that the important decisions of history have been made by brute force, rather than by negotiation or reasoning. Machiavelli makes this observation early on, but then, in his practical way, dismisses it from consideration, because that’s just the way things are.

I believe I’ll probably have to read it again, at least once, to get the more practical implications of the book to today. I read most of it while I was on airplanes over the past week, and that’s not the time when I think the most clearly. There are those who insist that it’s the best available book on management. I’m pretty much convinced, having read it, that either they are speaking entirely tongue-in-cheek, or are focused on some particular chapter or other. In particular, what get mentioned is the chapter about whether it’s better (more effective in retaining power) to be loved or feared. Interestingly, the answer to this was not what I was told it was. That is, Machiavelli says that it really doesn’t matter, as long as you’re not hated.

Anyways, on the whole, a thoroughly enjoyable read, if only from a historical perspective. The examples that he gives to illustrate his points are simply fascinating.

Cut bus routes

This morning I read about St. Louis cutting bus routes. I feel for these folks. Around here, the situation is similar, with bus routes cut almost every year, with the city council deciding to spend money on more important things, like multi-million dollar hotels for folks who never show up.

But I have to wonder whether this is yet another case of complaining about the wrong problem. Why is it a 45 minute bus ride to the nearest gym? It seems like our addiction to cars has led to a situation where there are no neighborhood businesses, and we have to drive, or ride, miles and miles to get to things that, once, would have been in walking distance. Every time I visit Europe, I’m reminded of how dysfunctional our neighborhoods are in the USA, and how broken our zoning system is.

I hope that out of situations like this, the result is more neighborhood businesses, rather than folks protesting and demanding that they are somehow entitled to be ferried to businesses in other neighborhoods.

Along that same line, last night we ate at 7 Leguas, which, although we didn’t walk to it, we *could* have chosen to walk. It would have taken a while. Perhaps we need to make a more concerted effort to go to businesses that we can walk to, and choose to walk to them. I walked farther than that for dinner in Amsterdam earlier this week.

First Apache email

It seems that first Apache.org email message was a very thorough bug report for a bug that, alas, not only was already well documented, but which had already been fixed. The report was against Apache 1.3b3, which I mistakenly called 3.3b3. I guess, since 1.3 hadn’t released yet, that we must have been running 1.2 at the time at DataBeam.

That was in January of 1998, though, and I am pretty sure that I had already been running Apache for at least 2 years by then, and NCSA before that. It seems strange that I never sent a message to a mailing list before then.

mod_rewrite

I don’t remember exactly when I started doing mod_rewrite stuff. I remember why. I noticed that more than half of the questions on #apache were about mod_rewrite, and I made a decision to become the expert on it. I was already very familiar with regular expressions, since I was a Perl programmer at the time, so I figured it couldn’t be very difficult.

I determined pretty early on that the biggest difficulty with mod_rewrite was that people were afraid of it. In particular, they were afraid of regular expressions. And there’s plenty of things floating about reinforcing this fear, not least of which is the mod_rewrite documentation itself.

So, now, several years on, I have a book about mod_rewrite, and in about 10 minutes I’ll be giving Yet Another conference presentation about mod_rewrite, which is nothing more than an affirmation that this isn’t hard (after all, I mastered it) but that there’s still a lot of people who need help with it.

ApacheCon day … something

Yesterday, I felt absolutely wretched. This used to happen to me a lot at conferences. I’d get sick the first day or two, and miss a lot of stuff. I spent most of yesterday napping.

I feel a lot better today, but am still very tired.

This afternoon – in about 2 hours – I’ve got my mod_rewrite presentation, and then tonight I’m MCing the Lightning Talks, since Fred and Fitz aren’t here this year. Could be fun. You should come.

DNS idiocy

For reasons largely historical, and perpetuated by laziness, I host a DNS server in my living room. I keep meaning to migrate everything off of there onto something more reliable like SliceHost.

A week ago, or thereabouts, I changed my LAN IP range at home to match the range at work, simply because it makes it a little faster to get a DHCP lease when I switch between the two places.

Now, had I thought it through, I’d have realized that this took my server offline. But I didn’t. So the zones I host have been gradually expiring over the last several days. As usual, this happened while I’m out of the country.

So … if I host DNS zones for you, continue to bug me to move them to SliceHost. But they’re back online now.

ApacheCon Day Two

The first night in Amsterdam, I went straight to sleep, so yesterday was pretty good. Last night, I was up almost all night, or so it seemed, and today I am exhausted. Which is bad, because I have to talk all day long. I’m going the second day of the “Apache Nuts To Bolts” training class. JimJag did day one.

The presentation bit is here. Yeah. I know. Comic Sans. Get over it.

Lunch was great, but now I’m tired *and* full, so the afternoon is going to be a little long. Just 3 hours to go.