Category Archives: Uncategorized

Facebook Friends

I have 246 Facebook “Friends”. At least half of them are folks that I really have to stop and think before I can figure out who they are. Some of them are a friend of a friend, and others are folk who I vaguely knew in college, or who snubbed me in high school. My main activity on Facebook is rejecting invitations to a cause, or ignoring a poke or a water balloon. And it’s simply impossible to keep up with the various updates, notes, statuses, and so on.

A few days ago, I thought it might be a good idea to prune my list of so-called “friends”. I posted to my Facebook status:

Rich is considering trimming his Facebook Friends list. Nothing personal, but it’s just impossible to keep up

I immediately got several responses, with people saying that they hoped they make the cut, or giving suggestions of how to manage the firehose of data.

And as I looked at the list, I discovered that it was indeed hard to decide who to drop from the list. They’re all there because they contacted me and asked to be reconnected with me. With only a tiny handful of exceptions, they all invited me. I’ve only invited perhaps a dozen of the folks on my list. So presumably these folks had enough esteem for me that they thought me worth reconnecting with.

And, each person that I considered removing, I realized that it was, indeed, pretty neat to be back in touch with this person, some of them after more than 20 years. So … I guess I’ll just try to figure out some way to manage the data. Apparently there’s Yet Another Facebook App for doing just that.

But … I still can’t keep up with the endless stream of messages of one kind or another.

Eleven

Eleven years ago this morning, I held my daughter for the first time. It was about 4 in the morning, and I hadn’t slept in 22 hours or so, so the scene has a hint of surreality about it. They handed me my daughter, and I carried her to the little glass room where they put her for observation. She was slightly premature, so there was a little concern, but I greatly resented them taking her from me, when I had only just met her. There was so much I wanted to say to her. She was tiny, and strangely colored, and absolutely perfect, and I was immediately in love. I knew I was in way over my head, but I determined to be the best father I could possibly be, whatever that took.

Eleven years doesn’t seem like very long. A lot of joy, and a lot of sorrow, in that short time. There are still times when I feel I’m in over my head, but I’m still very much in love with my little girl. She holds my heart quite firmly, and what’s more, she knows it.

I am always so very proud of her, and I am looking forward to continuing to watch her become a beautiful and talented woman, with interests and opinions entirely of her own, and her own idea of what she wants to do with her life.

Apache HTTP Server Training in Amsterdam

Shameless Plug:

ApacheCon EU is just a few weeks away. I’ll be doing a two day training on the Apache HTTP Server, along with Jim Jagielski. He’s listed as the instructor, but we’ll both be tag-teaming on this.

Day one will be an overview of the entire server product, and day two will be hands-on, recipe-based examples, showing you how to do specific tasks that come up every day as a web server admin.

Here’s the training description.

Here’s the conference website.

Here’s where you sign up.

Come see me in Amsterdam. It’ll be lots of fun. And I’ll be going down to the Van Gogh museum on Wednesday afternoon. You should come with me.

MacBook Pro – Initial Impressions

I got a new MacBook Pro today. (Long story. I wasn’t supposed to get one for another year. Lucky me.)

The screen is, at least initially, the biggest disappointment. It’s very glossy, and at the office, under fluorescent light is extremely reflective. On the other hand, here at home, it’s not reflective at all, so I guess it has a lot to do with the light. From what I’ve read, it’s pretty good in outdoor sunlight, too, but today hasn’t been an outdoor kind of day.

The transition from my old laptop was, as always, painless. This time, I did the transfer from a Time Machine backup, which was even less painful than the FireWire cable transfer last time.

The click-anywhere trackpad took almost no time to get used to. I had heard and expected bad things about it, but it’s very nice, and matches the way that I think about a track pad anyways – click where your finger happens to be at that moment. The multi-finger shortcuts are also very cool. I think I’ll get used to that pretty quick.

The speakers are considerably louder than the ones on the previous generation. That’s nice for us, since our DVD player broke several months ago, and we watch all our movies on the laptop.

Unfortunately, the DVI connector is now a mini-DVI connector, so I need to go buy new widgets to connect to my other widgets. Fortunately, these widgets are all pretty cheap, but it’s still annoying. On the plus side, it means that all of the ports are on one side of the laptop, so I will no longer have cables sticking out of both sides when I’m docked at work.

On the whole, very pleased, and I think I’m going to enjoy it.

Apache OFBiz Development

Apache OFBiz Development
The Beginner’s Tutorial

by Jonathon Wong and Rupert Howell

Packt Publishing (Official book website)

About 2 months ago, I was sent a review copy of “Apache OFBiz Development“, and have been trying to find time since then to do a review of it. I was also sent a PDF of Chapter 10, which you can read here.

For those of you who listen to FeatherCast, you may remember hearing an episode on OFBiz that we did back in December 2006. A lot has changed since then, including OFBiz becoming a TLP within the Apache Software Foundation. TLP stands for Top Level Project, and refers to the status that a project obtains when it is no longer under the supervision of the Incubator.

OFBiz is an Open Source framework for developing ERP and CRM systems. If you don’t know what ERP and CRM are, or if you don’t have at least a decent knowledge of Java programming, OFBiz probably isn’t for you. And, for that matter, this book probably isn’t. Although titled “The Beginner’s Tutorial”, keep in mind as you read that it’s referring to being a beginner at OFBiz, not a beginner to these other concepts.

The book dives right in to installing OFBiz from SVN. It’s pretty clear from this chapter that installing and configuring OFBiz is not for the faint of heart. As soon as Chapter 3, we’re being shown how to make modifications to the core OFBiz source code, and given recommendations about keeping track of these for future upgrades.

Although a certain familiarity with the MVC development methodology is useful, chapter 2 covers the rudiments, and discusses OFBiz’s take on it.

After a couple chapters of nitty gritty stuff, the book settles into an example/solution tutorial, and is very effective in presenting practical, hands-on scenarios that demonstrate how the system woks, and how to get real results from it. As a side-note, every time I see OFBiz in action, I’m enormously surprised at how sophisticated it is, and how much work has obviously gone into it.

Through the course of the rest of the book, example applications are built, and you can immediately begin to see the fruit of your knowledge. The prose is conversational, but direct and to the point, getting straight to the implementation details.

Chapter 14 covers a variety of useful debugging techniques, from the log files to using a full debugger – very valuable content for someone new to this stuff.

On the whole, I found this book to be an enormously helpful introduction to OFBiz development. While I admit that I’m probably not the target audience for the book, since my development is somewhat outside of the scope of this project, I was able to quickly understand the purpose of OFBiz, and see how it can be made useful.

Sleepless

This week’s Weekend Wordsmith prompt is “Sleepless“. I knew that before anybody else, of course, since it’s my website, and I post the words ahead of time. What I didn’t know was that I’d be up half the night, each tick of the clock taking a couple hours.

Then, it happened – that indefinable moment when late night turned into early morning, like pushing through a bead curtain and feeling the different quality of air on the other side. Subtle, but definitely there. And still several hours to go before it was decent to get up and make the coffee.

Sleepless
January 30, 2009, 4:42 AM

There’s an almost indiscernible moment
when late night
becomes early morning.

Some nights, it’s not there at all.
Night ripples gently into day
with not a seam or dropped stitch.

Others – like this one – deliver you
through a foaming, pounding surf,
over nameless hidden foot-cutting horrors,
to dump you, half dead and gasping
on the rocky and barren beach of the next day
with still miles to limp to the treeline
and shelter.

Trees Down

Ice

Over the last two days, we’ve had some nasty weather, primarily consisting of freezing rain that collected on everything as a thickening layer of ice. We’ve fared better that a lot of people, mostly because we don’t have any old trees. We’ve lost two branches on the large pine tree out front, and it looks like we’ve lost two trees back behind the fence, but it’s pretty hard to get back there and move around right now, so I’m not sure. The trees are beautiful, in a life-threatening kind of way, and are all bowed over in unnatural poses.

I’ve got some pictures on Flickr, and will probably have some more up later today.

After icing over, we got a heavy snowfall – by Kentucky standards – and I’ve been working from home all afternoon. I discovered that I can actually get quite a lot of work done at home. Fewer distractions, I guess. Which is odd, since The Boy was home most of the afternoon. I guess it depends more on the quality of the distractions. 🙂

ApacheCon EU 2009 registration is now open!

ApacheCon EU 2009 registration is now open!
23-27 March — Mövenpick Hotel, Amsterdam, Netherlands
http://www.eu.apachecon.com/
================================

Registration for ApacheCon Europe 2009 is now open – act before early bird prices expire 6 February. Remember to book a room at the Mövenpick and use the Registration Code: Special package attendees for the conference registration, and get 150 Euros off your full conference registration.

Lower Costs – Thanks to new VAT tax laws, our prices this year are 19% lower than last year in Europe! We’ve also negotiated a Mövenpick rate of a maximum of 155 Euros per night for attendees in our room block.

Quick Links:

http://xrl.us/aceu09sc See the schedule
http://xrl.us/aceu09hc Get your hotel room
http://xrl.us/aceu09rc Register for the conference

Other important notes:

– Geeks for Geeks is a new mini-track where we can feature advanced technical content from project committers. And our Hackathon on Monday and Tuesday is open to all attendees – be sure to check it off in your registration.

– The Call for Papers for ApacheCon US 2009, held 2-6 November
2009 in Oakland, CA, is open through 28 February, so get your submissions in now. This ApacheCon will feature special events with
some of the ASF’s original founders in celebration of the 10th anniversary of The Apache Software Foundation.

http://www.us.apachecon.com/c/acus2009/

– Interested in sponsoring the ApacheCon conferences? There are plenty
of sponsor packages available – please contact Delia Frees at
delia@apachecon.com for further information.

======================================================
ApacheCon EU 2008: A week of Open Source at it’s best!

Hackathon – open to all! | Geeks for Geeks | Lunchtime Sessions
In-Depth Trainings | Multi-Track Sessions | BOFs | Business Panel
Lightning Talks | Receptions | Fast Feather Track | Expo… and more!