Tag Archives: apache

mod_rewrite Cookbook

Due in part to my frustration with the format of the Rewrite Guide, and in part to my desire to be writing, with, just maybe the hopes of someone publishing it some day, I’ve started working on the mod_rewrite Cookbook. Of course, there’s also a great deal of learning for me to do, and I tend to learn the most about stuff when I’m writing about it. I know, that may seem a little odd, but it’s true.

The Rewrite Guide was a great document, but over time, it has aged, grown to unmanageable size, and not kept up with the stylistic changes of the documentation or the particular rewrite questions that people are asking. So what we’re left with is a monolithic doc that’s hard to use, and lacks the most commonly-asked questions.

Maybe this is just an exercise for my own amusement, but I expect that at least someone will benefit from it, and I *know* that I will. I’ve already learned a number of things. And, of course, the real docs will benefit in some way out of this, even if not directly.

Imagemaps and 1993

The year was 1993. I was a grad student at UK, and I was putting up my first web site. I had seen image maps on other web sites, but I didn’t really know how to make them work on my own site. So, I poked around Usenet looking for useful information, and I used the rudimentary web search tools that were available at the time. Webcrawler, if I recall correctly. I found Vivek Khera, who had written something called imagemap.cgi, which was a server-side imagemap handler.

Of course, being a clueless newbie, I could not get it working, and had do bother Dr. Khera to help me get it working. I don’t expect that he remembers this – I’m sure I was one of a horde of clueless newbies that took up his time. But he helped me get the darned thing working, and was one of the many important forces that moved me on a path to webby stuff.

So, yesterday, I received notification that he had signed my GPG key, and I suddenly made the connection. We had met at OSCon, and I didn’t make the connection there.

So, a public Thank You to Vivek, and to all of the other folks that helped a clueless newbie 10 years ago. I would not be where I am right now (in a very cold conference room for an ApacheCon planners meeting) without your help.

On the way to San Francisco

I’m supposed to be arriving in San Franciscon in about 10 minutes, but I suspect that it will be a little more like an hour.

In Lexington, I thought I had lucked out. At the terminal, they said that I could get an earlier flight to Atlanta, and possibly an earlier flight to San Francisco. However, after sitting on the runway for a little while, we returned to the gate and ended up leaving somewhat later than the later flight was supposed to leave. Something about “a lot of weather in Atlanta.”

Upon arriving in Atlanta, I had to board my second flight almost right away, but then we ended up sitting out on the runway for more than an hour waiting for the weather to go away, then, moving at a slow walk down the runway behind the other 48 flights that were waiting for the weather to go away.

So, now I’m most of the way to San Francisco. I left my little neck pillow at home, so now I have a very sore neck after dosing off for a while. Bah.

Also, I thought there would be an opportunity to buy some dinner on the flight, but apparently I was mistaken.

Remember when they used to serve dinner on these flights, with silverware? And it was included in the price of the ticket? Remember when they stopped charging for the headphones for watching the movies? Remember when flying was fun? Yeah, I do too.

Packing again

I haven’t even completely unpacked from OSCon, and I’m already packed for my next trip. I generally don’t much care for these back-to-back trips, but I’m kinda looking forward to this one. Going to catch the tail-end of Linux World. Should be interesting, anyways.

Attempting to catch up

Here’s a bit of an attempt to catch up. Having been offline since Friday, there’s plenty to catch up on, and I’m afraid I’ll miss something. Oh well.

Friday, after the conference was officially over, I had a liesurely lunch with Ken, after which I took a long nap. Wow was I tired. I tried to go out and read by the pool for a while, but there was a young’un out there who screamed without taking a breath for about an hour, before he was finally carted off to somewhere else.

I inquired about an Indian restaurant at the front desk, and walked down a few blocks to The India House for some very good chicken tikka and paratha. Mmmmm.

On Saturday morning, after a liesurely breakfast, I went off on my geocaching hike. I think that Saturday was about as close to a real vacation as I’m going to get any time this year. I walked about 1.25 miles to Washington Park, where I took some pictures. Also while there I visited the rose garden.

And I found 5 geocaches, most of which were actually very challenging.

I also found a wallet. I pulled a business card out of it, and attempted to return it to the address thereon, but he didn’t live there, so I took it to the police station. I think by that time I had probably walked 4 miles, but perhaps a little further.

While I was in the rose garden, my brother had called with the names and addresses of the various ethiopian restaurants in town, so after stopping by my hotel, I headed out for Mudai (45d32.0964,-122d39.44436). That was another 1.5 mile walk. Very enjoyable little hike.

On the way there I observed Flugtag, which was very odd. Strange people built flying machines (for a rather casual usage of the word flying) and drove them off of a 30-foot pier into the river. Very amusing. You should read about it on their website. I saw the Santa’s Sleigh team, among others. I even got a few pictures, although it’s a little hard to make out what’s going on.

Dinner at Mudai was fantastic. Just amazing. And well worth the hike. I was planning to get a taxi back, but the day was still so beautiful that I just walked back. Along they way I saw this Amazon.com advertisement on the side of a HUGE warehouse. Kinda funny. And that’s about it for Saturday. I have a remark to make about Sunday, but I’ll probably make that as another post.

At OSCon

I’m at OSCon, waiting for my tutorial to begin. I spilled $beverage on my keyboard a week or so ago, and it’s starting to seriously gum up. I’m very not happy about this. And, to make it worse, there’s a very shiny 17″ powerbook sitting here on the speakers’ table, and it’s looking very attractive.

I’m still not sure I could get used to that one mouse button thing. And it has a trackpad the size of Detroit.

I wrote some stuff on the plane, but it was on my Palm, and I have not had a chance to sync yet. I’ll probably post it out of chron order.

Every hotel in the downtown area is full. Between the conference and BrewFest, you pretty much have to go outside the city to get a room. My hotel was full, and I had to move to a different room this morning. Why is it that the worse one has to pee, the slower the check-in person is? I suppose this is a special application of relativity.

Oh, yeah, and I also wrote some other stuff this morning at breakfast. I need to sync pretty soon.

The conference is very full. I think it’s going to be a good one.

Getting ready for OSCon

Apparently OSCon is just a few days away. Sheesh. This year is going by mighty fast. And I *still* don’t have confirmation on my travel plans, although I’ve sent a number of irate email messages to the purported travel agent. I’ll be even more irate if I show up to the airport and don’t actually have a reservation to fly.

I don’t really have the building enthusiasm for OSCon as I have in years past. I’m not entirely sure why this is. I suppose it’s somehow related to my disconnection from the community for the last year, with work conditions and general busier-than-heck-ness conspiring to make me less involved. It seems that by this time last year I was all but packed and ready to go.

Perhaps I’ll meet interesting people and get fired up about some project or other while I’m out there. And, due to the savings that one gets from staying over the weekend, I’m actually not leaving until Sunday morning. Perhaps that could translate into more fun. Dunno. I just know that I’m greatly unenthused about the whole thing.