Tag Archives: apache

Garage Band, mod_rewrite, and podcasts

I’ve been trying to convert my mod_rewrite presentation from Dublin to a podcast, complete with the slides from my presentation. I got about halfway through, and decided to do a test export so that I can see what it looks like.

Apparently I have some settings wrong somewhere. The images are getting squished into a frame that is the wrong aspect ratio, and so a lot of the content on the sides of the screen is getting chopped off. I tweaked settings and re-exported, at least getting the slide at full-size, so that it’s not terribly pixelated, but still am losing content from the sides. Not sure I’m going to finish doing it, if I can’t get it to render at full-size, since there’s not much point. So I might end up just posting up the audio without the slides. Unless someone has a suggestion of how to do this.

It’s not much fun testing setting changes, since the export takes about 20 minutes. So I’ll probably do some briefer recordings and see what I can come up with. Meanwhile, I have about half of the talk, with truncated slides, if anyone wants to see it. It’s 73M, so I won’t be putting it up for general distribution until I’ve decided what to do with it.

Chatting with Brian

After my attempt to interview Sally turned into her interviewing me (more on this later) she suggested that we go chat with Brian Behlendorf. I had all my gear hooked up, and Sally got Brian to come over, and we chatted for more than an hour, on various topics ranging from interesting stories about the old days, to what he’s up to now, to whether meeting face-to-face made any changes in the interpersonal dynamics of the Apache Group.

I captured an enormous amount of audio, and it will probably take me several more days to go through that, as well as the other stuff that I recorded at ApacheCon. I keep meaning to do it in the evenings, and then going to bed.

I’ll get to it … soon. And put some of it up on FeatherCast soon.

I remember the first time I met Brian. It was at OSCon, I think in Monterrey. I was still very much in awe of him (“And now,” said Brian when I told him this, “the stars have faded, hmm?”). I worked up the nerve to go talk to him, and shake his hand, and tell him what an honor it was, and so on. I remember him saying that he really hadn’t done anything marvelous, other than being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, but that he had done what anyone else would have done given that opportunity.

Anyways, now that I’ve told you about it, I suppose I have to go edit audio.

Another person that I recorded an interview with (I’ll refrain from saying who) had their time cut by almost a third when I edited out all the “uhhh”s from the recording. But I’ll spare him/her the embarassment of telling you. 🙂

Camping trip foreshortened

By the way, the main reason that I cut my camping trip short was that, on Thursday, the 4-wheelers showed up in their hundreds, and transformed my haven of silence into unending din, and it wasn’t pleasant anymore. So I came home.

And while home, I’ve been spending a lot of time reading Apache web server documentation, and tweaking it. I’ve found that in the busyness of the last year, I’ve fallen way behind on improvements/changes to the server, and there’s a lot of cool stuff in there that I simply don’t know about. So if I want anybody to think that I’m something of an expert on the topic, I really better read the documentation.

Call for papers, ApacheCon 2006 US

Today we announced the ApacheCon US 2006 Call For Papers (CFP). This is the earliest we’ve ever gotten a CFP out – a fact that we’re *very* pleased about, as it means we have more time to plan. The CFP closes as ApacheCon EU opens, meaning that we can review the submissions at AC EU, and possibly announce the schedule for AC US immediately after AC EU. This would please me enormously. Leaving stuff to the last minute bugs me a lot, and the last several conferences have been characterized by lots of last-minute-ness. Hopefully, this signals a new era.

Ireland, day zero

In about 10 minutes, I’ll leave for the airport to go to Ireland. There I’ll be meeting with Lars, Ken, Noel, and Frank, to choose the talks for the upcoming ApacheCon Europe. We’ll be setting the schedule, and checking out the conference facility. We’ll also be hanging out with the Ireland branch of the Apache community, including Colm, Noirin, and Justin. Colm is the only one of these that I’ve met, so I’m looking forward to meeting them and seeing some of Dublin.

So, I guess it’s about time to go pack …

projects.apache.org

David Reid et al have done a great job getting projects.apache.org up. A long-standing complaint of mine has been that there are dozens of Apache projects that I really don’t know what they are. Granted, I still don’t have any real clear idea what some of these descriptions mean, and we do seem to have an awful lot of projects that describe themselves as a “framework”, but it’s a great start. Thanks, David!

Podcasting, Garage Band, Audacity, WordPress, and my patience

Things I’ve learned so far this weekend.

1) It is a much better use of my time to record stuff in Audacity, export it as a raw WAV file, and then drag that into Garage Band. It gives me *far* better audio quality, and tries my patience far less.

2) Although the WordPress documentation states authoritatively that WordPress doesn’t, and can’t, automatically recognize .m4a files as podcasts, this is untrue. It will recognize anything with an audio/* mime-type. The thing is, Apache doesn’t come default with the .m4a file type mapped to an audio mime type.

a) I’ve fixed the doc, so that it now tells the truth

b) You have to add the following to your configuration file, or .htaccess file:

AddType audio/x-m4a m4a
AddType audio/x-m4b m4b

c) I committed a patch to Apache that adds these mime types, so the next time you upgrade Apache, you’ll have these audio types by default.

Note: This patch has been reverted, due to the policy that x- mimetypes can’t be in the default config. While I find this policy to be somewhat silly, I don’t have the energy to debate it right now. So, for now, pretend that item (c) isn’t really there.

3) Running iPhoto, GarageBand, Audacity and iTunes all at the same time appears to be too much for my laptop to handle. But perhaps that goes back to my patience.