Tag Archives: apachecon

The saga begins

Since tomorrow I am starting on a journey of epic proportions, it’s only appropriate that it start with a bang.

When I got home, I emailed my travel agent to ask about the leg of my trip that was marked as “waitlisted” to see how big a deal it was, and if I should worry. 10 minutes later, he called me in, it seemed, a bit of a panic. I had assumed that I was travelling on e-tickets. He, on the other hand, assumed that I had received the tickets he had FedEx’ed to me.

Of course, those of you who know where this is going have immediately realized that I hadn’t recieved them. You’re pretty sharp, you know. Maybe you should just write this thing, hmm?

Anyways, after a bit of troubleshooting, we discovered that it had indeed been delivered today at 11:40. Unfortunately, not to my address, but to an address off-by-one from my address. A very common mistake in programming, and no less troublesome in addresses.

So I scampered over to the neighbors house. Yes, he had received it. No, he didn’t have it anymore. You see, his wife works at the UK mail office, and so thought to take it back to work to try to send it back. SEND IT BACK!!?!

Fortunately, her office said, no, they couldn’t just send it back. Particularly since she had already opened it. ALREADY OPENED IT!?!?!! These are my nearly $2000 tickets to Sri Lanka, by the way. And they have opened them, and attempted to send them back. 🙁

Anyways, he said that he’d bring them over as soon as she got back home. Which he did in fact do. And I have these tickets sitting in front of me right now. And they appear to be going to the correct destinations.

Now, all I have to do is navigate the delightful new world of increased-security-travel, and hopefully in a mere 48 hours, or thereabouts, I’ll be in Sri Lanka.

Photos from OSCon, ApacheCon

The last two cons that I’ve attended – ApacheCon and OSCon – I’ve hardly taken any photos. I’ve relied on the photographers more talented than I, or at least more shutter-happy than I, for my photographic memories. That seems to have worked out pretty well, but there’s something just more satisfying to having one’s own photos, even when they aren’t very good.

So I’ll try to take more photos this time around.

Perl lightning talks

The Perl lightning talks have been a staple of the Perl Conference, and, later, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, for as long as I’ve been attending it. And YAPC, too, although I haven’t been to YAPC in many moons. They were somewhat different this year. Not hugely, but subtly.

MJD observed that, when he started them, the purpose was to get folks who would otherwise not give talks to give brief presentations in a low-stress environment. 5 minutes is enough to get a taste of public presenting, but not long enough to get too terribly intimidated.

Over the years, it became a bit of a sideshow, with elaborate presentations, complete with slides and sound effects. And of course MJD as the MC, complete with funny hat and gong. And so folks who wanted to give a five minute “here’s what I’m working on” or “here’s my cool idea” talk were overshadowed by the brilliant presentations by Audrey Tang and Andy Lester and the like. Also, talks lean towards the comic routine rather than the technical talk. Indeed, technical lightning talks tend to get heckled on IRC, and yawned through, waiting for the *real* lightning talks.

We started doing Lightning Talks at ApacheCon a few years back, and they have become part of our conference culture. We, too, tend to favor the entertainment talks rather than the technical talks. That’s fine, in that it draws a crowd, and folks hear interesting ideas, and it’s a great community event. But we need to remember what the initial purpose of lightning talks really is – to give folks a shot at the mic, if only for a few minutes.

Of course, I don’t run the lightning talks, so feel free to ignore me. 🙂

ApacheCon Asia

I’ll be in Sri Lanka for ApacheCon Asia in about two weeks. I’ll be doing an Apache Web Server tutorial, and another talk yet to be decided. I’m very excited about getting to go, and very excited that we’re finally doing an ApacheCon Asia.

Still a few travel details to be worked out …

mod_rewrite talk: ApacheCon Europe

I’ve temporarily given up on trying to insert my slides into the audio of my mod_rewrite talk, because enough people have asked for the recording.

Warning, this is a 50MB file, approximately 50 minutes. It’s BIG.

I’m not listing this in the podcast category, because I don’t want folks subscribed to get it without really meaning to.

Here it is.

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.

Planning meeting

Because we weren’t quite exhausted enough after Friday evening, we started right into the planners meeting on Saturday morning. We had 220+ submissions, and 90 slots, so we had to a lot of winnowing.

There were a number of discussions of whether it is reasonable for certain projects to be more heavily represented than others.

We’ve traditionally had the web server more heavily respresented than any other project. This is really the first time that I’ve started to question that policy. The reasoning, I think, has something to do with the fact that most of our attendees, we think, associated “Apache” with “web server” and so come expecting HTTPd (and related) talks. I think that the attendance numbers kind of support this theory, but over the years, we’re seeing other projects’ talks more heavily attended.

It would be nice to have actual statistics and be able to make more data-driven decisions. I’m not sure what’s the best way to go about gathering those statistics, but we really need to find a way.

So, anyways, by some time Sunday morning, we had the schedule laid out. Hopefully we’ll be notifying selected speakers real soon now.