Tag Archives: apachecon

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. 🙂

Feathercasts

As usual, the week was suddenly over almost before I had a chance to catch my breath. It was quite the whirlwind, and I didn’t really get out of the hotel much, except for a few times to grab something to eat.

I got interviews with several interesting people, for FeatherCast, but so far have only had a chance to edit and post one of them. Ok, really, David did most of the work. I still have the raw audio for several of the others.

I talked with Sanjiva about ApacheCon Asia. I talked with Bill Rowe about Apache on Windows. Justin about being treasurer. Ken about ApacheCon in general. Greg about being chairman, and what this whole ASF thing is about.

And I got to talk at great length with Brian, which I’m writing another post about. So be patient.

All these, and more, will appear on FeatherCast over the next few months, as I have time to edit.

Meanwhile, I’ve spent entirely too much time trying to get my mail client working. Apparently there’s just something in 10.4.7 that breaks Thunderbird, and I’ll have to use something else while I wait for somebody to fix that.

Or maybe it’s just me.

mod_rewrite

I just got done with my mod_rewrite talk. I recorded it, and am going to try to podcast it, including the slides. I have no idea how well this is going to work or how much work it’s going to take. I assume I’ll listen to it in Garage Band and drop in the next slide at the appropriate times. We’ll see. Should have that up early next week.

This is in preparation for my plan of world domination – um, I mean, my plan to take my training classes and turn them into online training. If this goes well, I’ll continue to do this for all my class segments until I have the whole course as m4a files.

ApacheCon Musicians

Last night was one of those great ApacheCon moments that I imagine will stay with me for a long time. Several people with a lot of talent – and me – were up until about 1:30 this morning, playing music on a variety of stringed instruments and pipes, and singing. Here’s one example of the music, and hopefully I’ll be able to extract more of them from the hour and a half of recording I have.

ApacheCon, Wednesday evening

As usual, the week is half over before I have a chance to catch my breath. I’m in an HTTP auth BOF, which is very interesting. There are things that must be done to HTTP auth if people are going to be able to continue to be able to use the interweb for secure transactions, and somehow have a digital identity that is anything like as universal as one’s Passport or photo ID.

Today I got FeatherCast interviews with Sanjiva and Justin. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll get them with Bill Rowe, Ken, Sander, and Noel. We’ll see. It’s been somewhat hard to pin people down.

Also, tomorrow, I give my mod_rewrite talk, which is always quite a lot of fun.

This evening was the welcome reception, sponsored by Covalent. Yay Covalent. We like them. And lots of interesting conversations. Which is mostly what ApacheCon is about to me, these days.

Let’s go Pembroke!

When I was going to St. Andrews School, in Kenya, 20 years ago or so, one of our arch-rivals was Pembroke House, another boarding school.

Here at the conference, one of the meeting rooms is named Pembroke, and every time I see the sign, I can hear their Rugby coach yelling “Let’s go Pembroke!”

ApacheCon EU 2006, Mark Shuttleworth

I’m in Mark Shuttleworth‘s session at ApacheCon. He also gave the opening keynote, which was very interesting and insightful. He spoke about the challenges faching free software before we achieve world domination – all the way from “Pretty is a feature” to “Grandma’s new camera”. Good stuff.

This talk is about the world view and culture of free software, and of Ubuntu specifically. The Ubuntu community looks quite a lot like Apache, but is different in important ways, among the most notable of which is the powerful place of Canonical in the project.

Mark’s a very interesting guy, to say the least. And he’s a great speaker. I’m really glad that he was willing to come to our conference.

ApacheCon EU 2006, day 0

I’m in Dublin, at the end of a very full day. Actually, this particular day was 2 days long.

I left Lexington around 2:30 pm, and went to Charlotte, where I met Joey – Danese Cooper’s husband – and also Lisa Dessault was there. We were somewhat delayed, due to storms in Philadelphia, so we were able to have dinner together, which was very nice.

In Philadelphia, we also ran into John Coggeshall, Bill Rowe and Matthias Wessendorf, all on their respective ways to Dublin. After a brief delay (about 2 hours), we left for Dublin.

I think I fell asleep immediately after sitting down on the plane. I remember waking up briefly when the captain said “prepare for takeoff”. Then I woke up again when he said something about 20 minutes until we get to Dublin. I *never* sleep that well on a plane, so I arrived much fresher than I had any reason to expect.

Danese picked us up at the airport and gave us a ride back to the Burlington. Somehow in this process we lost John, who we then found back at the hotel. Lars, John, Justin Erencrantz and I went down to the Canal Bank Cafe for some lunch, then we came back and I was able to get online and Skype call Sarah, which was very nice.

This evening, the ApacheCon planners went to Noirin’s home for a cookout and some planning discussions. Dinner was *great*. I love walled gardens. They give the impression that the rest of the city isn’t really there. I would love to have that kind of separation from my neighbors. My own little kingdom. I wonder what would be involved in doing that, and if the city zoning laws would actually let me get away with it. I forgot my camera. Perhaps you can track down Noel’s pictures at some point. Present were Noirin, Colm, Ken, Lars, Noel, Danese, Joey, and Justin.

Later this evenig (it’s perhaps 1:30am now) we went down to the rooms where the tutorials will be in the morning, and monkeyed with the wireless networking for a while.

Tomorrow I hope to do a few interviews for FeatherCast, and maybe try to even get one of them edited to a usable state. I’d like to do one with Ken about the history of ApacheCon, since he’s the chair of the ApacheCon Committee.

I should probably go to bed now.