Tag Archives: apachecon

Downtime

My WRT54G picked this week, when I’m 7500km away, to quit responding. Have I mentioned before how much I hate that thing? I’ll be replacing it Real Soon Now. It has a habit of just stopping, for no readily evident reason, at very inconvenient times.

Well, Moose apparently persuaded the apartment management to let him in to restart it. Thanks, Moose. You’re a life saver! Let me know what I can bring you back. Anything. Really.

So I have tons of email POURING in, and about 3 blog entries on my Palm that I need to get copied over. Probably not tonight, though.

Summary: The conference is going really well. Details coming later. 🙂

In Stuttgart

Got into Stuttgart at about 10 yesterday morning and spent most of the day in zombie mode. Right now, I’m in the Infrathon with a roomful of Apache folks. Photos later, since the network is kinda slowish.

Photos here.

And away I go

This week has been absurdly busy, and yet very little seems to have gotten done. Lots of meetings, and trying to get last-minute stuff done before heading off to Stuttgart.

And now the time has arrived. In about two hours, I’m off to the airport, and off to Germany.

Just in case you didn’t know, you can follow the large ApacheCon picture on the ApacheCon blog, where, hopefully, we’ll get a number of people blogging, or at least track-back-ing, so that we can find out what folks really think of our little conference.

I’ll see a number of you real soon.

Itinerary

I’ll be arriving in Stuttgart on Saturday morning, around 09:00.

I’m speaking on Monday morning, and there are some things that I want to do at the Hackathon. We’ve discussed the possibility of a road trip on Tuesday, but nothing is firm yet.

The rest of the week, I’m speaking twice on Wednesday, and once on Thursday. It’s the most pleasant schedule I’ve had at an ApacheCon in a very long time. Nothing at all on Friday, and nothing Thursday morning. I might actually be able to attend some of the talks I’m interested in.

Some of the sessions I’m interested in include Mad’s mod_rewrite talk (so that I can maybe figure out what I need to say when I give that talk at OSCon), What Time Is It, about date/time handling in PHP, and Apache on OSX.

If you’re not registered for ApacheCon yet, there’s still time, and we’d really love to have you there.

iCal and ApacheCon

After much pain and suffering, I managed to wrench an iCalendar format out of the ApacheCon schedule database. Given that I haven’t touched iCalendar format in about 4 years, I’m actually quite pleased that I was able to get this to work.

So, if you have iCal, or any other calendaring application that understands the iCalendar format, you can subscribe to the ApacheCon schedule at http://apachecon.com/2005/EU/html/sessions-ical.php

Of course, if you just load that link in a browser, it will look like garbage, and that’s completely expected.

I’m also not entirely sure about the timezone stuff. Timezones are so irritating. Can I produce iCalendar in a timezone-neutral manner? The events in this calendar are timezone Europe/Berlin, and when I sync them with my Palm, it shows up with the correct offset. But when I arrive in Germany and change my timezone setting, will it display them appropriately? Experimentation suggests not. I really hate timezones.

If I just have it output US/Eastern as the timezone, everything works fine. For me. I expect it would be messed up for everyone else.

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Ok, upon further investigation, it appears that I can make the events timezone-agnostic, so that they work for everyone. So it should be all good now.

I really hate timezones.

Abstracts done

I’m all done copy-editing the abstracts for ApacheCon, and I see that there are some that I really really want to attend. I think we’ve got a great batch of talks this time around. Several of the talks in areas that I usually don’t care much about (in aggregate, generally these are the areas that are labelled “Java”) are fascinating, and I want to know how I can use them in my projects. Gump and the various print-on-demand thingies in particular look like they might be very useful. Single-source documents producing multiple outputs (print, web, audio, etc) also looks like it could be exceedingly useful to me.

I hope I get a chance to attend more talks this year than I did last year. You should come too. It’s going to be great.

ApacheCon schedule

The speaker notifications have gone out, and I have started the long and not-so-fun process of editing the session abstracts. While some of the abstracts are great works of literature, most of them require at least a little proofreading work before they make it into the printed conference materials. This is time consuming and somewhat boring work, but it needs to be done.

Once that’s done, we should be able to get the schedule up on the website. If you’re interested in the conference, you are encouraged to subscribe to the mailing list.

I, for one, think that we have a great schedule this time around, and that it’s going to be a really great conference. Hope to see you there!

Home again

I’ve been home a few hours and done some laundry and grocery shopping, and I think I’m almost ready to resume my regularly scheduled life.

Saturday, we worked from about 07:30 until about 22:45, and Sunday we worked from about 7:30 until about 15:00 when Ken had to leave. Lars left a little later. I stayed overnight, and left the hotel about 05:30 this morning.

I was in JFK for a while. If you’re ever in the NorthWest terminal at JFK, you might like to know that there is a WAP there. Its name is “Linksys”, and, if by chance you don’t like the way it is configured, the administrator username is ‘admin’, and the password is ‘admin’. Just doing my civic duty.

My flight out of JFK was delayed almost an hour, and when I arrived at Detroit, I had to run across the terminal, and ran onto the plane and to my seat. They closed the doors and left as soon as I was in my seat. I am *so* glad I didn’t have to catch a different flight, and it is *so* good to be home.

I tried to get some writing done, but I’m just too tired, and I think I’m going to bed now. Yes, I’m writing again. I’ll say more about this once I actually have a contract. 🙂

The city that sometimes sleeps

We’re staying in the financial district, near Wall Street. Apparently this part of town completely shuts down on the weekends. Restaurants are closed early. Nobody is out on the streets. Nobody delivers. It’s actually sort of quiet at night.

And, based on Chris and Adam’s visit yesterday, there are actually some very nice people who live in NYC. Why they would choose to live here, I can’t imagine, but, to each his own. Now, if only the hotel staff here wasn’t quite so surly.