Junk Drawer

So Wall Street will get a bailout of $700 Billion. It must be nice knowing that no matter how badly you screw up, you can count on your friends to completely cover you.

Of course, that is a simplification and the deal as currently defined will almost for sure not pass. The major sticking point seems to be that even though the companies are in woeful financial state, and the gov't need to step in with $700B of taxpayers money to shore things up, the executives of those companies will walk away with tens-of-millions (at least) of compensation and... wait for it... BONUSES! I have no idea in what Alice-In-Wonderland universe these things happen, when an executive expects and receives bonuses for basically being a greedy, selfish tool, but I obviously don't understand The Financial Market.

Of course, we are told, that the bailout can't add limits or restrictions for these types of things, because it would prevent executives from taking the bailouts to "save" their companies. If there is any clearer indication that the executives' priorities are screwed up, I don't know what it is. "Screw the company! I want what's coming to ME!"

And what is even worse is that the main people in the gov't behind this bailout have no idea why we feel that this is somehow wrong...

Before I even start, I want to note a coupla things. First of all, I have never really owned a Windows system. Not to say I haven't bought them, but mostly for my sons and never for myself. I do run WinXP, but under VMWare Fusion on my Mac. Secondly, I have performed tons of upgrades of systems, from FreeBSD to OS X, but the upgrade from XP to Vista was a new one for me. And finally, I've built quite a few systems (physically) from the ground up. Sometimes it's even fun.

But even with all that, the recent full upgrade of Jon's computer from a Pentium 4/WinXP system to a new Quad/Vista system was, to put it nicely, painful. Much more so, IMO, than it should have been...

I went ahead and upgraded my Macs to 10.5.3 yesterday (using the Combo Update, of course).

Unfortunately, even though many things are better, the most annoying bug in Mail has NOT been fixed... doing a search causes Mail to forget the field width settings in the Message Viewer window. Ugg!

Will someone please explain to me this "Internet Freedom" that Viacom's challenge is supposedly threatening?

What freedom is that? The freedom to steal copyrighted data? How did all that is good and noble about the Internet get somehow associated with the concept that "as long as I can make a copy of something, I should be able to do whatever I want to do with it whether I have permission or not."

Yes, the Internet is all about sharing information, but it doesn't also mean that copyright now flies out the window.

Let's be clear, if I create something (music, video, code, whatever) and I choose to share it, then great! If I also decide to let others share it as well, even better! But the sharing of that information is mine to choose, not yours. Don't lump my exercising my rights in protecting my property, with your perceived "rights" to take what is mine and do whatever you want with it, without my permission.

Really, that sort of mentality is totally embarrassing.

Although I've been "on" Twitter for awhile, it's only recently that I've really used it. For me, I find it much easier to take a minute or 2 to write up a short 1-2 phrase tweet regarding something on my mind, than spent more time to craft something larger and longer to "warrant" a blog post.

A blog post seems like just too much work.

A tweet is just fun.

If you want to follow me, my Twitter ID should be pretty obvious.

There is one bug in 10.5.2 which is still there and still quite irritating. It's in Mail.

It keeps on forgetting the width of the columns in list view all the time. I've setup Mail so that in list view it shows the thread cluster, the status, flags, From, Subject, Date Rec'd and Attachments. I then spend time adjusting the width of those columns so I can see the data I want. In particular, I want the Status column wide so I can see how many unread messages there are in the thread. And, without fail, every time I close Mail, it loses those settings, and I need to readjust the column widths again.

What a pain.

With my transition to Leopard, I've gone ahead an pretty much dropped Fink. Except for all those packages I compile and build myself, I'm baselining MacPorts. For one thing, it was getting problematic supporting 2 porting implementations and for another, well, Fink's kinda been slipping for awhile, as far as the timeliness of some updates.

So right now, I'd say about 75% of my local additions are home-built , 20% via MacPorts and the remaining 5% are some one-off builds of some standard tools (like Wireshark).

Oh, yes... I am very much looking forward to OS X 10.5.2... The various bugs and "issues" in 10.5.1 are starting to get quite annoying...

It's a shame, but the tongue-in-cheek nature of my Invitations post appears to have been lost on some people... I guess those who know me, caught the humor in it immediately, whereas others may not have caught it at all...

Hopefully, this clears that up

At this year's ApacheCon event, I had 3 sessions: The State Of The Feather, What's New In Apache 2.2, and Advanced Load Balancing In Apache 2.2.

Overall, I think I could have done better... Not so much on the actual content itself, but the actual presentation aspects.

First of all, I don't get nervous in front of a crowd, so I have no real issue speaking in front of an audience. But I do tend to focus more on the feedback from the audience than maybe I should... for example, if I see a lot of confused faces, I try to figure out what they are confused about and drift off a bit on a tangent to hopefully address that confusion. What I do tend to do as well, is try to fit all the content in during the timeframe given, even if, due to external circumstances, that isn't feasible anymore. So instead of skipping sections, I rush through on the assumption that something is better than nothing.

My first talk is a perfect example. It was scheduled to start at 9 with Doc Searls taking over at 9:30. Knowing how things go, I set the talk to last for about 20 minutes, knowing that we would start a little late. Unfortunately, Rich went a little long, leaving me quite a short timeframe to go through things. Since Doc was one of our keynoters, I for sure wasn't going to grab some of his time. So I knuckled under and picked up the pace and squeezed the whole preso into a timeslot that would have been more comfortable with an extra 5 minutes or so. That doesn't sound like a lot of time, but believe me, it is. After the fact, most of the comments I heard were "very good presentation, but a little rushed"... yeah, I know

My next was my What's New In 2.2 talk, also at 9am. I think this went well, since the topics that I just glanced over (authn/authz and proxy) had their own sessions the next day. I was pleasantly surprised that it was a packed room.

My final was the last day of the conference, at 3pm (2nd to last session). I was shocked to see that this was also a packed room. Unfortunately, I had a cold coming and tended to get dry in the mouth. Plus, I think that some attendees thought it was an introduction to reverse proxying, rather than a review of the new features in the proxy module, which threw me off a bit. I wasn't happy with how it went, but still, I got some good feedback after the talk, and many people came up to me with questions afterwards. So maybe it wasn't that bad.

All in all, I'll wait to see what kind of marks I get in the speaker evaluations... Hopefully, I won't be too embarrassed or disappointed.

It appears that Marc Fleury attended ApacheCon this year (for all you out there who have no idea who Marc Fleury is, he was the owner of the JBoss company). In his blog he laments that he had no idea that ApacheCon was in town, and surmises that his invitation to the event was lost in the mail. This surprises me, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, I would assume that someone who became a multimillionaire based on the sale of a company whose products were, for a non-insignificant amount at all, leveraging and bundling ASF codebases, Marc would at least have a passing interest in what was going on within the ASF. It would make sense to me to follow the goings-in within a community that was at least partially responsible for my success... I guess not... And secondly, I don't think his invitation was lost in the mail, because I'm not sure what kind of conference Marc thinks ApacheCon is, that one requires an "invitation" to attend. I've attended lots and lots of conferences without receiving a written invitation to do so; heck, I've always considered the announcement of a conference as an implied invitation. I hate to think now that I've been such a rude conference attendee (and speaker, presenter, etc..) bursting in uninvited! How Borat!

Anyway, since all the above implies that Marc doesn't follow the events of the ASF, he is most likely unaware of the Apache Sponsorship Program. This is a way for corporations, and entities, and people to show their support for the ASF by making non-directed financial donations to the ASF.

So Marc, how about becoming an ASF sponsor? I figure that the Platinum Sponsor (at $100,000) is the right level. The donation would only be a bit over 0.06% of what you personally made off the JBoss deal, which is an amount I hope you could afford. If money is tight (and with the holiday season right around the corner, that's perfectly understandable), then maybe the Gold level ($40,000) is the right fit, at just 0.026%. Please don't hesitate to contact the ASF's fundraising team if interested. Heck, you can even contact me directly if you like. In fact, I'll even mail out a written invitation to sweeten the deal.

It's deja vu all over again.

It's back. Thanks again to Thom!

In case you hadn't noticed, PlanetApache is down. The site is a labour of love for Thom May who just happens to be on vacation right now (isn't that always the way it is?). What a fun thing to come back to... In any case, I'm sure I'm not the first nor last to say how useful the site is; I owe Thom a beer.

In the meantime, Sam Ruby has setup an incredible simulation.

Well, although 2 points define a line, it doesn't really describe a "trend", but I like the title anyway.

I offer this to compliment this.

For those with a little extra spending cash: Robot