Jim's Ramblings - ASF

Apache HTTP Server 2.3.8-alpha

nospam@example.com (Jim Jagielski) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:40:04 -0400

Today, I (as Release Manager for the project) released the latest, and what is expected to be the last, alpha version of the NextGen release of Apache httpd.

This is pretty exciting news because for now on we'll be focusing on pushing out beta releases in anticipation of a quick trip to 2.4.0-GA.

Certainly, Apache httpd 2.4.0 has been a long time coming, but it will be well worth the wait. The new features, especially related to MPMS, Authn/Authz and the Proxy module, will continue to be the reference standards for web servers. I'm really excited by all the mod_proxy improvements because that's an area which I, and others, have been giving special attention to. You combine that with the various async changes, the Event and (for the time-being still experimental) Simple MPMs and you have a killer server.

So download and try it out and give us your feedback.

Cheers!

ASF Voting System Rocks

nospam@example.com (Jim Jagielski) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 11:15:17 -0400

The ASF uses an ssh-based voting tool, mostly developed by Roy, to handle the new member and new director voting process. New members are elected in using a simple yes/no/abstain whereas directors are voted in using the STV system. The tool is great, but it had the requirement of actually having to ssh into a specific machine to cast your votes.

Well, after some discussions on the members mailing list, our illustrious SysAdmin Joe (with some patches from others) created this exceptional GUI front-end for the tool, which makes casting votes even easier. Hopefully, with this front-end, the voter tool will be used for a bunch of other things...

As far as setting up the voter tool, well, I just use a bunch of scripts I hacked together years ago... Not fully automated, but good enough.

ApacheCon US 2008 Slides

nospam@example.com (Jim Jagielski) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:04:34 -0500

I've made my ApacheCon US 2008 slides available at:

http://people.apache.org/~jim/presos/ACUS08/

There will also be available on Slideshare shortly as well.

ApacheCon US 2008

nospam@example.com (Jim Jagielski) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:57:22 -0400

On Sunday, I'll be leaving to attend ApacheCon US 2008, which is located in New Orleans. I'm really looking forward to the conference, which I'll also be presenting at as well. In fact, this is one of the busier ApacheCons, having 4 presentations (the State Of The Feather, Apache Nuts to Bolts (which I'm co-presenting with Bill Rowe and Rich Bowen), Sponsoring the ASF and Advanced Reverse Proxy in Apache 2.2). Plus, it looks like a lot of meetings, interviews and other brikabrak going on as well, so it promises to be a pretty full week.

As always, I'm also looking forward to seeing and spending time with so many friends, people who I don't get the opportunity to see nearly often enough. As much as I really enjoy the technical exchange, I also like the deep social aspects of ApacheCon as well. We know how to code, but we also know how to kick back and enjoy ourselves.

Are you going to ApacheCon? You should!

2.2.10

nospam@example.com (Jim Jagielski) — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 13:06:45 -0400

I was so busy traveling and pushing out 2.2.10 that I didn't even blog about it.

Well, better late than never: Apache HTTP Server 2.2.10 is released... enjoy.

2.2.9

nospam@example.com (Jim Jagielski) — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 07:45:31 -0400

Hot off the stove: Apache HTTP Server 2.2.9.

Yum. Good pudding.

ASF Board Elections

nospam@example.com (Jim Jagielski) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:42:23 -0400

The ASF just finished our annual members meeting. During the meeting we elected in a new board and new members. The list of new members isn't public yet, allowing time for them to be contacted, etc... But the roster of the new board can be announced now. It is:



   Bertrand Delacretaz    Justin Erenkrantz        J. Aaron Farr

   Jim Jagielski          Geir Magnusson Jr.       William A. Rowe, Jr.

   Sam Ruby               Henning Schmiedehausen   Greg Stein

Of the above, Bertrand is the "new guy", taking over for Henri Yandell who decided not to run again this year.

Congrats!

Amsterdam and ApacheCon EU 2008

nospam@example.com (Jim Jagielski) — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 10:06:45 -0400

If you follow PlanetApache, the fashionable thing to be doing now is talking about ApacheCon EU 2008, either regarding one's preparations on getting there, what you will be doing while there or comments regarding the ongoing, internal discussions regarding ApacheCon in general.... think I'll jump right on in!

For me, the hardest part about getting prepared is syncing my MacBook and MacPro. I use my MacBook pretty much only when traveling, and do everything else on my MacPro. So when it's time to be away for awhile, I need to rsync a bunch of stuff. And this takes time. A loooooonnnnnnngggggg time. I'm sure there are easier ways to do this, but I do it so infrequently that I deal with the pain and move on.

Then of course there is the actual event of traveling itself. As I've previously blogged about, this is very much a non-productive time for me. So I see travel time pretty much as wasted time, and, to be honest, when things are busy, I can't waste any of it. So even though I try, I know that I'm falling behind. Combine this with the facts that (1) traveling is no longer fun or easy and (2) I get quite anxious flying, especially large distances, that "getting there" is the worse part about "being there."

Once at Amsterdam, I'm looking forward to the week. As with most people, I'll be staying at the Moevenpick, Amsterdam City Centre. Look for me. In addition to my 2 talks, I'm going to be attending several sessions (reminder to self: sign up to be session chair!) and will be hanging out at the Covalent/SpringSource booth when I can.

I'm sure I owe you a beer!

Marc responds

nospam@example.com (Jim Jagielski) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 08:43:04 -0500

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Marc responded to my blog entry. Although it appears that despite my (tongue-in-cheek) suggestion, the ASF will not be receiving an ASF sponsorship check from him anytime soon, Marc does make a few comments which I feel need to be addressed (and one "comment" which I won't even honor with so much as another word).

His 4 main points appear to be: (1) How can people claim to speak for the "community" when that is such a nebulous term; (2) that the concept of "community over code" is a mistake (at least, this is my interpretation of some of Marc's post, an interpretation shared by others; (3) that the ASF has some sort of historical hostility to Java and (4) that the BSD-type license is wrong, or, at least, has not proven to be a viable license.

Items 2 and 4 deserve a post of their own, so I won't bother addressing them here, but the remaining 2 are easy to clarify.

First of all, the ASF does not claim to speak for "the" community but rather for "our" community. The entire Open Source community is more varied and beautiful than just a single interpretation of "community." In fact, I liken the FOSS community as an analog to nature itself; with different species and forms combining to create a rich tapestry. But certainly, continuing with the nature-analogy, one can speak for the "mammalian class" without claiming to speak for others as well. That is what the ASF does; it speaks for a class of the FOSS community that shares a core set of fundamentals, and, as such, has shown itself to be a very successful class. No more, no less.

And finally, how anyone can look at the ASF of today and claim that there is some sort of "hostility" or "bias" towards Java is mind-boggling. In fact, I would claim that the ASF's involvement within the JCP and the JCP EC have done more to help Java that any other open source "community" out there. Why an organization which is "hostile" to a technology would go to such pains to ensure the continued viability and universality of that technology flies in the face of logic and common sense. Maybe this perceived "hostility" is due to the fact that, for the most part, ASF developers are self-thinkers, and realize that as great as Java is, it has warts; that as with all languages and technologies, it has advantages and disadvantages; that languages are tools and some tools are better for some tasks than others. I don't consider the fact that people who use Java also know (and use and love) Python, or Groovy, or Ruby or what-have-you as being "hostile" to Java at all. The fact that the ASF is language neutral, that "we" welcome codebases based on lots of languages is not hostility, it's openness.

ApacheCon - Day 2

nospam@example.com (Jim Jagielski) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 12:07:41 -0500

Today is the 2nd day of ApacheCon... well, maybe I should say "2nd" day, because it's only the 2nd day of the conference itself, but not the full AC event itself. And for me, having arrived on Monday, it's day "4". OK, I admit it, I have no idea what day it is. Sounds like a successful conference, right?

In fact, AC US really is a success. It seems that people are generally very happy and pleased with the diversity of sessions and the quality of the presentations (and presenters). I know that every session I've attended, I've learned at least one very useful thing and, much more often than not, learned a bunch of new stuff.

Personally, I have 2 out of my 3 talks done. The 1st was the State of the Feather and I went through that more quickly that I would have liked, but I wanted to give Doc Searls his full time slot, and my talk ending up starting a bit later than expected. My 2nd talk was this morning and the ungodly hour of 9am. Even so, I had a packed room, which was unexpected but very very nice. My third and last is tomorrow in the afternoon. It's about the "cool new" load balancing proxy features of Apache 2.2, but the irony is that Paul Querna added a new module to trunk called mod_serf which is a (at present) bare-bones proxy module built using serf. It certainly doesn't have nearly the feature set of 2.2 and trunk's proxy module, but it is a cool initial step. I think he did it to spite me

Just A Week Away

nospam@example.com (Jim Jagielski) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 11:01:37 -0500

ApacheCon US 2007 is just a week away. I'll be flying out to the event on Monday, so I'll be there for pretty much the whole week. It is kind of nice not having to take a long flight for a change to get to ApacheCon!

I look forward to AC for a variety reasons. First of all, there is the incredible amount of knowledge transfer that goes on. You get a better understanding of a project and a codebase in a short 1 hr presentation that you would spending significantly more time following along on the mailing lists. It really is a great way to get up-to-speed on a project. Secondly, there is the opportunity to, hopefully, lay some of that knowledge on others by being one of the speakers. This year I'm actually doing 3 presentations and, although I'm not quite finished them yet, they are shaping up to be pretty good (at least I hope so!).

Another thing is that I like seeing the number of commercial companies who attend and support both ApacheCon and the ASF. Being the CTO of one such company (Covalent), ApacheCon is a valuable avenue to strengthen that bond.

But by far, the community and social aspects of the conferences are what I really value. Being able to connect and reconnect with people that you don't see nearly enough is quite a gift. And having the opportunity to make new friends, and connect faces with Email addresses, even after all these years, never grows old.

2.2.6 and 2.0.61 and 1.3.39

nospam@example.com (Jim Jagielski) — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 13:00:37 -0400

After a few stops and starts, we finally released the latest versions of Apache HTTP Server. We released all 3 versions at the same time: 2.2.6, 2.0.61 and 1.3.39.

Cheers!

When reported trends don't match observed trends

nospam@example.com (Jim Jagielski) — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 09:02:06 -0400

No doubt, there will be many posts regarding the latest Netcraft survey, some good, some bad and some just plain FUD. Even ignoring other surveys that show vastly different results, the Netcraft report is confusing for one real reason which has nothing to do with Apache at all.

For the survey to match reality, it means that web hosting providers are selecting Windows over Linux, or Solaris, or BSD or OS X or, well, basically, any other OS. Well, of course that's not the case. Is anyone seeing that? At anything close to the numbers that would be required?

No, of course not. It simply shows that once one knows the secret sauce on how rankings are made, one can make a very directed effort to shift those to reflect the version of reality you want to present. We saw it with web search rankings and we're seeing it now. It's almost as if someone said "We are ranking big business using the metric of how many phone lines they have; the rationale being more phone lines means more employees which means a bigger business." Once that's done, it's easy for a small business, who has a vested interest in appearing much larger than they are, to simply order more phone lines, increasing their ranking.

With all that being said, it is quite nice seeing lighttpd, which is an Apache-"based" variant, making increases. It shows just how useful FastCGI still is and how neat mod_proxy_fgci will be, once we finish it, that is.

The new board

nospam@example.com (Jim Jagielski) — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 16:15:37 -0400

So we (the ASF) have finished up our latest members meeting and, in addition to voting in new members, we also elected a new board. They are:

Justin Erenkrantz
J Aaron Farr
Jim Jagielski
Geir Magnusson Jr
William A Rowe Jr
Sam Ruby
Henning Schmiedehausen
Greg Stein
Henri Yandell

Notwithstanding the number of Juniors on the board (pun intended), this represent 4 new directors (well, 3 completely new board members and one (Geir) who had served on the board a few years ago), which is a record for us. Great thanks go out to outgoing directors Ken, Dirk, Cliff and Sander. The ASF board is unique, in my opinion, because they don't steer or control the foundation as other boards do. Instead, this is done by the members. The board exists simply to allow the membership to continue doing what they want to do, and like doing. The power of the ASF really is in the hands of each and every member.

As mentioned above, we also elected in 24 new members, but we won't be announcing their names until they are officially informed of their nominations and until we hear back whether or not they have accepted. But congrats go out to them as well!

Looking for a few (or several) good sponsors

nospam@example.com (Jim Jagielski) — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:28:14 -0400

ApacheCon is always, at least in my opinion, one of the premier conferences going. It's kind of nice having a conference where the presenters are not just exceptional users of the software, but the developers as well. The ASF has been doing ApacheCons for years now, and we're only able to do so by having sponsors help with the event.

Unfortunately, at the last minute, we had a potential Gold sponsor pull out due to tight funding. So if you or your company or organization is capable of doing so, consider being a sponsor (and dare I say a hero) to ApacheCon. If interested, please contact Delia Frees and bring joy and happiness to a hacker's heart.