I just received the feedback evaluation sheet concerning my ApacheCon EU talk. At first, I was a little depressed seeing how most votes tended to cluster around ratings of 1 and 2, but then I read the mail again and noticed the following:
Rating system: 1=excellent, 2=good, 3=fair, 4=unsatisfactory, 5=inadequate
Whew! Nice. I won’t publish the totals here, but if you’re interested or want to compare it to yours, just ask me.
As it looks like the talk was well received, I might risk proposing a couple talks for the upcoming ApacheCon US conference in San Diego. Not the same talk, as I’ve pretty much beaten the subject to death, having presented it at OSCOM, Cocoon GT and ApacheCon EU with few variations, but I have a couple ideas brewing.
Gotta rush, though. The deadline is August 9.
ApacheCon is over and I have to say that it was great, as expected. The organization was flawless and everything went perfectly, almost without a hitch. Nice job!
I have just one suggestion for the organizers: Next time, record the audio of the sessions, or at least of keynotes and distribute them as podcasts.
Apart from some interesting sessions and the keynotes, whose level was really above average, the best part of these type of conferences is meeting people. There was the usual bunch of Cocooners, most of whom I already knew, but I also had the possibility of finally meeting face to face for the first time with some really nice guys like, in no particular order, David Crossley, Brian McCallister and Steve Loughran.
Netx up is ApacheCon US, in San Diego, December 10-14. Don’t know if I’ll be able to get there, but it would be great.
In case somebody wants a copy of my slides, here they are.
So, it’s finally the time for me to learn something about what everyone’s so much excited about: Ruby on Rails. I’m quite amazed that there aren’t more people attending, but maybe it’s because it’s only 9AM and many are still recovering from a night of sausages and beer.
From what I see, I can figure myself using RoR to very quickly develop prototypes. Active records and code generation should really shine in this respect. Being much of a conservative, I’m not going to drop my usual, all Java, bag of tools any time soon. But using RoR for prototyping could be a way to learn more about it and maybe I could really like what I learned, who knows?
This morning I held my talk in front of a packed audience: more than 80 people, some of them sitting on the floor. Some people were even sitting outside the room, looking through a glass door and unfortunately someone turned away after seeing that there was no more room.
I can’t say if it was my name that attracted them 
or either one of Cocoon and Spring, but sure it was gratifying. What’s more gratifying is that nobody stood up and went away in the middle of the talk. From this and from a few compliments I collected later, I think the talk was well received. I’m eager to see the results of the evaluation forms processing.
I was interested in this talk because I am applying in The Open Source Zone some of the techniques mentioned in the talk’s introductory blurb. Thus I wanted to see if what I’m doing right now is the best possible way or if there’s space for further optimizations.
Apparently I should seriously think about adding E-Tag and Last-Modified headers. This shouldn’t be too hard and give a much larger payback than just using the Expires header as I’m doing now. Of course, I need to check how easy it is to do this on Cocoon’s side.
One thing I just learned is that in order to force a refresh of the cache, I can issue a request with a Cache-Control: max-age=0. Nice to know.
I attended this talk hoping to find an answer to my problem of finding similar documents in a Lucene index. I pretty much expected not to find anything. After all, the title of the talk clearly gave away its introductory nature, but even asking the speaker did not elicit much. I know I have to use “Term Vectors” but was unable to find a digestible explanation on the web before, and Christoph couldn’t point me to one either, so I’ll keep looking.
I’m not really into J2EE application servers, but I have an interest in following what’s happening in this field, since from time to time it happens that one of your applications needs to be deployed inside one of them. Open Source J2EE appservers, in particular, are becoming more and more used. Though Geronimo is the new kid on the block, it seems to have enough momentum to become a worthwhile competitor to the established leader in this field: JBoss.
I even briefly considered exploring GBeans as a mechanism for enabling Cocoon “Real Blocks” once. Even though it seems like we’re headed in the OSGi direction, it might still be cool to be able to deploy the Cocoon core as a GBean inside Geronimo.
Carsten Ziegeler is presenting “Maven is your friend”. I always saw Maven as a foe, but my opinion is entirely based on unverified assumptions, so I decided to attend Carsten’s session to see if my assumptions are correct or not.
Turns out Maven has lots of interesting and useful features, but I don’t think that’s enough to make me change my old habit of just using Ant. The problem is, I don’t think I’m going to invest a significant portion of my time to overcome the learning curve, however gentle it might be. But if I happened onto a project that already uses Maven, or someone proposed to use Maven on a project I am already contributing to, I won’t certainly oppose it.
I’m sitting in ApacheCon EU 2005 opening session right now and listening to Horst Zuse’s keynote about “The Origins of the Computer”. “Horst who?” I hear you saying. Well, turns out he’s the son of one Konrad Zuse who is credited with inventing “the first functional tape-stored-program-controlled computer, the Z3, in 1941″. I always suspected those Germans had invented everything before their American and British counterparts ;).
Anyway, the keynote is mildly interesting, and with videos of working reconstructions of stone-age computers too! It surely beats having to listen to a local politician telling us that Apache is behind more than 50% of websites and it runs on Unix and Windows. Wow! Not even in my wildest dreams I would have imagined that ;-).
Update: this Zuse guy was really ahead of his times. In 1969 he wrote a booklet hypothesizing that the universe is made up of computers at the subatomic level and all this 35 years before Wolfram.
The Cocoon Blockathon is well underway in Stuttgart. Unfortunately, I won’t be there until tomorrow night. Meanwhile, I’m looking at the weather forecasts and feeling a bit worried. With 12/14C less degrees on the average, I’ll be leaving shorts home and bring a jacket instead.
Steve Loughran: “I see everyone in apacheland is posting their route to Apachecon 2005.”
Me? I expect a rather uneventful trip: Milan to Stuttgart by plane on the 19th. Stuttgart to Milan by plane on the 23rd. What else did you expect?
I just got this nice ApacheCon Europe 2005 Speaker logo along with an invitation to use it to promote out ApacheCon talks. So, here it is.
I’ll be talking about Developing Enterprise Web Applications with Cocoon and Spring, on Thursday July 21st, 10:00AM.
Registration is open, and you get a nice discount by registering before June 17th, so hurry up!.
My (belated) congratulations to all the new Apache Software Foundation members, and particularly to fellow Cocooners Torsten and Upayavira (no blog for you, pal?).
I find it strange that Henri, who is currently the Jakarta PMC chair, wasn’t already a member. Anyway, now he is one.
The Rodent’s Burrow: And the winnahs are..:
The annual ASF members meeting has just adjourned, and the election results are in.
All twelve member nominees were elected. Congratulations to:
- Torsten Curdt
- Doug Cutting
- Theo van Dinter
- Robert Burrell Donkin
- J Aaron Farr
- Justin Mason
- Vincent Massol
- Henning Schmiedehausen
- Sander Temme
- Upayavira
- Susan Wu
- Henri Yandell
Welcome to all of you!
By now, everybody who has an interest in Java is aware of this:
We propose that we create a new Apache project, Harmony, that will
achieve the following goals :
1) create a Compatible, independent implementation of J2SE 5
under the Apache License v2
2) create a community-developed modular runtime (VM and class library)
architecture to allow independent implementations to share runtime
components, and allow independent innovation in runtime components
What I haven’t seen appearing yet are speculations, informed or otherwise, regarding the motives that got project Harmony started.
With all the J2SE implementations that exist, is there a need for yet another one? I think the answer is yes.
Fact is, Apache has an incredible amount of Java projects. Being at the mercy of one (Sun) or more (IBM, BEA, …) vendors is a big risk. And now, with J2SE 5, it is finally legal to create a compatible, Open Source implementation.
Of course, reaching the goal of a complete J2SE implementation starting from a clean slate is a daunting task. I hope it’s not so big that by the time it’s finished the target has shifted too much (i.e. Java 6, Java 7, …).
Published by ugo on April 29, 2005
in apache.
From: Rodent of Unusual Size
Subject: ApacheCon 2005/EU speaking agreements
[...]
Also note that the deadlines for notes and handouts have been
extended at least 3 weeks.
I was almost done and planning to spend some time this weekend to finish off my slides, but now that I have three more weeks I will try to make them more polished.
They also informed me that Software & Support Verlag, the producer of ApacheCon will anticipate travel and lodging expenses for us speakers. Nice!
Actually, ApacheCon Europe 2005 starts on the 18th of July, but I just got this email:
From: Rodent of Unusual Size
[...]
1. Session slides/handouts are due by 1 MAY 2005.
Gosh! I have less than a week to finish the slides and the handouts. I don’t even know how handouts are supposed to look like.
Fortunately, Monday is a national holiday here and I had already decided to take a day off on Tuesday anyhow, so I have plenty of free time before Sunday. I was thinking of devoting some of that time to doing development for Source.zone, but it’s priority will have to be lowered.
Got this in the mail this morning:
Thank you for your recent session proposals for ApacheCon Europe 2005.
The following sessions have been selected and
scheduled:
(1244) 'Developing Enterprise Web Applications with Cocoon and Spring'
So it looks like I'll be heading down to Stuttgart next July, great! The proposal I submitted is for the same presentation I did at the Cocoon GetTogether 2004, but given Carsten's recent work on the itegration between Cocoon and Spring, I'll have to update it quite a bit.
Rich Bowen: “With 214 responses to the ApacheCon RFP, about half of them coming in the last week, we're gathering in NYC to select which ones will be in the show, as well as put together the schedule.”
Having submitted two proposals myself, it's going to be tough getting one or both through with 212 competitors. Oh well, at least it looks like we'll now soon.
I was going to submit a proposal for the upcoming ApacheCon Europe 2005 conference, but the website seems to be down at the moment. Hope it gets back up soon, the deadline for submissions is Friday.
Update: it's about 12AM (CET) now on Thursday 3rd and the server is running again. Fine.
If you need to search your intranet, you'd better have a look at Nutch. Now with the Apache feather.
