bertrand’s brain grep

US 2008 in New Orleans has been my best ApacheCon so far! Brain dump ahead.

Great socializing and networking, which should lead to new exciting new projects in the near future.

My two talks were well received as far as I can tell.

Nice emerging buzz about Sling. Free polo shirts helped – well done Carsten! We have to do something about our docs and examples so as to not scare people away, in the meantime I’m sure the Sling folks will be happy to offer guidance on how best to structure things if you want to try it.

Big thanks to everybody involved in this very successful event – it is impossible to mention everybody here, so I’ll just pick and choose: Shane Curcuru who did a great job as the conference lead. The Stone Circle team for making everything happen in a flawless way.

Thanks to President elect Obama for allowing me to spend a historical day in the US.

Thanks to Glen Daniels for finding the jam session places – the first one was not too hot from the musical point of view (drumming on a beer keg only goes so far), but interesting to visit – ever seen a laundromat in a bar?

Thanks to the folks (sponsors IIUC) who organized the parade on Thursday evening. Walking in the streets following the great Rebirth Brass Band with cops opening the way on their nice Harleys was awesome.

Thanks to the New Orleans people for being so nice and friendly, even though I sometimes had a hard time understanding them. I’ll work on that.

For some reason, swimming in the outdoor pool at 7:30AM on a foggy day made us suspect in the eyes of the security guards. Normal hotel customers don’t do that I guess, but who said Swiss Apache folk are normal hotel guests?

Thanks to the local musicians for playing so well.

On Tuesday a few of us escaped from the barcamp (which was great, but one cannot do everything I guess) for a swamp tour with Cajun encounters. Definitely recommended, our guide was a genuine Cajun, born in the area and with lots of stories to tell. I didn’t bring a camera, but photos should be available on Flickr.

That’s for the “best ApacheCon” part – the “worst ApacheCon” is about jetlag taking almost a week to go away, and leaving me in a miserable state on Tuesday when I had a lot of work to do to finish preparing my talks and for the Big Release.

For some reason, many of us had a hard time with jetlag this week. That might be related to the food (deep fried everything) or the lack of fresh air and sunlight. Not that it wasn’t sunny, but sunset around 6PM means one does not see much natural light if following the conference sessions.

See you in Amsterdam in March for ApacheCon EU 2009!

(long post hey – that’s what you get for locking me in planes for about 10 hours ;-)

No LIFT for me once again this year, due to a timing collision with The Important Phase of That Project.

But thanks to nouvo.ch many videos are available to catch up. It’s not the same thing though, there are many people who I’d have loved to meet there.

Even though Gmail bothers us with its Sender header, Google Groups’s set of virtual gray matter is apparently too small to figure out that

From: "Bertrand Delacretaz" <myself@somewhere.ch>
Sender: myself@gmail.com

comes from myself@gmail.com.

Can’t those guys talk together?

(no I’m not going back to freelancing ;-)

Stephanie Booth announces the Going Solo conference, for freelancers and small business owners of the internet industry, in (our beautiful) Lausanne on May 16th.

More info at going-solo.net!

Just spotted this on reuters.com:

Ah no..wait, there’s more:

People should use   more often ;-)

So I tried the Wi-Fi provided by Boingo at the Atlanta airport the other day, and haven’t been too successful with it.

It worked for ten minutes, after which I was banned for Anomalous Behavior. I guess that must be my RSS feed reader. You know, this thing even does several HTTP requests at the same time, wow!

Here’s what I wrote to service@boingo.com yesterday – haven’t heard back from them yet.

Hi

I signed up for a boingo day pass yesterday at the Atlanta airport,
and my connection only worked for about ten minutes.

After that time, I got a warning saying “Anomalous Behavior Detected -
request blocked” (screenshot enclosed). I waited a few minutes to see
if the connection would become unblocked, but that didn’t happen.

That error page told me to contact a network administrator, but there
was no contact phone number, so I haven’t been able to get over that
problem, which means I haven’t been able to used the service that I
paid for.

Can I get a refund?

I think your “abnormal amount of activity” detector has been fooled by
me starting my RSS news reader, and browsing the web from several
browser windows, as I always do (I’m a professional software
developer, so I use my computer more intensively that your average
traveler I guess). This creates more HTTP requests than someone who’s
just browsing the web, but the sign-up page didn’t indicate any
limitations such as these, so I feel like I didn’t get the service
that I paid for. You might want to adjust that detection, and at least
provide a phone number to call, on the error page.

Please let me know how to proceed.

Update: they did reply today, and according to them I was blacklisted by the ATL airport network. I’ve asked for a customer service address to complain there.

I know…when you work for a company named Day, lame jokes are easy to come by…but hey, not all companies with 3-letter domain names are that fun!

It’s been six exciting months since I joined Day. Being interested in most everything, as usual, I have worked on diverse things like cool javascript-based user interfaces, helping customers make huge systems go faster, creating and teaching a developers course for a new product that was just entering alpha state, and attempting to make an innovative apps framework more understandable and agile.

The best part is being part of a great team, with the kind of people who create their own embedded database or content management system in their early twenties, people who reinvent the web, visionaries and great programmers and product managers who focus on getting things done right. Our products usually stay with us for ten years or more when they go out, so making them just right is worth the effort.

Do I sound enthusiastic? This job is really a step up from my previous activities, the things that I work on have a much larger scope, and the technical level is much higher. So yes, I am enthusiastic!

On top of that, several bright german guys recently agreed to join us. Judging by the stuff they’ve been doing at Mindquarry, they won’t bring the level down…

The team has been growing steadily since I joined, and we’re still hiring: R&D developers, service and support engineers, architects, technical project leads and more. Several of us will be at ApacheCon US 2007, so feel free to talk to us about that!