... to John Lam on his new job at Microsoft. Another step forward for dynamic languages. Who knows, maybe now John and I will even get to shoot some photos more than once a year...

Of all the conferences that I attend, ApacheCon is different, because I am an "insider". As with all conferences, the technical program is a piece of superstructure that facilitates the human part of the program. Since ApacheCon is one of the few times for Apache folks to gather in person, I find that the human track is much more important than the technical track. It's a time to have those high bandwidth conversations that don't happen over e-mail, to catch up with old friends, and to find some perspective on what is happening all around the Apache Software Foundation.

This year in the "official technical track", I worked with David Recordon, Paul Querna, and Justin Erenkrantz (thanks!) to get all of the Heraldry committer accounts created and Jira accounts setup. That process has been dragging out and it was one of my big goals to get that unstuck so that we can get going. That work paid off handsomely, because a bunch of code showed up in SVN on Wednesday. So now we can get on to the business of getting the community going.

I also talked about Heraldry in the Incubator Fast Track, a set of lightning talks focused on projects that are currently in the ASF Incubator. This is the first time that I've attended / participated -- I'm not sure if this was done at ApacheCon Europe this year or not. It's the kind of thing that just obviously makes sense, and you wonder afterwards why it took so long. The session took up two session lengths, and there still wasn't room for everyone who wanted to participate. I heard the best quote of the conference during this track. It was during one of the web services talks, and the presented described the WS-* stack of web services protocols as the "WS Death Star".

I attended Sally Khudairi's media training tutorial for an afternoon. I've been interested in getting some kind of media training for a while now, so I jumped at the chance to get in on this one. This was really "basic" media training, which focused on speaking to people, understanding how much information that you (as a technical person) are throwing at a journalist or analyst, and a bit about the world of a journalist or analyst. Sally kept it very interactive and experiential, which I really appreciated. She was able to get Michael Cote from the Redmonk analyst firm to come and do mock press briefings with us, which was great. I've been a follower of the Redmonk blogs for quite some time, and it was great to meet Cote. He and I had several good conversations during the course of the Con.

Brian Moseley from OSAF did a great job talking about Cosmo. When we submitted the presentation earlier in the year, it was directly applicable to Apache since we were using Jackrabbit as our storage engine for Cosmo. Unfortunately, since then we've had to replace Jackrabbit with a Hibernate based storage layer, so the relationship to Apache projects was not as obvious. Nonetheless, there was a decent turnout (especially for the first talk on the last day), and people asked engaging questions.

On the human/social track, I participated (as usual) in the PGP key signing (don't worry folks, cabot will be filling up your mailboxes soon). This was a little depressing for me. Before my laptop was stolen this year, I had one of the most highly cross-signed keys in the foundation, including signatures with/from people who only attended a single ApacheCon. Having to revoke that key and start over was one of the most bitter pills to swallow on the laptop scene.

I also spent a lot of time talking to Stefano and David Reid about RDF and mod_sparql. I hadn't seen Stefano in several years, and it was really fun just to see him and catch up on all the doings.

The photography walkabout/BOF never happened -- the biggest cause for this was that sunset was around 7pm, and this year the social scene at ApacheCon was really active. During the conference proper there was at least one event (sometimes two) every night. Wednesday night was the keysigning, which I couldn't miss, and Thursday there was the Lightning Lottery Talks, which are a must see. So we ended up with nothing. That doesn't mean that there wasn't a lot of shooting going on. I saw a good number of SLR's and lots of point and shoots. The active social scene provided lots of photo opportunities as well. In fact, this year, most of my shots are from the social activities and not the conference. There are only so many photos that you can take of people sitting in a room listening to someone talk -- same goes for the exhibit halls. In addition, I wanted to do a mini photography project showing various ASF folks in a more human setting. So as we made our way up and down Sixth Street each night, there were plenty of opportunities to shoot, and to interact with other shooters. Torsten Curdt took a bunch of really nice photos and Andrew Savory was around a lot with his Rebel XT. I met Debbie Moynihan of IONA when I noticed a camera strap with "EOS Digital" hanging out of her handbag - another Rebel XT.

Several people have asked me about my shooting at the show, so this next bit is for them. I shot a total of 733(!) frames and posted 159 of those. That includes test shots that I took to figure out the exposure for some of the club/party shots. The whole set of photos is here (Leo, I remembered to change the license this time). Thanks to Ken Coar for annotating the shots of his amazing lightning talk.

My photos from ApacheCon are up on Flickr...

"Me too"

• Get my new PGP key cross signed
• Make some good progress on Heraldry stuff
• Hook up with some Abdera folks
• Talk to David about mod_sparql
• Add my FOAF to the committers info
• Go to sk's media training tutorial
• Do a photography walkabout - the austin bat bridge is on my list

This weekend I had some stuff I wanted to write (on paper) and couldn't find any space on the desk in my office. That pushed me over the edge, and I spent Saturday afternoon cleaning my office instead of doing that work. So I was amused to read Kathy SIerra's post about her new office, and James Duncan Davidson's post about the Aeron that he bought when he went solo.

I've been working at home since January of 2001, and I am fortunate to have a dedicated office. When I worked in the Valley, I worked at many companies that believed in hardwalled offices: Taligent, Apple, the IBM Cupertino office. I can easily say that my home office is the nicest office that I've ever had. I have good office furniture, a small (too small to sleep on) sofa, doors to the outside/deck, and nice views of trees. But my office can't touch Kathy's trailer -- sorry no pictures, because I still didn't finish cleaning it.

Like James, I bought a nice office chair when I set up the home office. We had Aerons at the previous job, but even though they were trendy, I didn't like them. Being small, I found them to be cold and relatively uncomfortable. Having had repetitive stress injuries (tendonitis), I knew that things like correct sitting posture and so forth could make the difference between being able to work and being in pain. There wasn't a question in my mind that I needed a good chair, the only question was what it would be, since Aeron's were out. In the end, I got a Steelcase Leap Chair, which is adjustable in all the right ways. It doesn't have the brand recognition of the Aeron, but for me it is far more comfortable.

A few bits on Aperture 1.5

I'm glad to see Apple addressing the issues around the Library system. I wasn't particularly bothered by this, but I know that a lot of other people were. I do think that the changes in 1.5 will make it easier for me to do things like write projects (or parts of projects to removable media). I've just been using a second hard drive as vault volume, which works well, but doesn't help with off site backup.

The new edge sharpen and color tools are nice -- I've come to realize that I am going to want some selective editing tools -- the kinds of things that you can do in Photoshop with masking layers and such. I probably won't want to do this to every photo, but there are some photos where I probably will want to be able to apply such treatments. The more that I learn about photography, the less adamant I get about doing adjustments to pictures. It turns out that lots of things have been done to pictures via filter, darkroom or other techniques over the years. Alain Briot has an interesting essay on these and related matters.

I'm also pleased to see that Apple has taken steps to integrate Aperture with iLife/iWork and the rest of OS X. I've been using some of my top rated pictures as screensaver images, and the new support is welcome, although ideally, I'd be able to use an album or smart album as the source for the screensaver (right now you can only use projects).

My favorite two improvements in Aperture 1.5 are the performance boosts, and the plugin API. The last time I saw James Duncan Davidson, we were swapping Aperture experiences, and we both sort of agreed that all that Apple would have to do for a decent 2.0 would be to fix the performance. Performance of 1.1.x was okay, but not super snappy, and I usually had to quit any RAM hogging applications before I could really crank up Aperture. No longer. It took Aperture over a day and a half to make all the previews for the contents of my photo library, but I was still able to use my machine. Going in and out of full screen mode is much faster, and other operations appear noticeably faster as well.

I sort of lied about the plugin API -- the actual improvement is that Fraser Spiers has done an Aperture version of his FlickrExport. Getting stuff up onto Flickr has been a pain for me ever since I got the MacBook and stopped using iPhoto. While Fraser hasn't yet hit all the items on my Flickr uploader wishlist, he has done some things that I didn't think to put on the list, like adding photos to a pool (now let me do more than one...). I'm not sure how some of the things on my wishlist would work as an export plugin, particularly scheduled/batch uploading, but being able to upload from Aperture is going to keep me happy for a while.

Here's the first photo I uploaded using FlickrExport for Aperture:

Huge thanks to Adriaan for putting out a universal version of ecto 2.4.1. Don't get me wrong, Rosetta is great, but I'd prefer to keep my whole system native.

This year's ApacheCon US starts in less than a week in Austin, Texas. In addition to the regular ApacheCon activities, I'm interested in organizing a photo walkabout, similar to the ones that James Duncan Davidson has started doing at the conferences that he's attending. So if you're interested, or you know good spots to shoot in Austin, leave a comment or send me mail -- please say whether you are around for the tutorial days.