Following the reception was the PGP keysigning. Building up the ASF web of trust is important, so I'm glad that we did an official event this year. In the past, this has always been done informally at the hackathon. Unfortunately, some of the people who didn't sign up, and a bunch more people showed up unprepared. Next year, we need to have PGP tutorial session before the actual keysigning.

After the Atom BOF, which was relatively uneventful (lots of discussion), I went to dinner with Ben Hyde, Ben Laurie, and Cliff Skolnick, all httpd oldtimers. We had an interesting programming language discussion (among others) that covered APL, SL5, E, Snobol, and Lisp.

By the time we finished dinner, it was kind of late, but I still had some e-mail, etc to do, so I headed over to the online lounge to take care of that. A group of ASF'ers came back from their dinners, and I ended up staying in the lounge until about 2:30AM. Brian Behenldorf and Manoj Kasichainula educated me on BitTorrent and Tivo Hacking. Dirk-Willem van Gulik spent some time telling PowerBook hints -- I need more contact with the hardcore FreeBSD users who are on OS X.

Dirk is involved in a bunch of stuff. I've written before about the fiber optic backbone that is being installed on Bainbridge Island, with the potential of fiber drops to people's homes. The last mile process is moving more slowly than I would like, and Dirk shared some experiences that they've had with fiber in Leiden. More interesting is that Dirk's been involved with WirelessLeiden, which has installed a wireless network that provides coverage for a city of 80,000 -- 4 times larger than the city of Bainbridge Island. The most important thing that I learned from Dirk is that trees are big problem for wireless networks. Since we have a lot of trees on the island, I'm pretty pessimistic that a wireless solution is going to work effectively for Bainbridge Island.

After that, conversation turned to Chandler, and I discovered that Dirk's company is working on stuff in the semi-structured repository space. Now I have a few reasons to keep in better touch with Dirk...