From the Grilled Peach and Prosciutto Salad to the Hand-Torn Papardelle, to the Angus Hanger Steak you could cut with a fork, everything was delicious. The desserts were simply to die for: the Blackberry and Raspberry Fruit Crisp was a simple concept, but so, so well executed. The Chocolate Silk Cake was in delightful harmony with its pecan and walnut crust and the salt accent does amazing things to bring out the flavors. We were hard pressed to not lick our plates.

Finally, it was all very reasonably priced. If you plan to hit downtown Sonoma, Cafe La Haye comes warmly recommended.

As in every situation with political implications (and which situation doesn’t?), discussions about the rising gas prices tend to quickly degenerate into an ugly partisan mudslinging contest. Suddenly it’s not about the price of filling up, but about jobs in Michigan vs. drilling for oil off the California coast (which was outlawed by an executive order of Bush senior) and if you’re not toeing one party line, you must be for the other guy.

However, it’s about more than that. Perhaps the shift in the market caused by the high gas prices will cause someone to start innovating again. Stop whining about how the auto industry is going down the tubes making cars that no one wants to buy, but come up with a something that makes this entire problem go away. This is America for goodness sake, we’re supposed to be smart. Is it electric cars that drink from the wall outlet? Can we engineer sufficiently efficient batteries that make them go as far as we need them to? Or will they get their power from hydrogen fuel cells and have we figured out yet how to store hydrogen without letting too many of those tiny molecules escape?

In any case, we have to stop putting gas in our cars. The dinosaurs are dead, they are not making any more oil. That stuff is too precious to keep setting on fire.

As of this week about 400 fires remain. I got a good look at this one today from my flight, from just south of Bakersfield looking northeast.

code_swarm - Apache from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

If you’re seeing this in syndication, the embedded video may not come across so do click on the post title, or go directly to the movie site. There is a sound control in the movie pane to turn down the perky electrobeat, although it fits the datastream perfectly.

Very cool stuff.

With all the flashing, blinking and breathing, and the plethora of colored lights in general, it was like trying to sleep in Times Square.

Fortunately, a Google trip across some web forums leads to the cause of the problem, which in itself is an interesting illustration about how intricate even Personal Computers have become, and how easy it is to break something.  The root of the problem seems to be the Universal Type definitions that come with the Microsoft Office 2008 programs. Like all programs, Word and others have file type definitions in the info.plist file inside their application package. According to this discussion at Apple, both the .doc and .dot file types (pre-2007 Word Document and pre-2007 Word Template, respectively) have the MIME type application/msword associated, and Safari, or the operating system service that Safari consults, obviously pick the wrong one. Apparently, all you need to do to make this problem go away is to eliminate the MIME type key-value pair from the offending file type so that there once again is a one-on-one mapping of MIME type to filename extension.

Remember how the Mac used to have Type and Creator information that came with the document files? These still exist, but now have gotten company from filename extensions the MS-DOS world grew up with, and MIME types that come with the Web.  A Universal Type definition bundled with the application (Word et. al.) ties all of these together: the classic W8BN document type to the modern com.microsoft.word.doc to the filename extension (doc) and the MIME type (application/msword) so that the OS and finder, and any program that uses these services, can make sense of these documents in any representation. In theory. Unless something gets multiple definitions and everything breaks.

I think Microsoft should fix this.

There were good talks too: I think dividing the conference up in tracks worked really well. It made it easy to find related sessions and follow them. A logical next step might be to work with the presenters to make sure that the contents of a particular track are cohesive, with minimal overlap. The planners may want to assign each track a volunteer “editor” from that particular field who gets to work with the individual presenters.

I spent a significant amount of time in the Systems Administration and Security tracks because that’s where I was presenting. On Friday, my talks done, I sat in on some sessions about projects and technologies with which I have never worked, and found them really inspiring. During Ate’s talk on enterprise portals I downloaded the installer of Jetspeed 2, and found myself with a fully functional portal on my laptop, ready for corporate branding and custom portlets. That’s cool stuff.

I guess that I’ll also be looking at interesting stuff like Serf and the Waka as they develop and (hopefully) are documented. Will I play a role in the development of Apache 3.0? Ma-a-a-a-a-a-y-be… in my copious spare time. Will there be an Apache 3.0? Only time and dev@httpd.apache.org will tell.

I feel tired, yet refreshed, with lots of interesting things to check out. And that is a good feeling to have after a conference.

The Keysigning session will happen at the tail end of the Welcome Reception, and hopefully be done before the BOFs start. If you would like to participate, send your public key to sctemme at apache dot org before 3PM on Wednesday. I will compile the key list after I’m done with my talks.