Mads suggests some topics for his session about httpd on OpenSolaris for ApacheCon US 2006. Perhaps he may also talk about the NCA, whether it still exists and what role could it play with today’s httpd?
How to Subscribe to the ApacheCon EU 2006 Feeds
No?r?n has put up a calendar for ApacheCon EU 2006 to which you can subscribe from iCal (if you’re on a Mac). I have set mine to update once an hour in case the schedule changes.
On a slightly related note, Apache legends Rich Bowen and David Reid have started Feathercast, a series of Podcasts on Apache related topics. You can subscribe to it in iTunes by choosing Subscribe to Podcast… from the Advanced menu, and typing http://feathercast.org/?feed=rss2 in the URL box. iTunes will then automatically download new episodes as they appear.
Maps of Dublin
Softguide makes available zoomable, clickable maps of many cities including Dublin. For instance, they have one of the immediate surroundings of the ApacheCon conference hotel.
Free Walking Tours of Dublin
meta-writeback: on
For those of us that happen to be visiting Dublin in the near future and not attend ApacheCon, the Dublin Tourism Office makes available self-guided walking tours in the form of Podcasts. Subscribe in iTunes (instructions at the bottom of the page), load some up on your iPod and walk the day away. Very cool. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could obtain the illustrated brochures that go with the audio from the tourist office, also the starting point of walk one.
Smackbook Pro Application Switching
People are having way too much fun with the sudden motion sensor on the Macbook Pro.
Luce in Petaluma
Not a lot of blogging lately: too much going on. We went to see Luce play at the Mystic Theater in Petaluma the other day. Great show. They played both the singles (Good Day and Long Way Down), a bunch of stuff from the second album and an interesting rendition of Eleanor Rigby. We bought a CD afterwards and had it signed by the band. So here is a band with a couple of hits under their belt, and one of the guys we talked to still has to keep a day job.
In other news, I will be presenting at ApacheCon Europe 2006. Topic of discussion will be Apache HTTP Server Performance, with a new section on high-performance web site infrastructure set up ideas. I hear Dublin is awesome; it will be a fun week.
Inside Man
We saw Inside Man the other day. Good movie. Go see it. I mention this here because we were wondering what was the last good movie we saw in the theatre. We couldn’t remember. Now it’s this one.
An iPod is a Harddisk
David Lazarus writes in the San Francisco Chronicle how an identity theft suspect was apprehended with his victims’ personal information stored on his iPod. David, an iPod is a hard disk. You can store any type of data on it you want, including music and video. This is not different from a floppy, CD or USB Keychain drive, just larger. And I suppose it has a recognizable brand name that one can hang a column on.
Bootstrapping a Gump Run
I’ve been playing around with Gump over the weekend. My goal was to set up a Gump run on an Xserve box that Apple has made available to the ASF, so we get some build coverage on the platform of all the packages and projects that Gump tracks.
Gump builds and installs hundreds of software packages, and to get the maximum experience I started from scratch, by checking out the trunk of the Gump source code. Before Gump can run, it requires the presence of several native and Python packages. I found out about these by repeatedly calling ./gump run until it would actually go, installing pre-requisite libraries along the way. I don’t remember exactly what I installed, but one component (rdflib?) required Python 2.4 so I installed that as well.
Gump checks for a number of prerequisites like make, ant, maven, a .Net runtime and it’s build utility NAnt. After I had all these up and running, I had the following build result:
| Projects | Successes | Failures | Prereqs | No Works | Packages |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 769 | 72 (9.36%) | 131 (17.04%) | 566 (73.60%) | 00 (0.00%) | 00 (0.00%) |
Then, I started adding packaged projects by finding out from the build logs which jars were missing, and downloading those from the individual project web sites. This slightly reduced the number of failures due to missing prerequisites:
| 770 | 121 (15.71%) | 111 (14.42%) | 503 (65.32%) | 00 (0.00%) | 35 (4.55%) |
However, tracing down all those packages proved pretty tedious, so I cheated. I got with the Gump guys and copied the entire package collection from one of their official instances. This got my failure count down markedly:
| 772 | 122 (15.80%) | 30 (3.89%) | 497 (64.38%) | 00 (0.00%) | 123 (15.93%) |
But wait, the failure count was down, but the success rate did not increase. What was going on? Well, most projects depended on JUnit, which just a couple of days before had introduced some JDK 1.5 only features. So, I switched the entire Gump run to JDK 1.5. I also populated the Maven local repository by hand-rolling some failing builds. Gump runs Maven in offline mode, so it doesn’t go out on the net to find jars it doesn’t have. The folks on the Gump mailinglist were very helpful getting me up and running. This exercise got me to just about the present state:
| 778 | 404 (51.93%) | 73 (9.38%) | 175 (22.49%) | 00 (0.00%) | 126 (16.20%) |
A few more failures, mostly because of failing JUnit tests, but radically higher number of successes. Tee Hee! We’re getting somewhere! I have now put Gump on an automated run every six hours, with the results publiclly available. Now if I could figure out how the Stats and Xref pages work, I’d be onto something.
Thank You For the Memory
Early this week, I went ahead and maxed out the RAM in my Powerbook. I now have 2Gb and it just flies. With the default 512Mb it was swapping a lot, especially after a couple of days of opening and closing applications. Especially Safari was hit very hard. Now, switching applications takes no time at all. For under $300, I should have done this months ago. What a difference.