taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Since consuming a misjudged sossie at a BBQ last Saturday, I’ve been suffering from a stomach bug, causing nausea, sweating and the occasional vomit (never fun). On top of this, I spent Monday to Wednesday in Serbia on a work trip.

The result — I’ve managed to miss the entirety of ApacheCon EU 2006 in Dublin. I considered dropping down to catch the end of it this morning, but had to abort the attempt due to a bout of in-transit nausea.

All in all, a pretty miserable week. :(

Update: here’s something vaguely uplifting — a cover of Europe’s ‘Final Countdown’ in Khmer.

Update 2: wow, that little stomach bug has been wreaking havoc — over the weekend 3 more people laid low in our social group. sorry all…

Tags: apachecon, food-poisoning, illness, mind-the-sausages

Back from ApacheCon!

I’ve got to say, I found it really useful this year. Last year, I was pretty new to the ASF, and found that my expectations of ApacheCon didn’t quite match reality; it wasn’t a rip-roaring success exactly, for me, as a result.

However, many details of how the ASF works — and how the conference itself works and is organised — are much clearer after you’ve spent some time lurking and absorbing practices in the meantime. (The visibility one gets into the process as a member of the ASF makes this a lot easier.)

Result: it was much more of a success for me this time around. Plenty of networking, putting faces to the names, hanging out, and discussing many aspects of our work.

The hackathon really worked out, too; while we didn’t produce a hell of a lot of code per se, it made for a good ‘developer summit’ and I think we established solid agreement on SpamAssassin’s short-term directions and goals. (summary: rules, and faster).

On top of that, I got to meet up with Colm MacCarthaigh and Cory Doctorow for discussion of Digital Rights Ireland. Looks like I’ll be spending a bit of time on that next year ;)

Finally: Solaris. On Monday night, I got to sit down with Daniel Price, one of the kernel engineers behind Solaris Zones, work through a quick demo of a bug I was running into with chroot(2) and zones on our rule-QA buildbot server, and watch as he visually traced it through the OpenSolaris kernel source on the web. From this — and from talking to Daniel — it’s pretty clear that things have changed at Sun. Pretty much the entire Solaris operating system is now a full-on open-source project; it’s not just a marketing gimmick. The source is up there on the web, that’s the source for the code they’re running now, and there’s no half-assed ‘freeze it, cut out the good bits, and throw it over the wall’ fake-open-source tricks.

The concept of getting this level of access to Solaris source code and engineers, would have blown my mind when I was Iona’s sysadmin back in the 1990s ;) I’m very impressed.

Tags: apache, apachecon, apacheconus2005, asf, conferences, open-source, opensolaris, solaris, spamassassin, sun, virtualization, zones

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be going to San Diego for ApacheCon US 2005 (including the hackathon beforehand). There’ll be quite a few other SpamAssassin committers there, too, so if you’re working with SA, or interested in getting some face time with the developers, there’s no better way of doing so.

Tags: apache, apachecon, conferences, san-diego, spamassassin

Trips: So I’m just back from ApacheCon 2004, which took place in the lovely Alexis Park building site ;)

Good fun was had — very interesting to meet all the faces behind the names from various mailing lists and blogs, and get the inside track on how the ASF really works… there’s quite a lot you don’t get to understand from the outside, or even from being a committer. So, a useful trip.

Most of the talks were, naturally, very web-oriented — we’ll have to see what we can do about that, next time around! One useful tidbit: I didn’t realise, but found out at the conference, that the ASF ConCom are very generous with paying speakers’ expenses. So maybe next time I’ll join the speaker line-up, too.

A major goal, one we achieved, was an impromptu SpamAssassin developer summit, 5 days sitting down together hammering on bugs and plans, with 4 of the main developers present (myself, Daniel, Theo and Michael). Pretty much achieved, although there were some thorny bugs to deal with… one interesting factor is that we may now be moving towards emulating the Apache httpd’s preforking model to deal with a memory/performance issue we’re seeing in 3.0.x.

Finally — this sequence of photos has been cropping up all over the internets. When I saw it, I immediately thought it looked a lot like Ireland — and Roundstone, Co. Galway, in particular. Sure enough, it appears it is! I guess the Connemara landscape of Roundstone’s bay is pretty memorable, after all…

Tags: apachecon, asf, building, fun, lot, mailing, place, roundstone, site, time, trips