0x10 days until ApacheCon: Check the time!

Just a quick reminder: double-check what time it is! Remember that the US has already “sprung forward” and changed to daylight savings time; however Europe and much of the rest of the world will not be changing daylight savings for another few weeks, on Sunday, 29-March following ApacheCon.

This is a key thing to remember for anyone scheduling international conference calls, or when planning to catch your flight.

An excellent resource about times, timezones, and dates around the world is Time And Date.

0x11 days until ApacheCon: Dear Speakers

James Duncan Davidson – a longtime ASF member and past speaker, now photographer – has some excellent tips in his post “Dear Speakers“. There’s also a lot of great commentary there about improving public speaking, especially in a geeky or tech-y crowd.

Be sure to read the comments, there’s some great discussion going on there. And note these are great tips both for regular session speakers, as well as for any public speaking. And there are plenty of opportunities for you to speak at ApacheCon in our other special events.

(This is one of a series of catch-up posts; it’s really less than 2 weeks until ApacheCon!)

0x12 days until ApacheCon: Meet the MeetUps

Along with the usual array of Special Events at ApacheCon, we’ve had tremendous interest so far in the MeetUps scheduled on Monday and Tuesday evenings between 18:00 and 23:00

MeetUps are free for attendees, and are focused on individual project communities. In fact, the community is the primary driver to having a MeetUp – they’re doing the organizing, and the conference is happy to be able to provide space in our hotel this year. The only registration for the MeetUps is to sign up on the wiki page. If you have something to present, great; put it on the wiki, if not, just come with your questions about the project. Laptops are expected.

The ApacheMeetupsEu09 wiki page really has all the key details. If you go, tell them that Shane sent you.

  • Wicket Meetup (day TBD depending on signups), has their own flickr tags.
  • Jackrabbit Meetup (day TBD depending on signups), or anything about JCR; had a great meetup in 2008 too.
  • Portals Meetup (day TBD depending on signups), including Portals Pluto, Jetspeed, Bridges and WSRP4J and other related projects.
  • Lucene Meetup, will be Tuesday evening; ask about Lucene, Mahout, Solr, Droids, more.
  • Maven Meetup (will be held if there are enough signups).

Many, many thanks to Arjé Cahn for his patience with everyone! His tireless drive to ensure the MeetUps got organized and could share our space this year, a win for everyone, both MeetUp’ers and ApacheCon attendees as well – plus thanks to all the MeetUp organizers and project committers who are planning on presenting or being there to answer questions. We hope to get a number of Amsterdam area locals coming just for the MeetUps who will get to see a little bit of what ApacheCon is about.

0x13 Days until ApacheCon: On your favorite social network

ApacheCon’s social network is CrowdVine, where you can create your personal schedule of sessions, export as iCal, comment on sessions, and friend/fan other attendees. But as the ASF is vendor-neutral, we’re also social network-neutral. Sign up to show you’re attending or add your content on any of these:

0x14 days until ApacheCon: It’s cheaper this year!

Did you know that for most travellers, ApacheCon Europe 2009 will be cheaper than the 2008 conference? VAT taxes will not be charged this year, so travellers will find corresponding fees less than last year.

If you’re interested in staying at the Mövenpick Hotel (which is very nice!), they’ve extended their room block discount through 13-March. So you can still register for a discounted hotel room, and if you’re staying at least 2 nights in the Mövenpick, you can register for the Special Discount Package 3 Day Conference Pass, which saves you another 150 Euro off the full conference admission price.

Past conference attendees and members of a variety of other local user and open source groups may be eligible for discount codes as well – check your past emails from the ApacheCon Planning team or from info /dot\ stonecircle /at\ gmail /dot\ com for any discount codes (which you enter later in the registration process) you may be eligible for. All ASF Committers, as usual, register with a special discount code as well.

(Yes, I know I’m a little late with this posting – that’s the trouble when you fall asleep before you remember to post!)

0×15 days until ApacheCon: Are you listening?

We’ve all got iTunes (OK, maybe not everyone), but have you subscribed to FeatherCast yet?

FeatherCast is a semi-regular podcast run by a pair of ASF Members, Rich Bowen and David Reid. They interview committers, members, and speakers involved with ApacheCon and various Apache projects. Listening to the podcasts is sometimes a really nice way to get a different perspective on some of our projects and upcoming speakers than just reading everyone’s blog.

If you’re thinking of attending any of the trainings at ApacheCon Europe 2009, then be sure to catch several of their FeatherCasts with some of the trainers going into the details of their trainings.

Stay tuned for posts about our live video streaming, and some other 10th anniversary tidbits of the ASF.

0×16 days until ApacheCon: What sessions are when?

Can only make ApacheCon for one day? Coming all week but want to plan out what you’ll be doing? Can’t make it at all, but want to see the live video streaming we’ll have available?

We’ve done an even better job than before in focusing our tracks each day, so you can pick and choose, and know you’ll be getting a strong selection of talks on specific topics.

Wednesday

Morning Keynote: Data Management In The Cloud

OSGi and Geronimo
If we did any more on OSGi – all the way from quickstart, to real-life tales, to Geronimo management – we’d have to call ourselves Eclipse.
Data Mining and Search Technologies
Come hear about one of our most wildly popular projects – Lucene – and it’s many related search and data processing subprojects.
Business and Community
You don’t need to wear a suit – in fact, most people won’t. It’s an excellent resource for how our technology – and communities – fit into the larger ecosystems we live in.
Geeks for Geeks (Focus: Hadoop) (Live video stream)
You know you want to be here. Grid your Hadoop on the cloud in the cluster with a Pig in this highly technical track. (Yes, a Pig!)

Wednesday evening features the delicious opening reception with a celebration of the 10th anniversary of the ASF, as well as BOFs afterwards.

Thursday

Afternoon keynote: Open sourcing the analyst business – turning proprietary knowledge inside out

Tomcat for Developers and Administrators (Live video stream)
This grandkitty of Servlet containers and JSP’s is as popular as ever – learn the details here.
Service-Oriented Architecture
Use your Synapses to figure out the right ServiceMix for your enterprise.
Business and Community
This day of biz/community talks is for everyone, and shows how to get community done right.
Geeks for Geeks
Thursday’s afternoon of G4G gets into some cutting edge tools. (Note: pony not included.)

Thursday features our ever-popular Lightning Talks, my personal favorite event of anything ApacheCon.

Friday

HTTP Server Administration (Live video stream)
Just what it says: hardcore httpd learning from people who helped write it; security & advanced topics.
Builds and Clouds
As the ASF and it’s projects grow, so do it’s build management tools.
Java Development
Get your java weenie hat here. Yes, that’s a good thing. Along with all the overviews, I want to see the Shindig.
Geeks for Geeks
Can you handle a third day of G4G?

Stay for the end of Friday, where we have a Closing Plenary and Raffle – with a number of prizes you definitely will want to win.

Have a better description of one of our tracks? Let us know here!

0x17 days until ApacheCon: signup on CrowdVine

As with almost any conference, the chance to network with the people actually working on key technologies is a key part of the experience. ApacheCon has teamed up once again with CrowdVine to offer our own private social networking system.

All attendees – heck, even if you’re not attending, but know some of our projects or committers – are welcome to create a profile on the ApacheCon EU 2009 CrowdVine site. Just Create an Account or Login there.

Note that if you have an existing profile on a CrowdVine site and use the same email address to login, it will pull in your existing bio, url, and personal profile.

On the CrowdVine site for ApacheCon, you can sign up for a personalized schedule of the conference, picking which sessions you’d like to attend, and get your own personal iCal. The great thing about clicking the green plus for sessions there is that you’ll be able to see who else at the conference is planning to attend each particular talk.

CrowdVine also offers several different ways to network and communicate, including making friend/fan/want to meet connections with other attendees as well as having an overall and per-session discussion boards for asking speakers questions or giving feedback. It also provides a nice way to see what other projects or communities other people are interested in.

18 Days; 18 Posts; ApacheCon Europe 2009

That’s right: I’ll be posting once a day in the 18 days leading up to ApacheCon Europe 2009, this March 23rd thru 27th in Amsterdam.

Erm, what? ApacheCon isn’t that soon you say? Hmm. Ah – I see. My title field clearly must have dropped the leading 0x hexadecimal specifier, as in 0x18 days until ApacheCon, or for those decimally minded, 24 days until ApacheCon.

What happens when during ApacheCon?
ApacheCon is traditionally held over a work week. Monday and Tuesday include training classes – with in-depth learning typically from the people who wrote the software.
For those who already know the basics, you can instead join us for the Hackathon (open to the public) and BarCamp Apache (free!). The conference proper happens on the Wednesday thru Friday of the week, with keynote presentations, three+ tracks of sessions, and receptions and special events each day.

Typography Test

This is a sample post for testing typography.  Yes, I’m vain; I take forever to pick a theme.

Primary Heading

  1. Ordered lists
  2. I tend to over-use them; I should really work on editing structure more
  3. Three is a good number

And now for something different

O Fortuna, velut Luna statu variabilis, semper crescis aut decrescis; vita detestabilis nunc obdurat et tunc curat ludo mentis aciem; egestatem, potestatem, dissolvit ut glaciem.

Sors immanis et inanis, rota tu volubilis, status malus, vana salus semper dissolubilis; obumbrata et velata mihi quoque niteris; nunc per ludum dorsum nudum fero tui sceleris.

Sors salutis et virtutis mihi nunc contraria; est affectus et defectus semper in angaria. Hac in hora sine mora cordae pulsum tangite! Quod per sortem sternit fortem, mecum omnes plangite!

A personal preference

Shane likes definition lists
A simple and structural way to introduce a topic, and then describe it.  Somehow, his brain thinks that way.
Ut eu lacus.
Aliquam erat volutpat. Integer eget diam et quam pulvinar bibendum.

Heading 4 Is Only barely smaller than 3

Fusce eu lacus et risus interdum vestibulum. Proin a nisi. Phasellus ac nisi. In urna. Integer eu ligula at massa porta dignissim. Etiam vitae libero pharetra felis semper luctus. Nam semper. Maecenas non risus sed elit imperdiet laoreet. Ut eros elit, commodo interdum, aliquam in, ullamcorper sed, urna.

Get serious, who really uses H5?


# Every planet needs a [Planet] section
# [http://www.blog.com/rss]
# face = foo.png
# faceheight = 32

At level 6 you might as well use >small<

Break test:
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Add in some e.e.cummings, and that’d break the test!