Older blog entries for Jick (starting at number 5)

Slashdot:

Slashdot is such a terrible piece of journalism. I'm glad that they got to keep their 'journalistic control', when they got bought out by bendover.net, otherwise I wouldn't be able to read this blatently false report about how "Bush is the winner"

I've been reading a lot of Linux Weekly News, which seems to present a lot of the same articles as /. I'd like a few others to fulfill my techie needs though.. :-(

Watched 'Being John Malkovich' tonight -- very cool flick. I've been enjoying films lately that really break the mold (for me). 'American Beauty' had a similar effect.

lilo: Thanks for the link over to the BALUG. I've been wanting to get into that for a while now.

Been getting lots of positive feedback on mod_snake. People are getting involved with building packages, reporting bugs, porting to new platforms, and all kinds of other goodies. I'm very anxious for Apache 2.0 alpha 9 to come out, so that I can make another release.

So I'm back from London && ApacheCon, back in San-Fran.

I missed 2 important events while being gone.

  1. The Huskers lost!!!
  2. The Playstation 2 was released, and I didn't get one.. :-(

The conference was interesting. There were a number of good talks -- one thing that I was particularly interested in was the Subversion project. I talked a bit with gstein about it, and a lot of the features sound pretty sweet. The only thing I am a bit nervous about is all this use of the webserver. It seems that the webserver is turning into a monolithic piece of equipment -- kinda a cureall. I'll leave it at that.

Feedback about mod_snake was positive. gstein proposed a few changes which I will have to consider. I think steam is picking up for Python projects related to the Web.

Peace.

So like, London is pretty cool. I'm here for ApacheCon 2000 Euro giving a presentation on modsnake.

Lots of cool people here to talk to and meet. The only unfortunate thing is that the weather kinda sucks. There is a nice massage booth, with some nice lookin babes there. Incredible.. ;-)

So anyway, back to English culture, I've learned about a variety of things since I've been here. I've learned about 'snogging', and 'shagging', what a 'quid' is, and what a 'dodgy mini-cab' is.

I'd like to talk about superior English technology for a minute. The common American shower often has either two knobs -- one for hot, one for cold. Or one do-everything knob. Those SUCK. Here, I have 1 knob for temperature, and 1 knob for water pressure. Isn't this just logical? It allows me to turn off the water without getting a cold shower, and hop into the shower, without fiddling with the temp! The only beef that I have with the showers here is that they are very small! The bottom of the bathtub is well over the bottom of the floor, so I am quite elevated, and my head touches the ceiling. Talk about having a hard time washing one's hair! Must the that English people are short. (Except Elizabeth Hurley -- she's so hot)

Enough of this, and back to hacking. Peace

Was pleased to get a patch from jepler for accelerating embedded Python in HTML -- tis much faster now. Speaking of which -- this is one of those areas where Python's mandatory indentation is somewhat annoying.

I watched Jerry Springer tonite, which was probably a huge waste of life. Occasionally, I'd like to see Jerry or some of the audience members rumble with the guests.

I'd like to get involved with some kind of LUG out here in the San-Fran/Bay area -- I'm sure there is one, but I don't know about it. When I would have time to attend any functions is probably up in the air.

Finally decided that I should jump on the Advogato bandwagon and start writing some diary entries.

I played around a little bit with writing an adapter for Webware -- it seems to be a pretty slick program.

I've also been dinking with converting all of the mod_snake documentation to docbook stylee SGML. One of the most unfortunate things that I've seen with docbook so far is it's lack of real support for languages other than C. All of the function prototype tags deal with C types (such as <void>)

Since Apache 2.0a7 was released today, with preliminary support for filtering, I should release a new version of mod_snake. I've been pretty excited about the filtering, up to now, but am having a little bit of reservation about committing to their design. I feel that writing protocol modules later will be difficult, given that there is so much reliance on the request_rec in the filter code.

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!