October 2006 Archives

I've just finished presenting my 2 talks at ApacheCon 2006 US and it went really well. I was presenting one old talk, and a brand new one and they both drew a good crowd. Overall, I am quite pleased, with a few little tweaks I want to make to my slides for next time.

For those that might want to see what I was talking about, you can figure it out from:

• TH4 - mod_perl for Speed Freaks! (slides)
• TH9 - Advanced Profiling and Instrumenting (slides)

Or just find it yourself from the Talk section of my website

One think I simply can't pass up was that I noticed there were 2 PHP guys I knew in the back of the room during my Profiling talk:

• Andrei Zmievski
• Rasmus Ledorf

And they had nothing bad to say about my talk ;-) Thanks!

And I lied during my talk, saying Apache2::Instrument was on CPAN, well, sorry, but i've just uploaded it now, sorry for the bugs and the documentation (or lack of).

I've just run into a really amazing video of a guitar player from Quebec, but he might as well be from Mars.

His name is Erik Mongrain, and you can watch him play a tune called AirTap!

It's hard to describe, so just take 3 minutes and have a look. Wow!

I am awake and about to head down to the registration desk to officially kick off the conference. Somehow, I think this picture from Ted Leung I just noticed in my flickr stream sums it all up very nicely.

I've finally arrived in Austin, Texas. All in all, it was an uneventful trip getting here. Now, it's time for ApacheCon 2006 US to start!

The weather is warmer than I expected, so no complaints so far.

I do have 2 interesting incidents to share though.

When going through the security checkpoint, I was "caught" with 2 forbidden items. I had a can of shaving cream that was too big, as well as a tube of toothpaste that was also too big. I gave the nice security lady my best :

"Oh, I am sorry, I had no idea you couldn't take this kind of stuff in carry-on luggage anymore..."

Apparently she took pity on me and allowed me to pick one of the items to keep, and she would confiscate the other.

"It's all right, go ahead, pick one and you can keep it, I'll have to confiscate the other one."

I am no security expert, but that sounds like a complete failure of the security mechanism she was trying to enforce.

Before that, when going through US customs, I ended up with a fairly obtuse Immigration Officer that considered my attempts at explaining the concept of OpenSource Software evasive and forwarded me to a nice little waiting room for a secondary screening. Apparently, he suspected there was something very wrong about somebody claiming to be giving software away for free. After what seemed like a long time waiting in a small, removed, waiting room, I finally get interviewed by somebody else. Turns out, he not only understands OpenSource software, he actually runs Linux at home! Very nice, took 10 seconds, shook hands and he let me through. He still wanted to understand one thing:

"Still, why do you guys do this stuff for FREE ?"

Oh, well, if we meet again, and I don't have a plan to catch in 30 minutes, I would have tried to explain it all.