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tags:
all,
apache,
apachecon,
apacheweek,
bryce,
cve,
fedora,
fudcon,
geocaching,
gps,
ha,
jabber,
metrics,
microsoft,
nashville,
north carolina,
oscon,
red hat summit,
security,
trips
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mark :: blog :: north carolina
I was away for a few days to go to Red Hat HQ - the whole thing felt like an episode of 24, trying to fill every minute with some activity or other. Only Jack Bauer doesn't have to wait for an hour for an Airport shuttle to the hotel; or a five minute queue for the gents toilets. Those would be pretty unexciting episodes. Fortunately everything went to plan and on the last day was able to fit in exchanging my laptop (from an old Dell to a new IBM T41), doing two interviews, attending various sessions, receiving a long-service award, packing, and making it to the airport with time to spare.
Anyway, I normally put on a ton of weight when I visit the US so I weighed myself before and after my trip. I actually ended up losing 5 lbs because the food was dreadful and we didn't have time to go get alternatives. Fortunately I'd taken a gift of English chocolate for a friend and ended up keeping one of the bars for emergencies.
So it turns out the guy who wrote
libxml and libxslt works for Red Hat too as I was in a phone
conference today with him. I've also been looking at the
Perl module that links in libxslt but it's having teething
problems with glibc 2.2.2.
Finished off my
Guide to
ApacheCon 2001 and my
ApacheCon
photos
My last week here so decided to go
up to the mountains with Bryce who for
some reason decided to take his laptop. After my recent
fun with cars and Durham Police I let Phil do all the
driving, which I don't think he appreciated. I found a new xsl parser, libxslt and libxml, part
of the gnome project, seems to be quicker than Xalan and
has the advantage of being in C and not C++ (I'm so used to
release engineering for 30 platforms where even a working C
compiler is sometimes a stretch). Spent a good 6 hours on
Saturday failing to get it working right with Perl the way
I want it to, seems to be a strange memory problem that
goes away everytime I turn on debugging. I was going to buy a Earthmate GPS receiver for my laptop
until I read that it doesn't output standard NMEA format
data so it won't work with Autoroute. I'm still looking
for a GPS solution so the next time I'm coming back from
Scotland and get stuck for 4 hours on the M6 without a map
I can find an alternative route.
Worked out my schedule for the next weeks, I fly to England
next week for 4 days, then to Raleigh for 4 days, then
Reston Virginia for 4, then Raleigh for 3, then Santa Clara
for ApacheCon for 5, then Raleigh for a week, then back to
the UK. All economy too :-(
Finally got a spare few hours so finished updating the XML
database
of news stories about Apache. Used it to update the
apache.org
in the
news page.
FInished "The Longest Journey". Best interactive fiction
I've ever played.
My DELL laptop wasn't suspending to disk, found out it was
because the suspend partition had to be in the first 8Gb of
the drive. Took that time to re-install Linux (it had never
been installed right) and decided to use the latest Red Hat
rawhide. I was pretty amazed when it detected and worked
with my Wavelan card and random PCMCIA modem without having
to download a thing. These Red Hat guys are great *grin*
Back from the UK armed with fizzy sweets (US translation:
sour candy) which seem to be popular in the office. When
we got bought by Red Hat last year I gave a short
presentation on Stronghold to all the developers. There
was a large collective groan when they found out bits of it
were Perl based and that all our developers knew Perl and
that we didn't like Python. Actually, I shouldn't have
said I didn't like Python until I'd actually read about it
because after spending the flight learning it I think I'd
prefer it for most of my scripting needs. So I'm back in
the North Carolina snow for a little while, although I
don't think Tracy back in Glasgow is too pleased at that
thought.
Meanwhile I converted my photo album scripts to output XML
(index.xml)
with stylesheets
(index.xsl) as the old system wasn't very flexible
North Carolina; warm. Flight was uneventful and boring as
American Airlines don't have the cute seat back TV's so
you're stuck with a projection onto a wall and no choice of
films. The films were loaded from a normal VHS cassette
into a player in the luggage area. I didn't fancy being
sent back to England for replacing the baseball movie with
something more exciting though. My palm pilot decided mid-
way through the flight to reset itself to factory settings
but fortunately I'd backed it up earlier in the day to the
laptop. I'm glad I backed up all my work and home machines
now.
Red Hat's offices were still full of people at 7pm last
night, but we'll see how many are there at 8am on Monday!
Well i'm off at the end of this week for a stint in North
Carolina. Bryce is another ex-
pat there, but he seems as bored as toast. I'll have to
keep myself busy and working and finally get around to
doing all those fun things with Apache I've always wanted
to do
I think I'm going to miss: Real Chocolate (Hershey
chocolate is gross), Real Fish&Chips (you can sometimes
find a good approximation in Irish bars), my new car I just
bought 2 months ago. I'm also leaving behind Tracy, who'll
only get to see me once a month :(
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