The More Things Change...

So apparently the specific content of whatever I'm supposed to be writing has approximately zero impact on how much procrastination is involved with getting the chapter in question written.

A few weeks ago I was working on the chapter of my book about "Advanced Apache Integration", and since I'm not a huge Apache person I wasn't exactly thrilled about writing about it. As a result I ended up putting it off till the last minute, and wrote most of the chapter (which I'm still not happy with) in the last day or two before the deadline.

Today, I'm working on the chapter about "Best Practices", which is pretty much an excuse to blab on and on about how people should run their projects, and as anyone who's discussed the topic with me knows, I love doing that, so you'd expect that I'd have no trouble kicking out a chapter about it, right?

Wrong.

It's still a few days before the deadline, and I'm still not even close to done...

Making Progress

Apparently the Geronimo guys are making progress.

They were actually able to demo the Sun pet-store example program at the closing sessions of Apachecon, after spending much of the conference frantically fixing bugs.

Nice work!

It's always good to see neat projects like this moving along, and for someone like me who only has the vaguest clue about J2EE the only way to be sure they're moving along is when they actually start putting something together that resembles a finished product in functionality.

What Does "Gewinnertypen" Mean?

So apparently we won an award.

It's in german, so I can't read most of it, but it seems to be for "best newcomer of the year."

Cool.

Some Stuff That I've Been Thinking Lately...

Just some random things that have been on my radar lately...

• mark is cynical, but unfortunately right.
• maven is cool. well, it would be cool if i actually used java very much, but since i don't i suppose it'll have to settle for being theoretically cool.
• APR is actually going to hit 1.0 soon!
• If you're every looking for a textbook example of how an open source project should deal with allegations of copyright infringement, the recent thing between geronimo and jboss is exactly what you're looking for. I've been following the geronimo-dev mailing list for the past few days, just to see how they dealt with the issue, and they've been nothing less than totally professional about the whole thing. well done.

Say It Brother!

mpt is directly on target with this wonderful rant about the usability of SSL certificates.

i imagine it would still be almost as amusing even if i hadn't been digging through the documentation for mod_ssl for the past two days trying desperately to come up with some simple and clear directions for how to configure SSL support for a Subversion server.

i mean honestly, these things just should not be this hard.

How Unfortunate

Lawyers really tend to mess up cool things, don't they?

I mean come on, it's a parody people, lighten up!

A Story That Wasn't

Neil Gaiman has an interesting interview on slashdot, which is well worth reading (unlike most things on slashdot lately).

The fourth question is particularly interesting. It seems like a horrible shame that something that would have undoubtably turned into a fantastic Sandman story will never be written, but I can see why he did not write it, and I agree that it's probably best that he did not.

Oh, and speaking of Sandman stories, if anyone out there hasn't read Endless Nights, go out and buy a copy immediately. It's just that good.

I Call It... Mini-Db

Ok, so DBD::SQLite is entirely too cool.

I spent most of today mining data from log files and stashing it in an SQLite database, which lets me easily pull out particular parts of it for display in cute little gnuplot graphs. It's pretty neat, and way easier than setting up a real database. I love using perl for this kind of thing, it really shines at it.

Of course, I didn't get quite far enough to actually extract any useful data from my logs, but that's just a matter of turning my scripts lose on a larger data set.

At least I hope it is...