You Might Be A Winner

So a few months back, I got a random email from someone at musictoday.com saying that I had won a contest they were holding, and the prize was a copy of "Smofe and Smang", by Mike Doughty.

Now, I didn't actually remember entering a contest, but I did buy a t-shirt from them a while back, so I figured maybe I had entered and just forgotten about it. Anyway, I went on with my life, and about a month later I got another email from the asking for a mailing address to send it to. I replied, and forgot about it again. Up until they asked for an address I sort of figured it was a mistake or something.

Anyway, it showed up in the mail today, so I guess the whole thing really was legit.

It's pretty amusing, this is actually the first stuff by Doughty I ever heard, but I was never able to buy it because it hasn't been available for sale in years. Nice to finally have the actual album, considering that I've been listening to the mp3s since I was first introduced to his music by Ben ;-)

Data Center Fun

So Paul, Justin, and I took a trip out to the colocation site that holds a bunch of the ASF servers today. We had to replace a failed hard drive in minotaur, the machine that hosts http://svn.apache.org/, do some operating system upgrades/installs for a few other systems, and a variety of other tweaks that required physical access to the machines.

Anyway, since I'm making an effort to actually take pictures these days, there is some photographic evidence on my Flickr account. Enjoy.

Oh, and predictably it appears that the serial console cable on the machine I installed Ubuntu on was jostled a bit as we were closing things up, cause I can't get into it now. And sshd wasn't installed as part of the default install, so now we can't get into it. Great. Looks like somebody's gonna be making another trip out there soon...

ETL 0.1.0 Release

So a while back I was playing around with a templating language based on APR. I've still been playing with it, off and on, and it's finally ready for a new release.

I've made a bunch of changes since the last version, including renaming it from "APR-Template" to "ETL" since this isn't actually a part of the APR project, switching from a hand rolled lexer and parser to a lexer based on re2c and a parser based on lemon, and the addition of some new features, like filters to html/xml/url encode output. This version also handles utf8 templates correctly, which is a nice bonus we got as part of the switch to re2c.

Note that from the users point of view, the fact that I use re2c and lemon is totally transparent, they generate regular old C code, which is shipped as part of the release tarball, so the transition from the old lexer/parser to the new one is purely a developer visible thing, other than the fact that the new way of doing things makes it way easier to add new features ;-)

It's still lacking a number of features, but it's far enough along that it can be used for basic tasks, and the groundwork is there for finishing up the remaining features I want to add.

Anyway, if you're looking for a template language to embed into your Apache HTTPD module or other APR based application, feel free to grab it at http://electricjellyfish.net/garrett/etl/etl-0.1.0.tar.gz. Feedback, as always, is more than welcome.

Jellyfish!

Some friends were in town this weekend, and since they're into fish we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. If you ever have the chance to go I absolutely recommend it. Even with the swarms of annoying kids you get at that kind of place on a three day weekend it was exceptionally cool.

I took a bunch of pictures, but unfortunately I'm out of practice enough that most of them kinda sucked. White balance way off, a little blurry, etc. I did get a few nice ones in one of the jellyfish tanks though, and I figure that's as good an excuse as any to actually use the Flickr pro account that Rob gave me oh, about a year ago.

Yes, I clearly need to spend more time taking pictures if all I have that's worth posting to my Flickr account are some shots from 4th of July two years ago and three pictures of jellyfish from this weekend. I'll have to see what I can do about that, both by digging through my iPhoto archive to see what's worthwhile in there and actually getting out and taking some pictures from time to time.

Kick Ass!

So a friend of mine just showed me what his startup has been working on, and man is it cool. I got in on the private beta, and let me tell you, they're going to change everything.

Subversion Upgrades

So I rolled Subversion 1.3.x out on http://svn.apache.org/ last night. So far so good, everything seems to be working fine, and the benefits of the new code are already quite clear in some cases. For example, you can now run 'svn diff -r 10:11 http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf' and it'll actually return an answer quite quickly, where previously it would spend forever and a day tracing back through history trying to comfirm that your target path hadn't moved in the revisions between HEAD and your targets...

The next step will be turning on Operational Logging for mod_dav_svn, so we can get some easy to parse log info about what exactly people are doing with the ASF Subversion repositories. I'm quite curious about this, so hopefully I'll be able to get some nice statistics on how our Subversion traffic looks over the course of a week or so.

Making Progress on mod_proxy_fcgi

So over the past few weeks there's been substantial progress made on mod_proxy_fcgi. It's now progressed to the point where it implements all of the FastCGI protocol, and in general is approaching basic levels of usefulness. There are still a lot of things that need to be done (see the TODO list I posted to dev@httpd.apache.org for details), but we're a lot further along than we were the last time I posted about it.

Note that all the current functionality assumes that you're running your FastCGI backend processes manually, and having them listen on a TCP socket, as opposed to the more traditional way of having the server start up a number of FastCGI processes itself, which communicate with the httpd server via a pipe or unix domain socket. Support for this type of setup will come eventually, once the execd work that Colm is doing gets a little further along.

Unfortunately, I've spent most of this weekend watching season 1 and 2 of Battlestar Galactica instead of using my recently gained httpd commit access to push any of this stuff further towards usefulness, but who knows, I may get a little more motivated today, you never know...

mod_proxy_fcgi

Well, it looks like the little module Paul and I have been hacking on managed to get a bunch of people interested in it last night. Well, I'm glad to see that people like the stuff we're doing, but I do think some of what people are talking about is a bit premature.

So far, we've got a proxy backend module that speaks a subset of the fastcgi protocol. Assuming you've applied the lastest set of patches I posted to dev@httpd.apache.org you can actually run a fastcgi process (listening on a TCP socket) and via a ProxyPass setting tell httpd to hand all requests for a particular part of your URL space off to it. The fastcgi implementation is pretty bare bones, and has a bunch of known problems in it, but it is enough to get "Hello World" to work.

None of this is even close to the final solution we envision for this stuff. We still need to look at unix domain sockets and local fastcgi processes, with a mechanism for starting and stopping those processes as needed, and while we've talked a little about how that should work no code has actually been written for it yet. We'd also like to make the whole thing a lot easier to configure, the final goal being that a simple local fastcgi setup for something like Rails or Django shouldn't need more than one or two lines in httpd.conf.

Anyway, like Paul said, this is all very much a "free time" project for both of us, so no promises on when it'll actually get done, but we are working on it as time permits, and it's made pretty good progress lately, so who knows, maybe there will be something useful in the trunk of the httpd subversion repository fairly soon.

Infrastructure Holiday Fun

I got to exercise my newfound ASF Infrastructure powers for the first time today, by upgrading the httpd install that runs http://svn.apache.org/ (and http://cvs.apache.org/ for what it's worth) to version 2.2.0. The main http://www.apache.org/ instance has been running 2.2.0 (well, 2.1.10, which is just 2.2.0 with a slightly different version number) for a while now, so I don't anticipate any problems, but I was still a little nervous since it was my first time doing something like this.

For the curious, the only reason this hadn't happened yet was that upgrading this httpd install involves rebuilding mod_dav_svn and mod_authz_svn (since the MMN changed between the last version and this one) and nobody had managed to find the free time to do it.

Anyway, everything seems to be working just fine, but if you notice any problems please feel free to drop me a line.

Welcome to the ASF

So there are a lot of things from last week's ApacheCon that I'm sorry I missed, but ironically, the thing I really wish I was there for actually happened while I was sitting in the airport waiting to fly back to San Jose.

You see, at the ASF Members meeting I (along with a bunch of other people, whose names will become public once they've all been notified) was voted in as a member of the Apache Software Foundation.

This is a really big deal for me. I've been hanging around the ASF for years, helping out where I can, because I think the ASF does good work and that it plays a hugely important role in the software world, providing a place people can develop high quality tools that can be used by both open source and proprietary projects everywhere.

Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who voted me in, and that I'm looking forward to becoming more involved in the day to day operation of the ASF.