Today ApacheCon EU finished up. It was a great conference—so great, that I haven’t had time to blog or even take many photos. I have put up my slides though:

• Open Source in China
• Incubating Open Source Communities

The slides I used for my Scala: Hope for Java Weenies short talk were largely taken from material in the Scala Beginner’s Guide and I recommend reading that document. I was surprised to find a few others at Apache using Scala so hopefully we’ll see some Scala based projects soon.

Now that ApacheCon is over, it’s time for me to focus on coding. William and I have an exciting product in progress, so expect updates here on the blog.

A talk fell through here at ApacheCon so I had the opportunity to give my Open Source in China presentation. Given that it was only announced that morning, I had decent attendence (around 20 people) and good feedback. The slides are now online.

Tonight I leave for ApacheCon EU where I’ll be giving my Incubating Open Source Communities Talk next Thursday at 10:30 am. This talk is based on one I gave last year at OSCON and this year at the Taipei OSDC. I’ll be sharing lessons learned in Apache about open source communities as well as reviewing the structure and procedures of the Apache Incubator. I’ve enjoyed preparing this presentation and I’m looking forward to sharing it.

I’ll be presenting Incubating Open Source Communities at this year’s ApacheCon EU in Amsterdam, May 1-4. My other session Open Source in China is on fallback status in case another session cancels. I’m hoping to join the Photography Walkabout too. It should be a great conference, so I hope to see you there!

I got back from ApacheCon in Austin on Friday. It was a really great event. I finally got to meet Stefano and attended his semantic web talk (hey Stefano, where are the slides, eh?). Several others have already blogged wrapups so the only thing I’ll add is that I only got half of my published to-do list done.

Saturday I presented two sessions at the Pittsburgh Java User’s Group first Code Camp and the slides and notes will be published shortly. I think the event went really well. We had just under 100 people in attendance and all the talks were well done. I’m glad to see more events like this in Pittsburgh.

Tonight I finally finished some maintenance on my weblog which should make it a bit easier for me to post. I’m still looking into improving the performance of PyBlosxom, but that’s another topic. I’ve also launched two blogs here on CubicleMuses.com: Woodnotes and Peregrinari . Woodnotes is actually Jenny’s original blog from the JadeTower domain. Peregrinari is a new blog that Jenny and I will jointly author. It will feature stories from our travels abroad and other family events.

To be able to easily host mutliple pyblosxom blogs, I ended up using the following layout:

site/
     pyblosxom/
          pyblosxom...
          plugins
     blogs/
	  cm/
            public/
	          files/
                  images/
            entries/
            comments/
            flavours/
            static/
	  wn/
	    ...

I stuck with pyblosxom after exploring some alternatives because I wanted the flexibility to easily customize my setup. I also really wanted to use flatfiles instead of a database. The tradeoff is a performance hit, particularly for a site with a lot of articles, but I have some ideas on how to improve that.

I got into Austin for ApacheCon on Sunday. You really don’t want to see my actual to do list. A snippet of the interesting parts looks like this:

• Finish presentation on Java scripting for PittJUG’s code camp Saturday
• Verify builds tagged for the Excalibur release
• Help with Incubator documentation (does anyone still want to do a docathon?)
• Chair some sessions
• Catch up on Incubator email (an impossible task)
• Enjoy time with some of my favorite other hackers