Statler and Waldorf
This will only be funny for ourselves or people who know us pretty well. There is that dream of Marc and me presenting a seminar, not in front of the audience, but from a balcony somewhere in the upper right corner. I guess each of us having a weblog comes close.
11:25:57 PM    comment []  

Trust
While the war on personal homepages raged on, I had a blast today due to clueful people and the intertwinglyness of thought-connected people. Jeff finally got admin rights on cocoondev.org, and we have been chatting for hours during the day about machine setup, permissions, and a way to get our beloved forrestbot regenerating Forrest-based websites both automagically and on-demand, publishing them to the main Apache machines.
After some time, we encountered a bug in the administration system of the machine, and luckily Dan of AO was only a Unix talk away. When we explained him what we would like to achieve, he was happy to install rdist and rsync on the machine, plus some other fringe benefits, in return for us discovering a bug in his system.
So I had a very enjoyable day, chatting away with two guys I never met, yet exchanging confidential information like passwords and so on, trusting each other due to our common eagerness to help the community. Now that was a nice soapbox!
5:21:23 PM    comment []  

Keeping up public appearances :-)
For the Belgian readers: I'll be doing an XSLT Hands-On seminar organized by SAI on 13/Feb 2003. Marc will be doing an XML&Java seminar on 25/Feb 2003. Of course, we both will make abundant references to Cocoon. (Both in Dutch)
Also, we'll be participating in some ITWorks seminars: Open Source (15/Jan 2003) and XML&Java (22/Jan 2003). And if the itch stays there, we'll be organizing a public Cocoon course in 2003, too.

11:16:42 AM    comment []  

Soapboxes and ivory towers
On the hellhole of the Apache community list, where opinions and eloquence are often abundant and solutions are sometimes scarce, the next big discussion is whether people should be allowed/encouraged/forced to maintain a personal homepage on the Apache servers, with some more info about themselves, the projects they work on, and whatelse. Mine is a perfectly good non-example, offering just a link to some sort of homepage I maintain elsewhere, which then again links to this weblog, company homepage, yada-yada and anything else... If, for some strange reason, one of my fellow Apache committers doesn't find the reference to my weblog in my email .sig, he might check if I have such a homepage and is kindly deferred to the real one. Somebody even set up a small directory of such non-homepages, which seems perfectly fine to me.
Now, as is often the case with such discussions, there's pro and contra, and partisans of both sides. Interestingly enough, people have started comparing such personal homepages with the soapboxes used at London's Hyde Park. Which brings me back to that perception is reality thing which has become some permanent theme in my reasoning: people will go at much length to make sure they are perceived by the larger community as the person they claim to be. This might sound quite nihilistic (it certainly feels so), but I believe this is part of human's characteristics: the ability to design behaviour rather than live instinctively. And as long as this behaviour also serves the community, there's nothing wrong with that IMO. But maybe this might exactly be the problem: these personal homepages are there to serve the individual rather than the community. And Apache is about the code and community, rather than a tribe of individuals. And maybe some individual's opinion might be regarded as being the Apache point of view. Then again, I'm pretty sure the Apache community is healthy enough to (de)regulate, manage or administer this soapbox affair on a case-by-case scenario.
Update: README, A Blogger's Disclaimer. Well put.

10:05:53 AM    comment []