The Goldfish Chronicles

For a long time I’ve used a tiled genjava logo as the background for all my machines. It’s simple, tiles very nicely and doesn’t get in the way of the desktop. Recently I’ve experimented.

On my work Linux box I’ve been randomly selecting pictures from baby.yandell.org and applying colour filters and other options to them. Quite fun.

However, my new favourite is to grab a few images from http://www.explodingdog.com/ and set them as the source for a revolving background. They stretch very nicely and generally have lots of uniform colour that leads to a superb background.

To counter-point last night’s entry, there are positive things to consider.

For a long time I really missed the tube and being able to get 2 hours of reading done a day. I’m a master at the art of the tube, focus inwardly on your book, pda or navel and ignore the throng. I hated having to drive each morning as it was missed reading time and I’m hardly the most awake person in the mornings. The Subaru has changed a lot of that, it’s a pleasure to drive and while I don’t look forward to going for a drive, I don’t look at it as a huge lump of wasted time. So having a nice car has been a big positive.

While I find the American fascination with cookies of the chocolate chip kind to be far too specialised, leading to a lack of such wonders as the Jammy Dodger, it has lead to some very good cookies. As a kid in the US I loved the “Almost Home” brand that is non-existent nowadays. In its stead I’ve discovered “Soft Batch” and have to fight the addiction. There are a couple of other brands which are well worth a taste.

Ice cream is a US addiction it seems, and I’m well and truly ensourcelled. A local chain (I think) called Graeters is the pick of the bunch, they even have Banana which is a tough flavour to find in the US (banana milk shake seems to have lost out to that bland evil known as vanilla). Graeters even throw in dry-ice for long journeys, and the subsequent physics experiments which every techie-minded individual just has to do.

There’s a chain called “Outback” which is pretty good, a place called “Applebee’s” has a good dessert, “TGI Fridays” have a nice sauce on their burger, but the only restaurant I’d pick out as being something to write home about is “W W Cousins”. It’s a build it yourself burger-bar that makes the best burgers I’ve ever had. So good that it’s about the only beef I eat, all other burgers just make me kick myself for not going to cousins, which I manage to do once every couple of months.

Our house is a major benefit. I love it. Whenever we move I doubt we’ll choose anywhere as extravagent (for us) as the budget-minded voice in the back of my head likes to point out that we don’t really need all of this. Sounds like a palace doesn’t it Before we moved over, we were used to living in a single room, so this 4 bedroom 1800 sq-ft house feels like a mansion to us.

London->Louisville is a definite change in cost of living, so there’s actually liquid cash around to consider buying toys like a new camera or a mac mini. Even though the house seems too much, as a %age of our salary it’s still less than I’d the 50% I expect to pay on accomodation in London.

Which leads to another benefit. Carrie no longer has a job. The lower cost of living means it’s a lot easier for her to stay at home, which is good all around.

Football is another benefit. In the UK I’m a terrible player and would be laughed off of local teams, but here I’m an adequate player and can enjoy myself without turning my side into the laughing stock. Not played for a while, but planning to dip my feet back into the beautiful game again soon.

I can order from Bookpool now I’m here, and Thinkgeek finally stopped claiming that my credit card had the wrong email address (there was no email address, but I was unable to talk to the 3rd party people claiming it was so). KY is a pretty good place for Amazon, one of the centres is just down the road and UPS are based here so things turn up pretty quickly.

So, there are some +ves. Now if only the only decent pub in Louisville (the Churchill Tavern) hadn’t just closed down. It was a mile from where we live and I adored walking there in summer after mowing the lawn for a couple of drinks and an apple pie and custard.

Or how ever you spell the word that means I buggered off and left blighty to seek my fortune overseas. Said fortune today was “All decisions you make today will be most fortunate”.

It’s not really 4 years, it won’t be 4 years until late March or some time; but as a once mathematician I know that the actual number is not important, merely the purest variant of the value and today feels like 4 years, which probably means it is in some weird kind of number system. Hah, and my wife thinks she’s the only one with warped logic.

While trying to get the baby to slumber, I had a flashback of the taste-buds to R.Whites lemonade. No idea where it came from, I’ve never really been a drinker of soft-drinks, but I had a sudden panging for orangeade, as made with orange squash and r.whites at my grandparents house. Odd. Made me wonder what else I miss.

Pate is the first that jumps to mind. I’m not a toffed up kid from Eton or anything, or even much of an expert at the wonder of pate, and I’m too lazy to find the acute to go above the e, but I do miss brussels pate (yep, the boring one) and duck and orange pate. There’s something about a sunday afternoon with a chunk of bread, butter and a lump of pate that I’ve not had for a long time.

Crisps. In particular KP Skips, but any of the usual suspects would count. Monster Munch, Wotsits, the highly salt n vinegar sticks, ringos if they still exist, prawn cocktail golden wonder, worcestershire sauce golden wonder, a world of flavours. Over here it’s pringles and that’s about it. A world of drab, unimaginative barbecue sauce and cheese flavours. I could even murder a hula hoop right now, pathetic as they are. I mean, how can you claim to have a civilisation until you’ve discovered the vanilla ice cream flavoured crisp (and subsquently yearned to undiscover it).

Biscuits are an easy one. Again, this is a land without a biccie. The noble American cookie is, while novel and inviting, a much repeated story. This is the same story as the crisps it seems; lots of choice, provided you like chocolate chip cookies and doritos. Custard Creams are always the first to vanish when my parents bring over a sampling of Tesco’s, Asda’s or Sainsburys wares. Quickly followed by the choccie digestives and then the malted milks. We used to be able to get digestives here, but they’ve vanished since 11/9 and the increased pain in customs.

Chocolate is the last member of the great triumverate. We’re a nation addicted to chocolate, it’s hard to realise that it’s not shared by the rest of the world. Again the same story plays out. Lots to choose from, if you like hershey’s. The cruellest trick is that you can get Dairy Milk over here, made by Hershey’s. It’s grainy and a mockery of the truth. So chocolate is big on the miss list. Easter is obviously a bad time for missing chocolate, an easter egg over here is a cadbury’s creme egg. Did I really once look up at the centrepiece at Thornton’s on Oxford St and yearn? It’s a lifetime away.

That could nicely bring me onto a theory of mine that we all die every 4 years or so. If I look back at my past selves, I start to lose touch with the memories and the person at around 4 years ago. In which case, I’ve finally lost touch with the me who lived in England and am fully cast out. However I won’t go there as there is still so much to miss.

Pork pies. I was never impressed with pork pies. A lump of meat with aspic jelly above it and a rather boring pastry cover. So why do I find myself fixating on them? Sausage rolls are another delicacy which I once took for granted and now start drooling over. Even a scotch egg raises a tingle of interest, and having had to make them at school, I always felt they were an utter waste of time.

Further afield. Going to a chinese restaurant. While Louisville has superb cheap takeaways, there is nothing worth the effort of for an evening meal. I do have a favourite pair of places for lunch (Ya Chings downtown, and Dynasty on westport, both recommended), but none of them can compete with crispy aromatic duck, or the marvellous wonder of going over to Chinatown in London with a group of friends. Although I’ve never plucked up the courage (or maybe the alcohol to blood ratio) since, I once had a delicious ginger eel at an unknown (the ratio again) chinese restaurant when a student. It was one of those magical times when a friend from Hong Kong ordered the food for us (in Cantonese i presume, the ratio wasn’t that bad) and we basked in the tastes.

Lilt is an odd one, but I miss that too. Owned by Coca Cola, but not to be found in the US. Again, I’m not much of a soft-drink fan, but Lilt is nice and brings back memories of Quattro as a kid (I think it was called that, bright green scary stuff).

Fortunately I managed to find milk that doesn’t taste off (I’m assuming it’s all the hormones). I spend 4 times the amount on the organic milk, but it’s worth it for the taste. As I knock back 3 pints a day or so, it adds up. I also managed to finally find real baked beans. Heinz are huge here, but sadly Heinz does not meanz beanz. At all. The trick is to find what are called vegetarian baked beans; I get the local supermarket brand and it’s just like having baked beans at home.

I miss real sized bread, and toasters and kettles that have the power to do their job. That’s a bit unfair as what I really miss is a toaster that’s large enough to fit real-sized bread, if I had it, which I don’t. I only use a kettle when I’m ill. Or at least I would, if I didn’t have an aching hole where Lemsip should be. The variants I’ve tried over here all fail to match Lemsip’s flavoursome approach to medicine. The devil you know I guess, except I happily drink the tap-water without complaint, so it’s not as if I’m completely unable to adapt. US bread is all tiny-sized. Very odd.

Speaking of bread, SAUSAGES. Gah. How I miss the noble banger. Part sawdust, part grain, promise of meat. American sausages are pure meat, generally german or italian in style and such wonders as bangers and mash and toad in the hole are impossible to rediscover.

Thanksgiving is always a bad time. I get a fair bit of stick as the year progresses, because apparantly the English are known for having terrible cuisine, and then on the biggest meal day of the year they serve up a parody of a good honest roast. Oven-cooked turkey (okay, it’s hard to do great turkey so this is really a sign that my mum is a great cook when I’m underimpressed by others’ turkey), mashed potato, green beans, cheese-macaroni and various other mid-week meals. It’s like subbing a player from the Merseyside derby, sticking him in a taxi, and putting him on for Bootle’s latest match. S’just not right.

There’s probably other things that I miss. The Linux computer magazines in the UK are in their ascendency right now, though most other UK computer mags tend to promote the CD over actually having worthwhile content. US mags are getting weaker, but still have a good set of vaguely readable items. Being able to drive at 70 and not be nearing the point where officious police are looking to pull you over. The rain. Which sounds bizarre. The average home-counties person spends a large percentage of their time complaining about the rain, but you really do miss it when you’re gone.

All in all, I’m one hell of a non-adaptable bastard when it comes to my environment it seems. Although my accent has been americanised a touch, it’s still 99% limey and shows no sign of going away.

Perhaps my new years resolutions should be to find one new thing to adapt to.

So the previous entry, while intended to be a review of 2004 and look to the future in 2005 was heavy on the 2004 and light on the 2005.

Here are my plans for 2005:

Much cleaner site. Much of the content currently on Jakarta would migrate elsewhere, or at least have the links removed. Discussions on general@jakarta.apache.org and http://wiki.apache.org/jakarta/SiteInfo.

SVN. Nudge everyone in Jakarta to Subversion, hassle and nudge etc. Regexp should be into SVN very soon; next target is probably BCEL or ECS.

Licencing. Keep hassling on licencing issues and hopefully get results.

Commons Lang 2.1. Nothing to do with being chair, just something I want to get released

Encourage TLP moves. Slide and Lucene are likely to goto TLP; however Turbine->JCS and Commons->HttpClient are moving to subproject level in Jakarta. Score-draw for my workload.

Figure out how to handle closed projects (Alexandria, Watchdog) and sleepy projects (BCEL, BSF, ECS, ORO, Regexp).

That’s enough for the first 3 months anyway.

The last 6 months as Jakarta chair have been a slow learning experience.

To start with, you have to figure out what a PMC chair’s role is. It’s different from project to project in terms of what the community expects, but what the board expects is the same. I began by putting down what I thought it would be, and over the last 6 months it’s grown: http://wiki.apache.org/jakarta/RoleOfChair.

The first big problem was the report Jakarta gives to the board. The board wanted a lot more info than previous reports had contained and over the last year we’ve improved this a lot: http://wiki.apache.org/jakarta/JakartaReport.

The latest report was a very happy success. The board suggested that we do subproject reports based on which ones have had releases; I modified this to include changes of status (sandbox->commons, commons->jakarta, out-of-jakarta) and every subproject put in their reports with limited cajoling.

Next up, as I remember it, was the Jakarta charter/list-of-bylaws. It was getting very out of date and so I used the same superb mechanism that I used to change the Jakarta Commons charter; create a copy of the page and use red font to indicate addition and strikethrough to indicate removal. Then get people to vote on it. It works quite well as a strategy and although there was no vibrant new direction, we at least had an accurate rendition of how we worked.

Around the same time as the charter update, I cleaned up various removals and pending additions to the PMC that had gotten stuck. We’d spent the previous year adding lots of people to the PMC and have now reached a point where subprojects and commons-components should have 3 PMC committers on the books. Whether they’re active is another story.

It’s important to explain what all the fuss with PMCs is. Simplistically, Apache can be looked at as two communities. The original httpd C coders and the large explosion that was Jakarta + XML. In the httpd world, virtually every committer is on the PMC. Effectively, to not be on the PMC means you’re a new committer and not quite in the management of the code part yet. In Jakarta, the PMC was effectively the Jakarta board and all committers had voting rights and were on the management. Things had to change, and the two obvious choices were either an independent Jakarta, or to fold Jakarta back into the httpd (and thus ASF) style. The latter was chosen and we’re about halfway on the road to its end-goal I think. More ‘Apache’, less ‘Jakarta’. In case anyone didn’t know, this is why it’s ant.apache.org and not jakarta.apache.org/ant; and why it’s Apache Tomcat instead of Jakarta Tomcat (though it’s still currently in Jakarta; it’s just being branded under Apache).

Having digressed a little, the important point was that a) the Jakarta PMC include the active committers, and that b) we would thusly have a structured oversight of the codebase. I think there’s still a way to go on this, mainly just because Jakarta is still too large to be treated as a TLP, and we need to decide if it should shrink more or if it should try to come up with some other way of organising itself (less sub-project; more one-project; or maybe more independent sub-projects). I’ll probably ramble on this further in the future; there’s a lot of material.

So, charter good; PMC somewhat good; report improving. What was next? There were minor things, trying to encourage usage of general@jakarta instead of the private pmc@jakarta list for one, but I spent a bit of time relaxing into the role and discovering the mailing lists I should be on. Currently this is board@apache and prc@apache (Apache PR). Increasingly legal lists too; because:

Next up was the legality of licensing. A lot of the reason for Apache existing is legal protection for the coders (well, the members, officers and committers on the PMCs). So a lot of attention is spent on whether certain 3rd party projects may or may not be used. This is usually a slow, slow process and while a lot of progress has been made, there’s little I want to announce publically yet. Suffice to say, this is a big part of the job.

The announcing publically line above links me nicely into another part of my role. As a VP at Apache, I’m privy to internal info; however I’m not a member of the ASF (originally there were 2 of us non-member chairs, now there’s 6 or so) so my privy to info role is rule-challenging as not all of the system is designed for non-member officers. It’s “fun” as a) it’s like having a contracter as a CTO, and b) I have to be very careful about what I say. So a lot of my learning curve has been on how to fit in as a bridge between the partly private board and the public project.

The last month has had a few new themes. I’ve started to nudge subprojects about the move from CVS to SVN. The Apache Infrastructure group would like to be off CVS someday and Jakarta was lagging. Given that those most willing to reorganise were already at TLP level, it’s natural that those less likely to move out of Jakarta are also less likely to move to SVN. Momemtum is growing though: http://wiki.apache.org/jakarta/Migrating_20to_20Subversion.

The last week has seen a sudden burst of mental energy on my part. The website is getting a clean-up and over the next quarter (the board reports are quarterly, so I think in quarters) you should see simple cleanup and reorganisation there. Part of this involved moving from the older Anakia setup to an XSLT setup that had been there for a long time but was unused. Much fun, especially when you find out that many other projects are using the website’s CVS stuff for their own websites Currently my target is a site much like: http://www.apache.org/~bayard/mock-jakarta-frontpage.html, though I don’t plan to stop there. Organising the website is a good way to organise the community; I think the same thing applies to any company where the employees have a high buy-in to the website.

One of the things I’m de-emphasizing on the front page is the view of Jakarta being Java@Apache. I’m effectively pruning this ‘feature’ back so that I can try to grow it as a separate concept within Jakarta. It was really confusing our message of ‘reusable components and server frameworks/containers’. As if that’s not confused enough already

Another big thing to improve is the much maligned download system. The aim is to improve subproject download setups and turn the top level download page into more of a portal concept for getting to them easier. I want to do the same for Javadoc as well; perhaps even try to use my osjava multidoc there.

Day to day tasks as chair are a pretty small list. Monitoring the Jakarta dev mailing lists is something I do, and this uses a fair amount of time and gmail.com space. I change user permissions for CVS and SVN when needed. Otherwise it’s about sitting back and being aware of what’s happening, or trying to.

Recently one of the directors has pointed out a nice legal fact; the chair is the project. Thanks, no pressure, gah. So I have motivation to make sure I’m not biting off more than I can chew It also puts me in much the same position as a monarch in England; legally there’s enormous power, but in fact nearly all of it is unusable, and I have to be careful of meritocracy as one person’s good act on merit can seem like despotism for the chair.

All in all, an interesting semi-year and I look forward to the next year. Hopefully I’ll be able to get to ApacheCon in November and learn more.