Showed up at ApacheCon EU in Dublin towards the end of the day. Said hi to a few people, sat down for a beer in front of a very poor Switzerland vs Ukraine game with some of the Jakarta guys and then went out for a late meal with a different bunch of Apache folk. Much silent reading of gaelic street signs on my part - trying to form the sounds is quite enjoyable.
Beer ran out, so time to head to the room and do a bit of coding. Life changes with kids - once I used to sit and code at 1am every night, now it’s a rarity to be enjoyed. I played with a Jakarta Commons Lang bug in the random String generation. Something to do with high and low surrogates that I really don’t fully grok. I’ve added code to deal with them, but skipping on the concept of private high surrogates; no idea what their partner character should be.
Then a quick read of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. A classic book, I picked it off the shelf before getting on the plane as a nice easy and enjoyable read. It’s up there with Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land, which means it must be within the top 20 sci-fi books of all time for me.
Finally the day ends with a bit of solitude in the hackathon room - blogging, checking email and committing the Lang code. The habit of fixing an issue a night has been a real success. It’s meant I can slowly plod along and now there are only 3 issues left for the 2.2 release. To be fair, that’s partly because I moved 5 Enum issues to a 2.3 release.
Final thought for the night - hotel conference rooms really are very similar aren’t they? I can almost imagine it’s December 2005 and I’m sitting in San Diego.
