Notes In The Margin

Day 5 of the Apache training has normally been pretty rushed, and an opportunity to cover last minute stuff before people dashed off to the airport. Well, I've decided to add real content to day 5, so that 1) people really feel that they are missing something if they leave early, and 2) so that the notes that they have to take with them are actually worthwhile for that last day.

So, I've added quite a bit about mod_dav, mod_rewrite, and mod_proxy, as well as a complete treatment of migrating to Apache 2.0.

I suppose I really aught to write some "slides" for this content, but I tend to consider that somewhat less important, so I'll just probably have all the examples up on the screen while I talk about stuff.

tell all the friends who think they're so together

that these are ghosts and mirages, all these thoughts of fairer weather

Indigo Girls -- Love's Recovery

Past the half-way mark in the Apache training class. Things are going well. Having an intelligent student makes all the differentce between a frustrating week and an enjoyable week. Having a student with Unix experience makes things even better. This has been an enjoyable week so far.

Weird thing happened this week. Elections coming up in Kenya on the 27th, and there are two people that really have a chance of winning. Uhuru Kenyatta, who is the son of the first president, and hand-picked by the current president to be his succsssor, and Mwai Kibaki. Kibaki used to be the current president's vice president, but was fired a few years back. Kibaki was involved in a pretty serious car accident yesterday. The official story is that he is not badly hurt, but he was flown to London for treatment, which seems more serious than the fractured arm and sprained ankle that they are reporting. It seems rather suspicious, in a country where politicians have been involved in "accidents" as they rose to power. But today Kibaki assured people that there was nothing underhanded about the accident - that it really was a normal accident.

And today we had the first real snow of the year. There's quite a bit of accumulation, and the roads were kind of a mess on the way home. People were driving 35 about the whole way, which got annoying real fast, but was probably just as well.

Yesterday started training again. I find myself wondering, yet again, why the default configuration file uses 'Port 80' rather than 'Listen 80', while the documentation says that Port and Bindaddress are deprecated. I'll have to experiment with setting Listen, and not setting Port, and see if any bad things happen. The only strange thing that comes to mind is that Port has a default value of 80, so if we leave it out entirely, it is still set to 80. I think.

These classes invariably bring up something in the docs that could be done better. Which is pretty cool. It's like these folks are contributing to Apache just by virtue of letting me talk at them. ;-)

I have been reading my great great grandfather's diary (Isaac F Nace, Company F, 128th Pennsylvania, Union Army), and today I came across this:

Fri, April 10th, 1863

Weather very fine. Pres. Lincoln had a review of the 11th and 12th army Corps. We were taken out about 9 A.M. and had to wait till about 8 in P.M. when the President together with General Hooker made their apearance to review our corps. After the review was over we proceeded to our camp tired and hungry. Subscribed for a picture giving the names of our company & battles we were in. Have to pay $1.00 for the picture.