Notes In The Margin

I read with mounting horror Aaron's post about the Ruby conference, and the various things that he linked to from it. Unfortunately, it's an old and familiar story.

Unfortunately, it reminds me of attitudes in another community I used to be very involved in - Perl. Attitudes within Perl seem to have changed an awful lot in the last 10 years. I'm sure a lot of that had to do with the discovery that Allison Randall was smarter than any half-dozen of the rest of us put together. But, too, it had a lot to do with the examples of folks like Larry Wall and Casey West, who demonstrated by their actions that it was possible to be brilliant, but still be professional. This is a message that many boys (I hesitate to call them men) within the Ruby community haven't grasped yet.

Having been involved in the planning of ApacheCon for the last seven years, I'm also horrified that the planning committee for a (seemingly) respectable conference would accept a talk that made no secret of the fact that it would use jokes about pornography to make its points.

I've written before about how pornography is treated as acceptable for public discourse. That was 6 years ago. At least in the technical circles *I* work in, this attitude has lessened, but not vanished, in that time. It is far less common for me to hear reference to porn in every day technical discussion than it was back then. I don't assume that the people in question believe, as I do, that pornography itself is damaging. I think it has more to do with the realization that some discussions simply don't belong in professional settings. When someone spends good money to travel and attend your conference, they deserve to be treated with professionalism and respect, not treated to a stream of pornographic images and sexual innuendoes.

And this isn't just about alienating the women in your audience. Turns out that some heterosexual men actually believe that objectifying women isn't a good thing. But even if you don't accept that belief, you owe it to your audience to treat them with professional courtesy, and recognize that they are paying a LOT of money to attend a technical conference, not a peep show.

Shame on Matt for putting together this presentation. Double shame on GoGaRuCo for accepting this talk. Shame on the decent men in the audience (assuming there were any) who didn't get up and walk out after the first slide. Shame on the chauvinistic boors who are defending Matt in the various forums where this is being discussed.

Turns out, in the real world, it actually matters if you're a jerk. It's time for the Ruby On Rails community to grow up and realize that being professional isn't a weakness. But it would be grossly short-sighted to merely point the finger at them and not take a close look at the attitudes within our own communities - be they technical or otherwise - and seriously reconsider our common courtesy in the work place.

In the last few days, I've received my itineraries for travels in May, and it's suddenly seeming very close.

The last week of April I'll be leaving for Apachecon in Amsterdam. I'm still frantically trying to get my tutorial notes done so that I can have them in by the deadline on Friday. I was dumb enough to submit a brand new tutorial for this ApacheCon, after giving the same tutorial every ApacheCon since 2000 in Orlando (with one exception - I was just so sick of it that I didn't do it in Austin.) and now I have to actually prepare it. Just an enormous amount of time involved in putting together a half-day tutorial.

Two weeks after that, I'll be speaking at PHP|Tek in Chicago - one of the few places in the world that I can fly to without changing planes. I've never been to a PHP conference before, and it's a great honor to be asked. I'll be giving my "intro to mod_rewrite" talk, and then I'll get to hang out with all those cool PHP people for a few days. I'm really looking forward to that.

So, if you're going to be in either Amsterdam or Chicago in May, do drop by and see me. And if you're not, well, you should make plans to be. They'll both be great conferences, and there will be interesting people there.

Ohio LinuxFest was great, as usual.

There were 5 of us there from Asbury, as well as two other folks (that I knew) from the Lexington area. And, in addition to the 7 of us, there were about 1050 other people, up from just over 700 last year.

I did a new talk - 20 things you didn't know you could do with your Apache web server - and I had a ton of fun doing it. 20 things is really way too much material for 60 minutes, but even that worked out pretty well, as folks were never given the chance to lose interest. If one of the things wasn't of much interest, there would be another in 2 minutes. And there was only one person in the audience who claimed to know as many as 10 things, which was very satisfying.

I did cheat a little bit, since a lot of the stuff was from 2.2, and one thing was from 2.3. But evangelizing 2.2 is, I think, pretty important. There's lots of amazing stuff in it.

Also of great interest was the (as they were introduced) LIVE NUDE PENGUINS! Yes, two penguins came to see us. They were jackass penguins, and did indeed bray like donkies. It was very cool to see them. I'm sure that someone has posted a bunch of photos on Flickr by now.

Other excellent speakers included Chris DiBono, Jeff Waugh, Jay Pipes and Jon maddog Hall.

Jay's talk, in particular was very valuable. However, by about half way through, he had gone past my ability to understand what he was talking about. This is, of course, one of the things that makes OLF so unique. Zero product pitch. 100% technical talks.

Also very cool was hanging out with Skippy and Owen, and putting together our detailed plans for world domination. (No, I can't tell. It's a secret!)

Looking forward to next year's conference! It will be even better!

This weekend several of us from Asbury went up to Ohio LinuxFest. The conference is another post.

On the trip up, there were two cars, and we had an iVAN - that is, an intra-Vehicular Area Network. In one car, we had an inverter, and a wireless access point. I was in the other car, running the IRC server. I also was streaming Old Time Radio podcasts from iTunes, which they were playing on the stereo in the other car.

Oh, yeah, and we had CB radios, too.

We got a pretty strong link between the cars when we were 2 or 3 car lengths away, but beyond that, it broke down pretty fast.

Mostly, though, it was cool just to do it. And very geeky. :-)

I'm *finally* done with my presentation for Ohio Linux Fest. Yay. And it's only a week from today.

If you're anywhere near the area, you really should come. It's great.

In reviewing my slides one last time, I discovered that at the end I made a joke about Lilo coercing me to put in the plugs for irc.freenode.net. It's always interesting to uncover these little reminders of someone who is gone. Rob always encouraged me to softpedal promotion of Freenode when I talked about IRC involvement at conferences. If you benefit from Freenode's services, consider sending them a few bucks.