A Good Cause

Posted by Jim Jagielski on Tuesday, October 31. 2006 in Personal

Do you have an extra $5? If so, how about buying an Angel Ad for the Maryland State Boychoir's new viewbook. You can charge it, if you like, or simply make a pledge and send in a check. Contact them at 410-668-2003 or email them at info at marylandstateboychoir.org for more info.
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Involvement

Posted by Jim Jagielski on Friday, October 27. 2006 in Personal

Although not a hard and fast rule, it's been my experience that those involved in Open Source are also involved in lots of other things as well, usually things of a socially oriented slant. And even if they stay focused on just a handful of concerns, they tend to find themselves getting more and more involved in them. The reason, I think, is clear: these issues or concerns are important to them, and so they volunteer as much as possible to help them to succeed. And the more they do, the more they tend to be asked to do additional things. Not to toot my own horn (despite the fact that this is a blog), but 2 things recently happened to me that kind of follows this pattern. I bring them up not only to support my theory, but also because they are important to me, and hopefully the more people that are aware of them, the more success they will have. The first is that I was nominated and then voted in as the new Chair of the ASF Public Relations Committee. The PRC is basically the group of people within the ASF who are responsible for handling the marketing and other PR-type issues of the ASF to the external world. What with the announcement of the ASF Sponsorship Program (here and here), as well as the recognition within the ASF that we are leaders and examples to the open source community, the ASF has decided to focus more energies on PR. This is hard for many of us, since we are, after all, developers, engineers and hackers, and not marketing people. But it's something we need to do, and we're refocusing to make that happen. The other is that I was asked to serve on the Board for The Maryland State Boychoir. As with the ASF, I was already pretty heavily involved with the MSB, but when asked to help out on the board, I couldn't refuse. In today's society, I think it's crucial that boys and young men are involved in the arts, and the MSB provides an opportunity for boys of all ages and backgrounds to build self-esteem, self discipline and character while growing in their vocal talents. It's kind of cool seeing such a diverse group of young men hang out, play sports, discuss the finer points of Family Guy and then, the next minute, sing out with such depth and talent that you can't help but be amazed. I encourage you to at least check out the site, but it would also be great to attend a concert or 2 or, especially, help out the organization financially. It's a non-profit and is almost totally volunteer run. Yeah, both of these mean a little bit less free time, but isn't the reason that time exists is so you can do something with it?
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A painless G5 migration

Posted by Jim Jagielski on Friday, October 20. 2006 in Junk Drawer

As noted earlier, I received my new Quad G5 just a handful of days ago, in fact much earlier than I expected. I fired it up and let it run for about 8 hours as a quick burn in test. I then later on rec'd the additional RAM I had ordered, so I shut it down, installed the 2 chips, and then started it back up again. I again let it run for several hours, just in case. No problems at all. So yesterday I set aside a few hours to actually migrate over to it. I restarted the G5 in Target mode and then attached it to the firewire chain on my G4. The 2 serial-ata drives popped up on the desktop just fine. My plan was to copy over all the files on my "file storage" disk to one of the G5 drives and then the full OS X disk to the other G5 drive last. Using the super cool SuperDuper! application, I cloned both G4 disks to the G5, renamed them and then shut down both systems. It was then time to switch out the actual hardware. I had to do some rearranging of my firewire chain since the G5 only has 1 400Mbps firewire port on the back, and the G4 had 2. Luckily, I had a firewire hub around the office, so I used that to make the number of cable changes minimal. After maybe 10-15 minutes, I was ready, and powered up the G5. And it booted up perfectly, and after a minute or so, my desktop appeared exactly as it had been. I then spent some time firing up apps, checking programs, etc ensuring that all was well. Yep, not a hitch at all. This was one reason why I decided to go with the G5 rather than a newer Intel Mac: I knew that the migration would be easier. Plus, I still use Photoshop quite a bit, and needed the extra speed (Photoshop isn't Intel native yet). First impressions are pretty good. First of all, it's *quiet*. Much quieter than my old G4. And it's fast, as one would expect from going from a Dual 1.33 machine to a Quad 2.5 one. For normal operations, the increase really isn't all that impressive, but for the things that I needed the extra speed for (compilations, digital encoding, etc...) the new machine cooks. One con is that it doesn't have a built-in modem, and I did occasionally use my system for sending out faxes directly. What I may do it use the old G4 as a fax server and get rid of the HP AllInOne unit I'm using now. Should save a bunch on paper and ink. Oh yeah, in the process of cloning the drives, I lost the Spotlight indexing for both disks (as expected) so the system has been spending quite a bit of time re-indexing my system. But the machine is fast enough I don't even notice it. Nice!
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G5 Arrived

Posted by Jim Jagielski on Tuesday, October 17. 2006 in Junk Drawer

My Quad G5 just arrived, so I know what I'll be doing tomorrow. Thank You Apple for firewire Target Mode! Will make moving my stuff from the G4 to the G5 much easier.
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ApacheCon US 2006 Nuggets

Posted by Jim Jagielski on Monday, October 16. 2006 in Personal

Now that I'm back (I flew back Friday nite, but both Saturday and Sunday were packed with family stuff), it's time to post some neat little nuggets regarding the ApacheCon US 2006 Conference. In no particular order, although the 1st one is pretty freaking important: The ASF Sponsorship Program
On Wednesday, I announced (or, rather, the ASF announced, I was just the person doing it) the ASF Sponsorship Program, a way for companies and individuals to make non-directed substantial monetary donations to the ASF and receive in-return benefits. We already have 2 committed sponsors: Google (at Platinum) and Covalent (minimum Silver). Expect more info on the ASF site with a few weeks Hackathon
Spent *way* less time hacking code that I would have liked, but at least I did get the chance to make one small patch to the mod_dumpio module. Sessions
All in all, they were all quite good. I missed a few that I wanted to see, but will grab the presos from the speakers since some of them aren't on the CD. "Ahead of the curve"
Inside joke... Kamikazes
7. Or was it 8? Mini bars
How many escaped unscathed? Sushi
On Thursday nite, a huge crowd of us went to Maiko for sushi. Most excellent. The bill was a wonder to behold. Google, Covalent, Charles River Ventures and SourceForge graciously treated all of us. Buffalo Billiards
Attendees of ApacheCon, including mostly us ASF members, kind of took it over. T's and swag
Loads of cool t-shirts this year, esp. the Hackathon one. And the speaker's present (laser pointer and USB flash drive combo) was pretty neat. The people
I finally met several people I had been looking forward to meeting. It was also fantastic seeing people that I haven't seen for months, or even years! Cliff Stoll
"Chocolate milk! Chocolate milk!" Loads of fun and loads of good deep content...
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