If you’ve ever been to an ApacheCon, you’ll know that there are hundreds of great reasons to go. If you haven’t been [...]]]> I’m looking forward to attending ApacheCon US 2009 in Oakland, 2nd-6th November. We’ll be celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Apache Software Foundation, with more content, more people, and more fun than ever before.

If you’ve ever been to an ApacheCon, you’ll know that there are hundreds of great reasons to go. If you haven’t been before, check out Jeremy Thomerson’s Top Ten Reasons to attend ApacheCon. (Note that the trainings aren’t just for Wicket. Naturally, we’ll cover other top Apache projects, from Solr & Lucene to httpd & Tomcat. But we also have training on everything from dealing with the media to keeping your web applications secure!)

Of course, there’s more to attending a conference than deciding you want to go. I’m lucky enough to work for a company that “gets” open source, and is happy to give me time off to attend. (Wanna come work with me? )

What if your boss isn’t so keen to let you disappear off to California for a week? You might know that the value of the networking you can do at ApacheCon way outstrips the pricetag (and you know you can get a special discount if you’re staying at the conference hotel!), but “networking” is a bit of a vague proposition. Especially if your boss has to justify it to her boss, and so on.

So here’s just some of the business-friendly reasons you should come to ApacheCon:

• Just started doing open source, and your team haven’t quite got the hang of open development, working with the community, or exactly how this “open source” thing works? Come along to the Hackathon, for a serious crash-course in collaboration–and a behind-the-scenes peek at the upcoming features of the products you use!
• Oakland is just a stone’s throw from the Valley–whether you need to check-in with head office in Silicon Valley, or entertain a client in Napa Valley, why not combine it with a trip to ApacheCon, and kill two birds with that one stone?!
• Two days of top-quality trainings (Monday and Tuesday) will bring you right up to speed on the technologies you need to know about, quickly and efficiently.
• If you’re not attending trainings, the BarCamp gives you a chance to talk and learn about anything under the sun, with some of the coolest people in Open Source. If you want to know what’s going to happen in the next ten years of open development, you can’t afford to miss this. And it’s free
• What other vendor invites you along to meet the Chairman of the Board!? At ApacheCon, you can meet the movers and shakers who are shaping the products you use, creating the technologies of the future, and paving the way for bigger and better opportunities yet! (Heck, you can even get training from our Chairman!)

Pick the ones that make the most sense to you, and put together a pitch for your boss. Check out the schedule to get an idea of the relevant trainings and tracks, and see if there’s a Meetup that would go into more detail on the projects you work with. There’s so much going on at ApacheCon, that there’s really no reason for your boss to say no!

P.S. If your boss is still a little unsure, why not offer to do a training session for your colleagues when you get home? You’ll learn more than enough at ApacheCon to justify the expense–heck, for the cost of hiring in an expert, your boss could send several people to ApacheCon to quiz a whole collection of experts!

And [...]]]> My father has always been difficult to get presents for. If he needs something, he’ll buy it himself. If he knows he wants something, he’ll do the same. He doesn’t have my mother’s love of certain fabrics or patterns, so that we could just keep getting him Portmeirion china every year (sorry mum!)

And so it was, that many years ago, I drew up our family tree, as a birthday present for dad. I wrote to the Office of the Chief Herald to find out about the Plunkett and O’Callaghan coats of arms. I quizzed my mother and my grandmother to fill in as many details as I could. Unfortunately, I ran out of names before I ran out of paper, but dad smiled and thanked me for the gift anyway. It ended up in the attic and some point, and I have no idea where it is now. I recently threw out the photocopies the Chief Herald had sent me, while clearing through old boxes!

Family is important to me, but I don’t restrict that to blood or legal relatives. My “family” includes a small raft of honorary aunts, uncles and cousins Despite a passing interest in history and genealogy, I’ve never really done the research to find out who my family are beyond the living generations.

I would imagine that Ireland is a pretty awesome country for a genealogist to find herself in. Combine a relatively small population with religious homogeneity, and parochial records suddenly make your job more like looking for a needle in a bureau drawer, rather than a haystack. Add in a relatively small landmass, and you could quite reasonably go around the parishes and just look. Finally, a relatively low level of personal mobility – emigration aside, in an agricultural society if you inherit the farm why would you ever move? – means that if you know your family are from Dublin, or Cork, two generations back, there’s a good chance that’s where they were from three, four, five generations back.

But with all that said, I was always a bit too much of an armchair genealogist to ever go looking through the records, until about a week ago. What happened then? I discovered that the National Archives of Ireland had completed their project to digitise the 1911 census data.

Well, what a job they’ve done! You can find out more at their Census of Ireland 1911 page. They’ve highlighted some fun facts – Oliver St John Gogarty wrote “single” as his marital status, and then had to cross it out when he remembered he was married! And they have an absolutely fantastic interface for browsing and searching the data. Dad and I laughed when we noticed that the Head of Family at Dunsany Castle could not read, although the twelve assorted servants could both read and write. (Little Lord Plunkett was only four at the time – so it’s fair enough really!)

On a personal level, I’ve found the census records for George Plunkett, my paternal great-great-grandfather, the dockmaster at the South Dock in Dublin. I believe I’ve found the records for my maternal great-great-grandmother, who my mother knew as Anne-Marie Buckley Carney, but who the census records as Anne Buckley – she had been married to Patrick Buckley for just a year at the time, and they lived in a house with six windows at the front (and a stable and coach house at the back!)

It’s amazing stuff, and I think huge props should go to the National Archives for their stellar work. I look forward to doing more research when the 1901 census data is released, later this year/early next year. And if you’ve found family records, I’d be fascinated to hear their stories

Lots of Macs, originally uploaded by NoirinP.

A more social post on the ApacheCon – it’s been a manic few days getting everything up and running! Now that the actual conference has begun, I can at least sit down for an hour at a time, even if I [...]]]>

Lots of Macs, originally uploaded by NoirinP.

A more social post on the ApacheCon – it’s been a manic few days getting everything up and running! Now that the actual conference has begun, I can at least sit down for an hour at a time, even if I haven’t gotten to the point of single-focus for an hour yet!

The hackathon was great fun – there were plans to get some work done on mod_rewrite docs with Rich, which didn’t really end up working out… There was the ‘docathon’ organised for the Incubator project which took a while to get off the ground

I also got some basic docs on mod_ftp, from Covalent/Bill Rowe, that I’m going to ASFise/XMLify as soon as I get a chance! (Really, I’m just collecting projects, that I’ll have to get working on once all this is done…)

We got fibre laid, connectivity set up, hacking started, and lots of socialising done. Gareth Eason arrived last night, and Colm brought over half a dozen instruments, so we even had some excellent music!

The Members Reception was fantastic for the socialising – and I reckon I’ve collected enough work to look forward to some more socialising tonight without feeling even remotely guilty about it

It’s the welcome reception, followed by a keysigning party, and I just can’t wait!