ApacheCon: Wednesday Afternoon

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Lunch

Sander, Jade, Zak, Shane and I headed off to the Mirage for their buffet lunch. Coversation included dead end jobs at dental labs, LindowsOS, differences between Israeli and Diaspora Jews, the conference scene, and handling traffic surges on websites (Fifa World Cup, 9/11, slashdot).

After lunch, I had a drink with Randy Terbush. We talked about Apache 2.0, Tribal Knowledge, where Yahoo! is going with the Open Source movement, and a little about the ASF in general.

mod_perl 2.0

I caught the tail end of Stas Bekman’s talk on mod_perl 2.0. I own a copy of the classic Writing Apache Modules in Perl and C, but I’ve only read the C parts of the book. In short, mod_perl 2.0 looks like it’s going to be really useful when it’s done. I got the impression that it’s still not ready for Prime Time, but it’s closer than it was 4 months ago. All new technologies need some soak time to work out all of the bugs.

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Advanced Topics in Module Design: Threadsafety and Portability

Aaron Bannert’s talk was about thread-safe Apache code and how to use the APR when writing modules that need to do fancy synchronization and locking. I didn’t have the energy to take good notes and the room was a little too warm which induced some degree of sleepiness. So I’ll just summarize the session as follows: writing portable thread-safe code is a pain in the neck, and the APR makes it slightly easier. But it’s still a pain.