RE: [RFC] holding a mod_perl conference
On Wed, 5 Apr 2000, Leon Brocard wrote: Throwing another idea into the works, I'm currently exploring ideas for a potential yapc::Europe in London this September. Interesting. I'm sure my wife would be *thrilled* for me to take her with me on that sort of trip, she's been hounding me to take her to England for the last couple years :) I'm currently stuck on venues - I *was* gonna hold it at Imperial College (conference fees on the order of single-figure dollar ammounts), but talks have kind of dried up. I'm about as qualified to discuss conference facilities in England as I am to discuss CP/M kernel internals, so I'm going to pass on this topic... Where are all you mod_perl guys? Would you be willing to come over to the UK? I've already said I would (and you can see where I am at present below)... OTOH, a couple days ago Randal posted about NOT being able to leave the US. I'm also not sure how a conference in England would affect our friends on the West Coast... I can hop a flight from Boston or New York to London for $300 (assuming I get a sale), it's closer to $1000 from San Francisco or Seattle (or it least, it was when I used to live out West). Of course, I also said (last week) that (and I still feel this way) the best solution for a mod_perl (or Apache::ScriptCon now?) conference is somewhere in/near the Valley -- and that that should be a static location. From personal experience (granted, this was eight years ago), I can say that the Hyatt Regency Bayshore, while a reasonably expensive facility, has beautiful conference facilities and is *VERY* convenient to SFO (as if SFO was particularly convenient in-and-of-itself?). Jeff D. "Spud (Zeppelin)" Almeida Windsor, CT [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [RFC] holding a mod_perl conference
On Wed, 5 Apr 2000, Nathan Torkington wrote: The problem with standalone conferences is that you need to have reasonably high attendance before they pay for the logistical work and equipment hire needed to put them on. "Reasonably high" could be anywhere from 200 to 500 depending on the hotel, speakers fees, tutorial attendance, number of parallel tracks, etc. 1) I don't think getting 200 people to attend a mod_perl conference is particularly ambitious at all, especially if it's held in a manner convenient for people to attend. 20,000 people went to Linux World in New York, and it wasn't THAT great of a show If you hold a conference where you already have a fairly thick concentration of mod_perl developers, and you get the right people to speak, people WILL come. 2) What people are saying isn't that we want a huge, IDG-ish production with tracks and a tradeshow floor and catered water and soundsystems and skirted tables. Several people have said they would rather have something along the YAPC model... a small, productive session, perhaps better suited for the conference facilities of a University than those of a hotel. If ever there was something calling for the "KISS" mantra, it was this con. :) Would we appreciate logistial support from O'Reilly? Of course. Do we want this con to be large enough to have to worry about revenue models? Not particularly. ******** Jeff D. "Spud (Zeppelin)" Almeida Windsor, CT [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Offtopic!] [RFC] holding a mod_perl conference
On Mon, 3 Apr 2000, Ruben I Safir wrote: The Grand Cayman is not US Virgin Island? Nope, the Caymans are a separate country altogether, in the Carribean. Check out the CIA World Factbook entry at: http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/cj.html For anyone who is going to the Caymans (I presume we AREN'T having the conference there *g*), some friends in Florida (one of whom is a Cayman national) who go there frequently say to NEVER put anything of value in your luggage... they've had significant losses by the time they get the bags from customs. Jeff D. "Spud (Zeppelin)" Almeida Windsor, CT [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: HTTP_USER_AGENT
On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, Jason Murphy wrote: I remember that SlashCode (The ModPerl scripts that run Slashdot.org) has a big listing of HTTP_USER_AGENT's in it. You might want to head over to www.slashcode.com and get SlashCode and find it in there. Its a small download. I still think that's missing an important point: YOU CAN'T HAVE a canonical listing of HTTP_USER_AGENT values, because NO SUCH ANIMAL exists :) All HTTP_USER_AGENT is is a string supplied by the client, and as long as the client follows the spec for what the string is supposed to look like [ Client/Version (param; param; ... param) ] then it is a valid response. I've written client scripts before that supplied values like "HungrySalmon/1.0" for HTTP_USER_AGENT. Nor can you trust it: it's a simple matter of editing one string table inside Netscape to change it (even easier than replacing the "traveling N"; IIRC, Netscape's "customization" kit for corp. clients even supports it directly), and if the agent is a client script, it's even easier to spoof (Exercise for the reader: write an HTTP client script using LWP that reports its user agent as "Navigator/3.04"; no, I don't want to see it when you're done -- I didn't collect homework when I did teach, I'm not going to start now *g*) in your own widgets. At one point I was involved with a project to collect the HTTP_USER_AGENT strings reported by spiders, and associating them with the search engine they belonged to, so that the "most appropriate" set of meta-information for that particular search engine could be returned... and it wasn't that long of a list. So you can get probably 99% of the information you want fairly easily, but I still wouldn't trust it. Incidentally, if you either use the (deprecated) Agent_Log directive or used the "combined" logfile format, you can extract a list of HTTP_USER_AGENT strings from your own server logs :) And now, you know not to be alarmed when you find your site being visited by someone using "FlailingJellyfish/5.7" :) ******** Jeff D. "Spud (Zeppelin)" Almeida Windsor, CT [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [RFC] holding a mod_perl conference
On Fri, 31 Mar 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Apache::Conference I can't decide if it is a good thing or no, seeing as there might be some confusion that it is really just another ApacheCon You have a point. How about: Apache::PerlConference ?? :) Jeff D. "Spud (Zeppelin)" Almeida Windsor, CT [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [RFC] holding a mod_perl conference
On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, John D Groenveld wrote: Site selection is never going to please everyone, that's why varying it from year to year is the friendliest solution. Don't confuse "friendly" with "politically expedient". I've been to conferences that do it both ways, one static location and shaking-it-all-about, and I'd say the ones in a static location are generally more user-friendly, even if you have to travel quite a distance to attend. Why? The statically located conferences tend to simplify the amount of intellectual capital expended on minutiae: * Airport transportation: what's available, etc. * Parts of town to avoid. * Things to do after conference hours. * Availability and quality of restaurants. * Nearby miscellaneous amenities (mall, drugstore, etc.). * How to get from point A to point B. (general local geography) If you spend a week a year in Vegas over a couple of consecutive years, you'll rapidly become an expert at "How to attend a conference in Vegas." OTOH, if the conference hops from Vegas to Orlando to Kansas City, whatever experiential knowledge of the local area you picked up in the physical act of attending the conference has little transfer value. **************** Jeff D. "Spud (Zeppelin)" Almeida Windsor, CT [EMAIL PROTECTED]
