Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Working from home.

Due to some recent changes I now work from home most of the time, as such I've had to think about how this changes my established work flow and what constitutes a work space. Over the last eight years I have generally worked from an office building full of cubicles and their occupants. Now I have a space in the basement where I keep my router, workstation tower, and other assorted bits of kit, to which I access with my Macbook. This arrangement allows me to sit in my desk for a 'normal' setting, or go a field for some variety. So the thing I guess I'm interested in is seeing just what this change will have on the work I do and its character. Does working from home or on the road change one's product?

One thing that I have noticed is that working from home does make one appreciate some of the background  noise of a busy office - the coffee breaks, and water cooler chat does offer some benefits; be it discussing tricky issues, or hearing about some neat piece of code someone had developed. In that vein I try to get out and work in local coffee shops or have colleagues over to break the quiet cycle. I recently had one of my Apache Camel friends over for some code fun and a proper coding breakfest/dinner (I included some pics of the Canadian bacon and cornmeal bread for Oisin's benefit).

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Karaf is now a top level Apache project!

It was barely a little more than a year ago that I was announcing that the Servicemix Kernel sub-project had moved to Felix and renamed to "Karaf". Time has moved on and development has been proceeding at an amazing pace, this growth has been so pronounced that we have requested to have Karaf recognized as its own top level project - this request was successfully granted :)

Now that the process has begun to establish Apache Karaf as a top level project, I thought it would be good to start publishing a few links so that Karaf developers & users could find its new home.

Karaf home page:
http://karaf.apache.org/

Karaf issue tracker:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KARAF

Karaf source code (anonymous check out from Karaf trunk):
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/karaf/trunk/

Karaf hudson build status:
http://hudson.zones.apache.org/hudson/job/Karaf/

Karaf mailing lists:
http://karaf.apache.org/mailing-lists.html

Karaf contributing guide:
http://karaf.apache.org/contributing.html

As a small personal note, with the establishment of Karaf as a top level project I have been included as a committer and the Karaf PMC :) 

Friday, June 18, 2010

Upcoming local events and seminars; June 2010

As the summer months arrive the local tech community has become relatively quiet. Moving towards the Fall I expect to see a flurry of new event and seminar postings, which I'll try to post here for your convenience. In the mean while I have one event to mention coming up in October, and a few media communications from NATI and CIPS-NL to pass along.

High Technology Crime Investigation Association: Atlantic Canada Chapter:
8th Annual Conference. Focusing on IT security and investigations, their theme this year is "Do you know where your data is?"

NATI:
Export Advantage Internship Program

CIPS-NL:
WIT 2010 Call for Sponsors