(I wrote this Thursday night but didn’t have net access on the train to post it) I finally managed to catch up with a number of Apache people tonight at the Thirsty Bear (rest assured the bear is not quite as thirsty after our beer drinking efforts). Afterwards we picked up the two new IBM servers that have been sitting at Collab.Net and deposited them into the cage at the colo facility. Since I’m not a server guy at all this is one of very few times I’ve been in a server room and the first chance I’ve had to see the Apache server setup (there’s now another colo in Europe somewhere I believe). It’s pretty small and simple but seems to do the job quite well which is what really matters. Apparently the Technorati servers are in the same colo and they look a heck of a lot more impressive with a few racks full of servers and cables going everywhere. Either way it was great to finally meet a few Apache developers and put some faces to names. My description of myself as “the tall redhead” seemed to be effective as people walked straight in the door and introduced themselves to me. Sometimes it pays to stand out a bit I guess.

It appears that my back to back rants pretty much completely took over Planet Apache the other day. er, sorry about that… I’ll try to use my “extended entry” box a little more in future…

Apparently, the ASF took delivery of a few new machines today. I just can’t get the image of Sam Ruby sitting around ASF head office and suddenly there’s a knock on the door and he finds a pile of orphaned servers wrapped in a blanket. Then again, I always was weird…

The vote to start the motion of HttpClient out of jakarta-commons to become a fully fledged Jakarta sub-project has been declared passed. I’ve just done up an initial draft of the proposal that will need to be put to the Jakarta PMC to approve the move (they noted that it was coming and that it was most likely to pass at the meeting they just recently had). This is the first bit of Apache “politics” I’ve been involved in so I’ll be interested in the feedback. I’m just not sure if it’s considered politics when everyone agrees as they seem to do so often on the HttpClient list. It’s good to have a team that’s working so well together.