Any suggestions for a 1995 E36 17in wheel that will never go out of stock? The New England roads – especially in this economy, when potholes don’t take priority in funding – are really torturing my alloys.

Born in April, 1921, Edmond grew up in Ferndale, MI with his parents Louis and Florence, two brothers and sister. After high school, he and his brother Louis both received Congressional nominations, and were accepted into the same class at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, NY. While at West Point, his brother Louis lost his life while flying a training mission. Edmond graduated in an abbreviated three years with the class of June 1943 and received a commission as a 2nd Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. Before departing for the war in Europe, he married his Highland Falls, NY sweetheart, Patricia Nichols.

Arriving in Europe in the fall of 1944, Edmond was assigned to the 502nd PIR of the 101st “Screaming Eagles” Airborne division a few short days before the Battle of the Bulge. He made his only combat jump off the back of a truck into the battle near Bastogne, where the 101st was encircled by the enemy. As the only surviving officer of his company, he led his men until forces of the 3rd Army broke the encirclement, winning the Bronze Star for his actions. Shortly thereafter, he was wounded by a bomb, losing the use of his wrist and acquiring some lifelong shrapnel along with a Purple Heart.

After his medical discharge from the U.S. Army after the war, he taught at Miami University in Ohio until being recalled by the U.S. Army during the Korean War. He spent his remaining Army service as a Captain teaching at West Point, and was one of the original faculty members of the Department of Military Psychology and Leadership.

After retiring on disability from the U.S. Army, Edmond moved to Connecticut, where he consulted and presented training for Life Office Management Association and across the insurance industry while receiving his PhD from Columbia University. He was one of the founding professors at the Stamford branch of the University of Connecticut Business School, where he taught business and management classes. He traveled extensively for his teaching, lecture, and consulting work on leadership and management theory with many insurance companies, and served as a director for the Sentry Life Insurance Company of New York.

Edmond continued his consulting and teaching work with his own company, Management Services, Inc. for many years, well past his retirement age. He called several places home in his life, including Palm Springs, FL; Weston, CT; Longboat Key, FL, and especially Southold, NY, where he dearly loved predicting the weather, and watching the sunset over the waves on the beach.

Edmond is survived by his wife, Patricia N. Curcuru; his sons Steven N. Curcuru, Kevin H. Curcuru, and Kim M. Curcuru; grandchildren Shane Curcuru, Julie Curcuru, Emily Curcuru, and Todd Curcuru, and great grandchildren Roxanne Curcuru and Arin Mcgilvray. Services will be held later this summer at the Southold United Methodist Church in Southold, NY, at the family plot.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to your preferred U.S. Army Veterans organization, or to the Southold United Methodist Church, in memoriam of E.H. Curcuru, USMA June ’43.

Condolences and memories may be added on the web Comments on below and will be presented to Patricia and the family.

Weather and News

We had late spring snow yesterday, so while my body is telling me it should be too warm for snow, there’s still just enough snow on the grass and a few dark spots to be more than a dusting. It gives an eerie feeling, like the onset of nuclear winter.

Oh, and then there’s the news these days. ‘Nuff said.

Office Building

They’ve been doing construction downstairs in my office building lately, and the sound travels through some of the walls. It’s an annoying cross between the clanking of SkyNet robots, and the strange chittering of some little alien creatures.

But even better than that is the latest way to save money on garage lighting. The building landlord recently replaced all the lights in our underground parking garage with efficient but flickery fluorescents. But they went even further than that: 80%+ of the lights now have motion sensors, meaning they’re turned off most of the time, until you drive near them.

It’s quite an experience being in the underground garage, where most of the lights appear to be out, and there’s just this hint of chittering in the background…

The Mall

To top it all off, those post-apocalyptic movie directors even got the Galleria to participate!

• None of the escalators are working. Possibly because of the mice scurrying along them.
• And the elevators aren’t working right either; one keeps coming and going with no-one in it.
• Plus, there’s a whole line of refugees in the mall, huddled along the wall, wrapped in blankets and looking a little shell shocked.

So I’m definitely hoarding the emergency food in my desk, and raiding the drink machine before anyone else gets into the office. I’ll be ready.

(Yes, it’s all true. Well, there was only one mouse; I do have pictures. Plus they were doing maintenance on the escalators & elevators.)

(Oh, the refugees? Yes, that’s true too. They’re waiting in line for their iPads. Reminiscent of an earlier day…)

Ideas of March #ideasofmarch

• Blogs are a great social CV, far better and long-lived than Twitter et al. Think of your blog as the world’s way to see what you think is important, and how well you play with others. A great compliment to a more traditional CV.
• Blogs for me can be cathartic: oftentimes writing down great little ideas I have (even if they’re the kind that are only great in those 30 seconds before you fall asleep) helps get them out of my system, or even evolve them into something useful.
• Blogs can encourage meaningful conversations, or at least conversations you remember. There’s far too much immediate topical stuff or cheap jokes or riffs on Twitter for it to really make you think bigger.

011 Plans

• Blog more – well, blog some: target monthly. Check!
• Edit more. Write drafts, save them, and come back to finish.
• Get my average weight down below my past two decade’s average weight (which was amazingly stable for years and years; basically before my daughter was born). In progress – close!
• Post some of my Domino designs and ideas. I’ve built so many Domino apps in the past 6 years that I have a bunch of reusable design patterns that I really like. Plus the bleed yellow people seem pretty cool.
• Start my daughter’s post-college fund. We have some money for college; this is for her to use afterward.
• Upgrade all blog and email and feed reader software and centralize domains to simplify my brain. I recommend Dreamhost for domains and hosting.
• Organize and document all of the ASF’s branding policy, including training for all PMCs on how to effectively self-manage trademarks. Working on it.
• Eat fruit every day. Most days.
• Exercise at least 4 times a week. So far!

No, I have no reason to believe there’s a password compromise, and no, I wasn’t doing anything naughty with that account, so one presumes it’s an odd bug with Google’s security procedures.

Drat – I wish I could see the IP login list for my account. I’m pretty stable at where I login from, so any theoretical hack attempts would be pretty obvious if they didn’t disguise IP. But I really have no idea why I’d be a hack target.

Sigh.

Reading the comment again, I see one of the things the cool spammers are doing today. The comment was relevant to the post – because they had scraped a previous comment and re-used the content! At first scan, I had thought it was two posts from the same person (impatient at my moderation delay). When I noticed the second username and website were different, I said ah-ha: just spam scraping. It was way too specific of a comment for a spammer to have typed it in by hand.

Thank goodness for Akismet – well, once it catches up to the spammer’s domain name, that is. Heck, now I’m trying to figure out what the spammer’s point is, especially since there aren’t any obvious ads or other income streams on the site itself.

/ Cheese on crackers, wine. /
/ Turkey, stuffing; gravy, mashed. /
/ Coffee, pumpkin pie. /

/ How many gobblers /
/ will we all gobble today? /
/ This one – yum! (Yawn) Zzzzzz. /

(When you wake up after the nap, check out “Thanksgiving Comes First“, and then you can go shopping.)

The Oracle reply to the ASF’s position on the Java 7 vote really doesn’t say much at all, now does it?

Everyone understands the point, right?

• Oracle refuses to play ball by the written agreements they made with the JSPA – so, basically, they’re breaking their earlier contract (and also reversing the position they held pre-Sun aquisition).
• All Apache wants is to be able to release Apache Harmony as a Java-compliant JDK, under the Apache License; we will not release software under another license.
• All Oracle wants is sole control the future of Java, and is using whatever licensing tactics they can to assure that.

From Oracle’s point of view, they’re presumably concerned about their revenue streams from Java related technologies. That’s great for them; possibly less great for everyone else, and certainly not great for a truly open Java ecosystem.

From Apache’s point of view, all we want to do is release software under our own license. Oracle’s continued disregard of the rules of the JSPA, and continued refusal to grant a TCK license that is actually “open source compatible” is the real problem point, no matter how much the Oracle marketing machine says otherwise.

To everyone else working on Java: if your project is willing to accept the restrictions that Oracle is putting on Java, then that’s great; I’m happy for you.

But Apache isn’t willing to accept the restrictions: our license is a key part of what we do and who we are. If we can’t release something under our license, then we can’t release it, period. If the EC and the JCP aren’t producing specs where implementations can be released under the Apache license, then Apache projects won’t be able to implement them.

That would be unfortunate for nearly everyone, I think. All it takes is for Oracle to add three little words…

Just one thing turned out to be “A hell of a time” in a bad way near the end of the conference – when one member, Noirin, of the Apache community was sexually assaulted that evening. Like a few other people, my first reaction was incredulity – not at all in the fact that I didn’t believe her (I do), but more to the point: I couldn’t believe someone in our community could do something like that.

In any case, within a few hours of her posting, there were dozens of comments and hundreds of tweets about it; by now there have been several online news articles about it as well as plenty of blogs – as well as tweets in a fairly wide variety of languages.

Among all the commentary are plenty of messages of support in various ways, which are great. There are also a fair number of uncomplimentary messages about the story or about Noirin, which I won’t bother to mention here. Several other Apache members are Disappointed, Angry, and Appalled, and those are just the ones who’ve had time to post publicly so far. But the set of messages that kind of puzzle me are the ones that call her honesty into question.

I suppose I’m biased in this case, since I happen to know Noirin and consider her a friend. Although I wasn’t at the pub that night, I did spend many hours last week helping to run ApacheCon alongside her, and also spent several hours the next night suggesting fixes for her her overloaded server once the deluge began after her blog was linked all over.

I suppose it’s true that the vast majority of the internet doesn’t know Noirin, and probably hasn’t even heard of her before. And I’m sure even fewer people have heard of me. That’s fine. But have people who are doubting her story actually seen who Noirin is? When you see what she’s done, did you think it through?

Along with her technical merits and many other conference speaking engagements, Noirin is both a Director of the ASF, is Apache’s Executive Vice President, and is the VP of the ApacheCon Conferences Committee. She was elected by a vote within the very selective communities that make up the organizational side of the ASF. Apache is about Community over Code, among other things, so successfully becoming a Director or EVP or VP is not just about technical merit, it’s also about social and community merit.

Let’s put it another way. I’d bet about half of the servers in the world run some sort of Apache software. Browsed the web lately? It’s a 50/50 chance the server was running httpd. Use any Java software? You’re almost certainly using a handful of Apache XML projects among others. Use Google or Yahoo! much? Then you’re certainly using Apache projects under the covers.

Many of the core people who’ve been writing Apache software over the last decade – and who are the Members who run the non-profit Foundation behind it – are the ones who elected Noirin as one of our Directors, and allowed her to become our EVP. And as VP, Conferences, she’s also responsible for organizing ApacheCon itself – a major public face of Apache to it’s users.

So you may not know Noirin, and you probably don’t know me. But if you’re in the software business, you’re most likely connected to one of the 300 or so Members of the ASF somehow. And we do know Noirin, and we trusted her enough to make her one of the 9 Directors on our Board.

So argue about the details or the naming or whatever else people on the internet will always argue about. But realize that if you’re seriously calling her integrity into question, then… well, all I can say is there’s a fair number of alpha geeks around the world who will simply pipe you to /dev/null.

OK, I’ve had a great time on the show floor, and especially at the Lightning Talks and Foodie dinner, but I’ll let a random selection of the great tweets speak for this year so far:

• New Incubator project from ApacheCon!
• Hey – you came to ApacheCon, so you’re on top of things.
• Yes, please post your ApacheCon photos!
• Yes, it’s true, our Lightning Talks got Spammed.
• Rich Bowen, famous for great Lightning Talks, gives another great one even with nothing to say.
• Thanks to our many ApacheCon Sponsors (and Sander for PGP Keysigning!)
• Berlin Buzzwords June 2011, BarCampApache Sydney 11 Dec – more Apache event goodness.
• Recruiter focusing specifically on open source experience.
• Hippo always brings great squishy hippos as swag, I agree!
• Congrats Carsten; whether you’ve been here 10 years or 1, it’s all important.
• Thanks Cote/RedMonk for some excellent podcasts.
• Repoman is getting The Apache Way.
• Thanks, we like ApacheCon too!
• ApacheCon wifi is everywhere, and everyone uses it – thanks, Cliff!
• Apache welcomes IBM as a Sponsor!

So? Anyone else still write something worth saying in more than 140 characters about ApacheCon?