Last week I was at ApacheCon Europe ‘08 in Amsterdam and it’s been a very good.

Six people from our Apache Directory project were there: Emmanuel Lécharny, Alex Karasulu, Christine Koppelt, Stefan Seelmann, Stefan Zoerner and I.
We’ve talked a lot about the architecture of Apache Directory Server and what new features we’d like to introduce in the future version of Apache Directory Server and Studio.

ApacheCon is also very good socializing event and I’ve met very interesting guys like Bruce Snyder and Guillaume Nodet from Apache Service Mix, Gerolf Seitz and Martijn Dashorst from Apache Wicket, or Richard Hall from Apache Felix.

I really look forward to next year’s ApacheCon Europe which location and date have not been decided yet.

For the first contest of the new 2008 Fosters ASP World Tour, the Quiksilver Pro Gold Coast, Jérémy Flores came to Australia with its best surf.

He has finished third, beaten in the semi-finals by the winner of the event, King Kelly Slater, in a very thight heat (15.47 to 15.17) in which Jeremy was in lead until the last 5 minutes.

That’s a really good start for the young frenchman, who confirms by this results the hopes established last season.

Unfortunately, the rest of the Euroforce Contingent was not in such a form. Aritz Aranburu twisted his knee during the MSF expression session and will not be present in the next contest. Tiago Pires was eliminated in round 2 and Miky Picon in round 3.

We’ll see what all the European guys will do in the next event, the Rip Curl Pro Bells Beach.

I’m very pleased to announce that Apache Directory Studio is finalist at the Eclipse Community Awards in the “Best Open Source RCP Application” category of the “Technology Awards”, competing with MyTourBook.

Winners of the Eclipse Community Awards will be announced on March 17, 2008 at EclipseCon 2008.

Sometimes the smallest detail counts…

Here’s the screen you get after registering Awaken.

Very nice guys!

This year’s Fosters ASP World Tour is going to be very exciting for European fans. For the time in the history of the competition, four European surfers have managed to qualify to the top 45 best pro surfers in the world.

The “Euroforce contingent” is composed of:

• Jérémy Flores (France)
• Miky Picon (France)
• Tiago Pires (Portugal)
• Aritz Aramburu (Euskadi - Basque Country)

I really look forward to seeing the results of this four guys, especially the french men Miky Picon and Jérémy Flores.

Apache Directory Studio has been nominated for the Eclipse Community Awards in the “Best Open Source RCP Application” category of the “Technology Awards“.

The Technology Awards are determined by a panel of judges. The judges were selected from Eclipse-oriented editors and Eclipse project leaders. The panel of judges determines winners based on a majority vote.

The criteria for judging the commercial and open source product awards are:

1. Usability and intuitiveness of the user interface - is the product user interface easy to understand?
2. Innovation and uniqueness - how cleverly does the product solve the problem?
3. Completeness - how well does the product solve the problem, including technology, documentation, tutorials, web site and community support?

Nominations open December 14, 2007 and close January 25, 2008. Winners will be announced at EclipseCon 2008.

Three others applications have been nominated:

• EscapeK
• MyTourbook
• Relations

May the best win…

I have updated the website of Apache Directory Studio with a new homepage design. I think this look way better, more professional looking and appealing.

Check it out: http://directory.apache.org/studio

Apple has introduced a new feature in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard that helps you find and highlight a menu item using keywords.

A new search field has been added to the “Help” menu of every application. Here’s a screenshot from Eclipse Help menu.

That’s a very convenient feature. Here’s it in action, highlihting the “Organize Imports” while I was searching for “imports”.

The only problem with this feature is that it is set by default to use the shorcut… Which is also the shortcut for the (very often used) “Toggle Comment” action in Eclipse. So every time I wanted to comment/uncomment lines of code, the Help menu was showing off… Pretty unproductive…

Here’s how to disable it or modify its shortcut.

Simply go the Apple menu and select “System Preferences…”. Then select the “Keyboard & Mouse” prefpane. Go in the “Keyboard Shortcuts” section and disable (or modify) the shortcut for the “Show Help menu” item.

Here’s a New Year 2008 animation from my friend Nykola:

His website will be open very soon at http://www.nykocity.com

You already read that lately I had to restore the data of my Mac using a Time Machine backup.
Everything seemed to work fine but I recently found that Web Sharing (Apache Httpd) was no longer working.

I had a look in the console and I found those lines:

06/01/08 12:21:25 com.apple.launchd[1] (org.apache.httpd) Unknown key: SHAuthorizationRight
06/01/08 12:21:27 org.apache.httpd[1405] httpd: Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 192.168.1.2 for ServerName
06/01/08 12:21:27 org.apache.httpd[1405] (2)No such file or directory: httpd: could not open error log file /private/var/log/apache2/error_log.
06/01/08 12:21:27 org.apache.httpd[1405] Unable to open logs
06/01/08 12:21:27 com.apple.launchd[1] (org.apache.httpd[1405]) Exited with exit code: 1
06/01/08 12:21:27 com.apple.launchd[1] (org.apache.httpd) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

Apparently something went wrong when opening the log files.

So, I went to “/private/var/log/” and found out the “apache2″ folder was missing. So I created it using a Terminal and it solved my problem:

cd /private/var/log
sudo mkdir apache2