The varnish-doldrums of July

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

Hi Varnish gang,

Up here in the Nordic countries we have had our annual sunshine-fix,
and as soon as our eyes manage to focus on the screen, we will be
getting back in the saddle, so here is a quick Varnish update:


1.  Varnish User Group meeting 4
--------------------------------

    VUG4 happens on the "hack-day" of the SURGE/2011 conference:

                    VUG4 - Sep 28th - Baltimore

    This time it is a one day only event, but we have a much larger
    room, so more people can attend.  ("If one man can dig...")

    Read more, propose content and sign up for VUG4 here:

	https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/VUG4

    The SURGE/2011 conference looks pretty good too, I'll be giving
    a talk about getting the content out from Heidelberg to Varnish,
    and Arthur (sky) will be showing of his usual wizardry too: 

	http://omniti.com/surge/2011

    See you there!


2.  Varnish 3.0.0 was released:  Play with it.  Use it
------------------------------------------------------

    If you have not started playing with Varnish 3, now would be a
    good time, while your boss is still at the beach, and the office
    is still too hot to play fossball.

    Varnish 2.x is still around, and if we find any really bad bugs,
    we will fix them, but you don't want us wasting too much time
    on maintaining it, when we could instead be developing new and
    exciting features for Varnish 3.x

    We will soon be releasing a 3.0.1, hopefully before VUG4, it
    will be almost entirely bug-fixes, better docs and cleaning up
    of other jetsam and floatsam of a major release.

    If you know or find any trouble with 3.0.0 we would like to
    hear about it, so we can fix it.


3.  What I did not do on my vacation
------------------------------------

    The best tan I have ever managed was #ffcc99, and since next
    step up for me is #ff5050, I usually spend the high summer days
    inside the house with a computer:  While the rest of the
    family frolick outside, I get some quality work inside.

    2011 was different, I managed to spend only two hours on Varnish.

    On july 20th my father died peacefully and painlessly from
    cancer in the liver.

    He died just 6 weeks after my parents celebrated their 50 year
    wedding aniversary, or "gold-wedding" as we call it, with almost
    a hundred friends and family, on a wonderful summerday.

    My father was a farm-boy who spent his life helping and supporting
    the local community.  All his life he volunteered and served
    on the boards of community centres, coop-shops, schools and
    what have you.

    Until sickness confined him to his bed, he was was active and
    involved chairman of the church from which we buried him.

    My fathers death made me realize that I got involved in Open
    Source for the exact same reason he got involved in in all his
    community work:  There is no better, no more satisfying way to
    spend a life, than to improve the world around you.

    So next time Varnish handles a traffic spike for you, send a
    kind thought to my dad, and invest the time you saved in making
    the world around you better.

Poul-Henning

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.