A family vacation can only entertain me for so long before I need to go flying again. Fortunately I had arranged to go flying with an instructor while on vacation in central Florida. For some reason or another I found an instructor foolish enough to go up with me for a couple hours out of Sun State Aviation.

I have a lot of respect for both my flight instructor and his judgement, but for one reason or another today we taxied back to the parking area, he stepped out of the plane, wished me luck and told me to go fly some circuits. Leaving me to fly the plane by myself, without adult supervision.

As I creep precariously close to my first solo flight, the only things stopping me right now are weather, and myself. When I called to get a weather briefing last night, the outlook for this morning’s lesson was not looking positive at all. I had some doubt that I would be able to fly at all given the low hanging clouds and higher winds that have been moving in to the bay area.

Due to some scheduling challenges, my instructor and I decided to move up our standing appointment from Saturday to Friday in order to ensure that I got two flights in this week.

I’ve had a good cadence of writing post-flight-lesson blog posts, so how about another one!

Last Saturday my instructor and I decided to head out to Livermore for our work on approaches and landings. With temperatures in the triple digits (38+ for the non-Americans) around the Bay Area today, we decided to look for cooler air this weekend towards Napa County’s Airport (KAPC).

After many weeks of departing from Hayward (KHWD), flying around in circles for a bit, then landing back at Hayward, I can finally add another airport to my log book.

If you were to ask me whether I wanted to fly when I was younger, I would have said “duh”, not because flight has been a life-long goal, but rather the question struck me similar to “would you like to be a millionaire?” Of course, who wouldn’t want to fly? The two kinds of people who I knew as pilots growing up were airline transport pilots, a profession I never wanted, or insanely rich people.

Recently I’ve been experimenting with the concept of a high-performance (high parallelism, high concurrency, low CPU/memory footprint) TCP server in Ada. Developing on top of Linux, you cannot help avoid the epoll(7) I/O event notification system.

A few years ago, [Ada](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Ada_(programming_language) became my hobby/tinker programming language of choice, for a number of reasons, concurrency being one of them. In this post I’d like to walk you through an example of dynamic task creation in Ada, which uses Ada.Task_Termination handlers, a new feature in Ada 2005.

As I mentioned in my previous post I’ll be going to FOSDEM this year. Unlike last year, I will be spending a lot more time in Europe this time around.

For this next year’s FOSDEM, I’m organizing the “Testing and Automation” developer room. And wouldn’t you know it, we’ve just opened up our Call for Participation.

I promise this is the last video I’ll post for a while. This talk was given at Jenkins User Conference 2012 in San Francisco at the end of September.

One more presentation video from PuppetConf a couple weeks ago.

Another presentation video, this time from PuppetConf a couple weeks ago.

A few weeks ago I had the fortune to speak at the SF Selenium Meetup with a talk titled: “Better Late than Never: Integrating Selenium After The Fact”.

For the past couple weeks I’ve been learning how to juggle in my spare time (and a bit at work). The act of juggling itself is surprisingly easy, so I learned how to juggle in about 2 hours one afternoon, since then I’ve been learning how to juggle well, which is much more difficult.

Some time ago I found myself captivated by watching another developer work. Not anybody that I work with or know in person, but the infamous Notch. Throught some twist of fate I stumbled across a live stream of his and spent a non-trivial amount of time watching boxes and code fly by in Eclipse.

Today the organizers of PuppetConf released an “almost complete” list of speakers and talks for this year’s PuppetConf in San Francisco, guess who’s on it?

Just over a week ago I returned from a trip to Tokyo for the Jenkins User Conference 2012 - Tokyo. I attended the summer Developers Summit and a Jenkins hackathon while I was in Tokyo, but JUC 2012 was the main event.