Co-ordinator Bill McGonigle announces that James Fogg will be presenting “Administrator In A Box,” a discussion on how to automate administration for large collections of machines in an enterprise, data center or server farm.
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Listening to…
On the TWIT.tv site, in their FLOSS weekly podcast, Jacob Kaplan-Moss is interviewed about the origins and design of the Django project by famed Perl guru Randal Schwartz while both recently attended OSCON. (Sadly, the audio seems to only be available in encumbered MP3 — we need more audio published in free formats like OGG!). Read about the episode and download the MP3 here.
Ed Foster: In Memorium
Ed Foster, 59, InfoWorld columnist of “The Gripe Line”, and an advocate for the consumer, dies of a heart attack: http://tinyurl.com/6syljf. Ed fought the good fight and will be missed
Notes from PySIG, 24-July-2008: Improv Intro
By Ted Roche on July 25, 2008 in Apple Macintosh OS X, LAMP, Microsoft, OpenSource, Python, Technology, Web Development
Seven attendees made it to the July 2008 meeting of the Python Special Interest Group of the Greater New Hampshire Linux Group, despite the heavy rains. Due to some last-minute conflicts, our planned speaker, Ray Côté, had to take a rain check for a future meeting, but cookies were made and we resolutely carried on.
There were two first-time attendees, one with a novice level of knowledge of Python and the second very little. Lead by the PySIG leader, Bill Sconce, we launched into an improvised session introducing Python and talking about its power, range and flexibility, comparing it with other languages, heckling Ben Scott, demonstrating several IDEs, talking about procedural scripting and object-oriented programming, showing off some working code, migrating database applications from proprietary platforms, and much, much more. A good time was had by all.
Prominently mentioned were the great tutorials available directly off the Python web site and the Tutor mailing list.
Great thanks to Janet for a delightful variety of cookies, to Bill for not only running the meeting and providing the projector but also bringing the milk, to all for participating, and to the Amoskeag Business Incubator for providing the fine facilities.
(Note: despite the organizational support of the GNHLUG, members running all sorts of OSes are welcome. A typical meeting has people running Python on OS X, Linux and Windows. All should expect equal-opportunity heckling.)
Upgraded to WordPress 2.6
Just recently upgraded the site to WordPress 2.6, using the Automatic Upgrade plugin. It went well, until the very last step when it couldn’t log me back into the web site. Shutting down and restarting the web browser seemed to fix that. Next time I went to log into the administrative site, some funky PHP errors appeared that appeared to be caused by blank lines at the ends of the PHP files provided by the Automatic Upgrade feature. I edited the files, removed the last (blank) line, restarted the web server and all is well. Stay tuned.
Notes from NH Ruby/Rails, 15-July-2008: Jeremy Durham and merb
Ten people attended the July meeting of the New Hampshire Ruby / Rails group, an affiliate of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group (but it’s okay if you don’t run Linux – there were lots of MacBooks at the meeting last night!). Thanks to Scott Garman and Nick Plante for organizing the meeting and to Tim Golden and RMC Research for providing the excellent facilities.
We started with a good round of introductions where everyone got to state who they were, what they were doing and their level of expertise.
Jeremy Durham was our guest speaker and the topic was merb. Jeremy explained that the 20-second answer for what’s merb is that Merb = Mongrel + erb. Merb is a very small and simple web framework that is ideal for quick small projects that demand few resources, while still providing a thread-safe environment in which to run Ruby. While not intended purely as a Rails replacement/competitor, much of what’s run in Rails can be moved to merb and vice versa with minimal effort. Jeremy offered that he often did a coding session in merb for the speed of the development cycle, and could then share the models he’d created with his team running Rails with minimum changes. Jeremy did a compare/contrast with Rails v. merb where merb is ahead in small memory models and threading, while Rails has the larger community and richer documentation. Jeremy mentioned a new community site: merbunity.
Along with the main topic, there were lots of tangential conversations on the joys of TextMate, vi vs. emacs, Apple shell defaults, JavaScript libraries (did you know there is an entire JavaScript MVC framework in SproutCore? That paperclip [DEPRECATED] is a cool replacement for attachment_fu for uploading files?) which always enrich the presentation.
After the great presentation, there was sufficient time for networking and socializing, where folks got to follow up on interesting developments. Thanks to Jeremy for the presentation, and to Scott and Nick and Tim for organizing the event and to all for attending and participating! Topic for the August meeting hasn’t been nailed down yet. Stay tuned to the announcement mailing list whose links you can find at nhruby.org
Ken Levy leaving Microsoft
Ken blogs, “After working at Microsoft for over 7 years as an employee and almost 5 years before that as a contractor/vendor, I’ve decided it’s time for me to do become independent and start my own company. My official last day at Microsoft is July 18th. I’ve enjoyed all the years working at Microsoft since the early 90s, especially with great people making many friends along the way.”
Read about his new venture at: http://mashupx.com/blog. Best of luck, Ken!
nVidia graphic chips have heat problems, turn on the fans!
The New York Times reports “Nvidia Reports Problem With Laptop Chips”
To tackle the problem, the company is releasing a software driver that will cause system fans to start operating sooner and reduce the “thermal stress” on the chips. The driver has been provided to laptop makers directly, said Derek Perez, an Nvidia spokesman.
Ouch! And for those of us who aren’t running the drivers the laptop makers provide us with? Darn. I just bought a laptop with an nVidia adapter, thinking I didn’t want the base Intel set of video adapters. Looks like I guessed wrong.
OpenDisc 08.07 released!
Chris Gray posts: “We’re pleased to release 08.07, the latest version of OpenDisc, with no less than twenty five updates, including Firefox 3 and the latest milestone versions of OpenOffice.org, FileZilla, Seamonkey and many more.” Grab the .iso or join the torrent at http://www.theopendisc.com.
The Open Disc has been a huge benefit in getting clients to see the power of Open Source. On a single disc they can install on all of their Windows machines, share with their friends, make a copy to take home, and it includes a complete office package (OpenOffice.org 2.4), a PDF driver (PDFCreator), diagramming tools (dia, InksScape), desktop publishing software (Scribus) and lots more. It’s a bargain at twice the price!
Catching up…
By Ted Roche on June 29, 2008 in CSS, Home Page, JavaScript, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Technology, Web Development
It’s been busy, busy month, and blogging was one of many things put off. Now, it’s time to start catching up.
I had an awesome month of June. Working on my main client project, we released yet another update on 12 June. After that, I took two weeks “off” — at least away from billing — to do some professional upkeep.
I spent a few days studying and then took the two MySQL 5.0 Developer certification exams on Tuesday the 17th. I went to the Blended Solutions facility in the Mall of New Hampshire, adjoining the PSNH building on Elm Street in Manchester, NH, and took the two exams, back-to-back. The first exam was the simpler of the two. Reviewing all the questions a couple times, I was still done in under an hour. The second exam, though, was a bear! The material was the more advanced stuff, some of the questions were trickier, some of the topics were material I had only book knowledge on. I marked a bunch of questions for review, went back and filled in all the answers, reviewed and debated and over-thought a bunch of questions and then, with three minutes left, decided any answers I changed in a panic were more likely wrong than right, and stopped. I passed both exams with acceptable scores, but nothing I’d brag about. “What do they call the man who graduates at the bottom of his class in med school?” “Doctor.” So, I’m pleased to have the opportunity to establish my level of knowledge, flag a couple of areas I need to learn more about, earn a logo I can display as part of my marketing and gain a listing as a MySQL Enterprise Ready Partner.
Wednesday the 18th of June was the first day of the Red Hat Summit in Boston. I attended all three days, commuting from Contoocook to the Anderson Rail Center in Wilmington and taking public transportation from there. While it made for a lot of hours on the road, the savings over staying in town were significant (total parking and rail for the week: $84 for 6 days), and sleeping at home in my own bed very much appreciated. The Red Hat Summit was a fascinating event. I wasn’t that familiar with the corporate structure or the market focus of Red Hat and I got much better insights into who they are and what they do. Here’s a slew of links on what went on, Red Hat announcements, and links to presentations.
Parallel to the Red Hat Summit was the Fedora Users and Developers Conference, FUDCon10 for short, that shared the Hynes Auditorium facilities on Thursday and Friday, and met at the Photonics Center at Boston University on Saturday. Even though many Fedora participants are Red Hat employees, the tone and structures of the groups are dissimilar. I missed a lot of the last-minute organizational notes the FUDCon’ners put together to organize their HackFest, so I tended to attend the Red Hat sessions instead. In the future, I’m more likely to put more effort into the HackFest side of things. Saturday was a BarCamp, a one-day self-organized conference. As I noted at last year’s conference, the means of pitching sessions, voting, scheduling and running the show are put together on the fly, and the results are startlingly good. Having pretty much had my brain filled of tech at the Red Hat Summit, I chose instead to focus more on process sessions, and learned about bug triaging, web site usability issues, and Fedora structure. A great use of a day, and a great chance to attach faces to the name and shake a few hands.
Sunday was a day of rest for me, and a day of washing laundry for Laura. Thank you!
Monday found me back on the Commuter Rail, this time attending An Event Apart just across the street from the Prudential Center where the Summit had been. Two long days of sessions were focused on the web, primarily design and usability, very different aspects from the two previous conferences. Like the Red Hat Summit, this conference was a little outside my comfort zone, in this case, designers rather than developers. Jeffrey Zeldman puts on an incredible show; facilities were superb, speakers knowledgeable, swag cool. Eric Meyer is the authority in the field of CSS, and it was his sessions I got the most practical tools from, but all of the sessions were well-presented, informative and thought-provoking. Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering had a very funny and very insightful session on analyzing clickstreams for success that will have me restructuring some of my client’s web sites. All of the speakers had great observations on the state of the art and future directions. Great stuff! Several other people took great notes I can share with you.
Arriving back to work on Wednesday, there was no time to decompress; a day of meetings lead to a couple frantic days of shipping yet another release and picking up another couple of projects. Thirty billable hours later, my super-contractor did a high-five tag-team tag and was off on his own adventures, while I took over sheparding a release out the door on Friday with some new features, new team members, new procedures and new prototcols. Whew!
It’s been an exhausting three weeks, but an exhilarating time, too. Hope to blog more details as I catch up on all the other projects.