Another great Beer ‘n Blog in Corvallis
Beer and Blog at Fireworks was awesome tonight! Thanks so much to Ocean for getting the pizza's lined up for us. It never ceases to amaze me about the tech community here in Corvallis. It may be smaller than Portland, but its certainly just as full of energy and ideas!
Tonight I overheard some discussions about getting other user groups going on a more regular basis centered around ideas created at Beer and Blog. I'm excited to hear new ideas like this coming out of these meet ups. It was certainly one of the goals and hopes I had when I decided to organize. Related to that, I'm planning on heading up to Portland on Saturday and help at the Calagator code sprint. While I don't plan on helping with much coding, I do hope to get some feedback on some usability questions I had regarding a Corvallis Calagator based site I was working on. The Corvallis tech community is facing the same problems Portland had, but on a much smaller scale. There's getting to be more and more events happening and people need an easy way to track it.
I'm actually hoping to utilize Calagator as more of a community driven calendar that includes events such as live music, arts events, and other community related events. While I'm personally interested in a unified live music calendar, I'd love to see it used for a more wide range of events.
But back to Beer 'n Blog tonight! It almost turned into a disaster for me tonight. I had just gotten to Fireworks when my pager started going off in a frenzy. By the end of it, my iPhone had about 100 text messages on it. I soon noticed that a group of servers in a set of racks next to each other appeared to have a power failure of some kind. Thankfully one of my students was still at work and took care of it. Almost everything came back online without any help from us which is amazing. I'm still waiting on the full story on what happened but it appears one of the electricians working on the power upgrade had tripped something on the power rail those servers were on. Talk about a headache! :(
Even though we didn't have a real "topic" driven session tonight, I think a lot of people got help with their blogs and learned a few new tricks! Next week we'll have Dawn Foster from Portland at Cloud 9 for a talk about Yahoo Pipes. I can't wait!
Happy Holidays, ruby on rails, and … thunderstorms?
I've been spending the last week back home in northeast Kansas with my family for the holidays. I thankfully missed the snowpocalypse in Portland by ONEÂ DAY and had an uneventful flight to Kansas. If I would have decided to leave one day later, I probably would have been stuck in Oregon for another 2-3 days. Talk about being lucky!
Somehow IÂ didn't escape wacky weather totally. In the last four days, the temperature has gone from 15F to 45F to 67F to 27F. Only in Kansas will you have balmy weather one day and snow/ice the next (literally). Not to mention, I even got to experience a thunderstorm late last night! This type of weather never happens in Oregon so its nice to have some variety like this once in a while!
I've done a surprisingly good job of not doing any work related things while on vacation. The only things I've done have been taking care of a few minor issues and replied to a few tickets so that clients don't think we're totally ignoring them. I really needed this break so its been pretty refreshing.
The only tech related project I've been doing lately is getting familiar with calagator (an open source calendar aggregator used by the PDX tech community), and also even teaching myself Ruby and Ruby on Rails (RoR). I must be a nerd to use my downtime to teach myself something new like this.
I've always had this negative view on RoR mainly because of the past experience I've had and heard from other people. Setting up a server to run a rails app its quite different than something like php. Not to mention that there's a lot of wrong ways to run the application. I've always heard and even experienced performance issues with rails applications, but it seems to have changed in the last year or so.
I've had several great online chat conversations with Igal Koshevoy in the last few days talking about the various issues that Ruby and Rails has had over the last few years. It seems as though the RoR community has worked pretty hard to try and combat a lot of the bad PRÂ its had and fixed many of the technical faults it had. They've even gone so far as to fork the Ruby source into a project called Ruby Enterprise Edition. It includes some important performance fixes and other various improvements that benefit RoR applications. Overall, I'm fairly impressed with the design and simplicity of Rails for web applications. I can see the appeal for it from a development point of view. Now IÂ just need to play with the backend some more to find an ideal way to host it.
I'm heading to Kansas City and Topeka in the next few days to see some more friends. I haven't seen some of these friends in a few years so it'll be a nice finale to a great holiday vacation! I head back to Oregon next Tuesday and can't wait to get back to town. I actually miss the rain :)