Blogging Roller

I've got a build of Roller 2.1-dev running on this site now and there's a small bug in the new comment moderation feature, which is preventing new comments. I hope to deploy a fix this weekend. Hold your tongue until then.

Please help the survivors of the earthquake disaster in southern Asia by donating to the Red Cross.

One of the best ways to help the survivors is to donate to the American Red Cross.

And don't forget to check with your employer. As Sun blogger Noel Franus points out, Sun Microsystems and other employers are matching employee donations.

Since 911 I've had to wait 20 to 30 minutes at the ticket desk while TSA verifies that I'm not the evil Dave Johnson. I could never use the automated ticket kiosk. Now that they've caught my evil counterpart air travel ain't half so bad.

VentureBlog: it is best not to clip your fingernails while pitching your company

I knew there was a reason I subscribed to VentureBlog.

This site is under what appears to be a DOS attack from 70.85.45.132. Of course, it could just be a script kiddie trying to write his first email address harvester. I've notified my ISP, his ISP, and added a quick and dirty IP ban filter.

Here's to a better year than last, peace, love, and understanding.

CNN is reporting that the death toll is now > 20,000 and the US is sending $4,000,000. That's not enough. You can help by contributing here: American Red Cross - Credit Card Contribution.

Update: Reuters reports the US is pledging $15,000,000.

Tickets.com must really be in dire straits if they are laying off their best people. Good luck Kasia, but I don't think a smart developer with a popular blog is going to be out of work for very long.

Don't miss it.

I don't expect Russell Beattie to be unemployed for long. So potential employers and venture capitalists, you'd better catch him if you can.

I won't be seeing this anymore.

After devastating Grenada as only a category 3, Ivan is now a rare category 5 hurricane and has its sights set on Jamaica. Evacuation is not an option for most of the 2.5 million residents. Let's hope Ivan loses strength, veers off course, and aims at some less populated area.

I'll be based in North Carolina, as I am now, but I'm going to be in the SF bay area for my first week at Sun. I'll be arriving on Sunday around 2PM, so I'll start off with some free time and I might have a night free later in the week. Any Rollers or bloggers want to get together for a geek dinner one night? I will be in Palo Alto, but I'll have a car and I know my way around, so I could make it as far as the city. If interested, drop me an email at dave.johnson@rollerweblogger.org.

After reading Chris and Rafe's posts about coping with a day without del.icio.us, I decided it was time to give it a try. I've tried a number of different ways to keep track of articles that I want to blog about, read at a later time, or just remember for future reference. Over the years I've tried keeping them in a browser bookmark folder, tracking them on a Voodoo pad page, and even saving them as draft blog entries but del.icio.us seems like a much better approach. You can find my del.icio.us link blog here.

The storm that devastated Florida and that appeared to be making a run at Raleigh fizzled out, fell apart, and passed right by. We got quite a lot of rain over the last couple of days due to the twin storms and we had to keep an eye on the new last night due to the tornado warnings, but that is the extent of the damage in Raleighwood. We lucked out on this one and so did Jamaica.

I just had a "hey, I wrote that!" moment. I was reading a Windley post about an OSCon 2004 talk about the open source GRASS GIS, I followed a link to the slides, and found my self looking at a screenshot of d.profile, a program I wrote back in 1990. I've been doing this open source stuff for a long time.