Blogging Roller

Just a gentle reminder that BarCamp RDU 2008 is coming soon. And one request. We've got 209 people registered and 31 on the waiting list so please help us out and if you registered but cannot make it, please remove your name from the list.

If you are interested in helping out with preparations or on the day of the event, then please let us know (dave.johnson at rollerweblogger.org or wayne at wayne-sutton.com)

After attending two great BarCamps here in Raleigh, I'm just as pleased as punch to be helping out on the BarCamp RDU organizing committee this year.

We put out the call for sponsors a couple of weeks ago and thanks to some generous sponsors including iContact, Canonical, rPath, Brian Russell, OpenNMS and Montie Design we quickly met 65% of our small budget. Now we need to wrap things up, money-wise. If you'd like to get some great positive exposure among the best and brightest in the local tech community by sponsoring, here's your chance.

If you're interested in sponsoring or helping out as a volunteer, contact me via email for more info (dave.johnson at rollerweblogger.org). If you're interested in attending, you'll have to add your name to the waiting list -- at this point we're sold out.

In case you're not following the Blackbox blog, the Sun Modular Data Center is coming to the Triangle on March 12, 2008. The event will be hosted at the SAS Institute campus in Cary, NC. Here's the blurb:

Join us and enjoy presentations and tours throughout the day of Sun's Modular Datacenter, the world's first datacenter in a box - a 6.1 meter (20 foot) shipping container. Also known as Project Blackbox, this is a virtualized datacenter optimized for extreme energy, space, and performance efficiency. It applies Sun's trademark innovation and network computing infrastructure expertise to engineer out complexity and provide a whole new alternative for quickly adding datacenter capacity anywhere it's needed, with the ability to move it as business needs change. Because of its modular, high density design, the Sun Modular Datacenter packs more heterogeneous compute power in less space than a traditional datacenter, and can be configured, deployed, and quickly modified and redeployed for another project virtually anywhere worldwide.

Interested? The sign up is here.

We spent most of the day today at the state fair. Kids loved it. Parents endured it. We saw the bunnies, roosters, cows and pigs. We avoided the fried-thing of the year. We used up a fist-full of pre-purchased ride tickets and learned that the dubious safety factor makes the rides much more exciting than the big sturdy ones at the theme parks.

Local multi-media and social software whiz kid Brian Russell is hanging out his shingle as an consultant. Best of luck, Brian. If you're looking to grow an online community or upgrade your organization to Web 2.0, check out his resume and portfolio.

The Raleigh Bloggers meet-up has morphed into a more inclusive RTP/Triangle-wide gathering, not just for bloggers and not just for Raleigh. We're still meeting on the 2nd and 4th Tuesdays, but we've moved the location from Raleigh Times Bar to the more centrally located Serena, a nice restaurant/bar with free WIFI. And we've established a community page at Ning. Our first meet-up in this new configuration is tonight so come on down and join us at 6:30PM tonight.

Looks like we're going to have a pretty good turn-out for the Raleigh bloggers meet-up tonight (7PM at Raleigh Times) with Pat Mueller, Jackson Fox, Wayne Sutton, Michael Kimsal and perhaps even Mister Sugar himself planning to show up. That's a little unusual because attendance has been pretty spotty recently. In fact, last time it was just Pat and I sipping pints outside of the Raleigh Times Bar.

Pat proposed that we rename, refocus and relocate the Raleigh Bloggers meet-up. He suggested that we admit our geek nature by renaming it the "RTP Blogging Code Monkeys Meet-up." Also that we move it to the RTP area so it's convenient to folks from all three corners of the Triangle. I'm ready for a change and declining attendance is a drag, so I'm a big +1 on that. I suggested that we be more inclusive to non-bloggers with a blurb like this:

RTP dev/blogger meet-up. Come and chat about software development and web-technologies with Triangle-area code monkeys and bloggers.

Interested? If so, subscribe to the BlogTogether mailing lists for further updates.

In the unlikely event that you are a Triangle area geek who reads this blog and has not yet signed up, you might want to know that registration for BarCamp RDU is open.

Via the Aquarium, there's a nice Java EE and Glassfish adoption story over in Chillboro:

Adam Constabaris: A fundamental question for us in building this application was whether to use Tomcat and "soup it up" by using Spring to add services Tomcat doesn't provide itself, or whether to use a full Java EE container. We could have made it work with the servlet container approach, since our application isn't heavily "enterprisey" and we were initially reluctant to pay the complexity price of EJBs. After looking at the Java EE 5 specification, though, we saw a lot of ways we could simplify and standardize things, such as using JSF 1.2 and coding to the Java Persistence API rather than using Hiberrnate APIs directly.

Hey! I know that guy. Hi Adam.

Is there a trend towards full app servers and away from plain old Tomcat? Is it because of strong open source Java EE offerings from Sun, JBoss and Apache? I don't know, but I sure hope so.

It's meet-up time and as usual, I'll be there. Details - http://joshstaiger.org/raleighbloggers

Via Paul Jones:

RTP 2.0 and the Council for Entrepreneurial Development are proud to present the first RTP 2.0 Social. Sponsored by RTP 2.0, CED, and Broadwick, makers of IntelliContact, this event will be held Wednesday, April 4, from 7-9PM at Tyler’s Tavern in Durham (located in the American Tobacco Campus).

This event is open to everyone interested in meeting other technologists, innovators and entrepreneurs in the area. The goal of RTP 2.0 is to bring individuals together for meeting, sharing ideas, and having fun. Friends are welcome, of course.

Sounds like another nice opportunity to meet-up with the local tech crowd. I just signed up for the mailing list.

We've decided to change the time and place of our Raleigh Bloggers meet-up. Too many folks complained about Tuesday night, so we've moved to the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of each month. Now we'll find out if "Tuesday's not good for me" was just an excuse to avoid hanging with the tech/geek patrol. And we've moved from crowded and loud Helios Coffee to the quiet Raleigh Times Bar (yeah, right). I mean, if nobody's gonna show up we might as well drink, no?

When: Second and Fourth Wednesdays of every month at 6:30PM

Where: The Raleigh Times Bar (Map)

14 E Hargett St
Raleigh, NC  27601
919.833.0999

It's time for the first Raleigh Bloggers meetup of the new year.

About Us. We are a group of bloggers who live in and around Raleigh, North Carolina. We meet twice a month at a local coffee shop just to chat. We have no formal agenda. Sometimes we talk about blogging, sometimes podcasting, sometimes technology, sometimes politics, ... mostly whatever's on our minds. We've been meeting regularly since March of 2005.

Join Us! New faces are always welcome, whether you're a professional blogger, a newbie looking for help starting a blog, or someone who just likes to talk about nerdy things. All you have to do is show up and look for a group of guys with laptops (invariably it's always guys, but women are certainly welcome!).

Meetup details are on the wiki.

 
(Helios Coffee. By Raleigh blogger abbyladybug / Dr. Lady Cutie Troublemaker)

The North Carolina Science Blogging Conference, Saturday, January 20, 2007. This is a free, open and public event for scientists, educators, students, journalists, bloggers and anyone interested in discussing science communication, education and literacy on the Web.

See Bora's blog for an update on sessions, sponsors and ways you can help.

Here's a little something else I'm thankful for. My brother Dan has been low-frequency blogging for a while and he's getting better and better. His blog is called Film Babble and it's definitely babble (and I mean that in the absolutely best way possible), but his writing style is interesting and he got a pretty deep knowledge base to draw on when it comes to movies and music. His latest post is about director Robert Altman, who just passed away.

Happy Thanksgiving to those that celebrate this fine American holiday and happy Thursday to those that don't. As always, I'm thankful for my happy and healthy family and happy that we'll be able to get together this weekend. And, as usual, we enjoyed a traditional Thanksgiving dinner at my parent's place over in Chapel Hill. For us, the traditional dinner is turkey, stuffing, gravy, rice, cranberry sauce, stir-fried veggies and dessert of pumpkin pie and chocolate pecan pie (my personal favorite). Tomorrow we'll head down to Andi's folk's beach house near Topsail Island, NC for a couple of days of doing mostly nothing -- the water will be cold but with temps around 70F my crazy kids might just brave the icy waves. Hope you have a good one too.

I ran the Old Reliable Run today and thanks to the cool weather, overcast skies and better training I did a little better than last year. Last year I had to stop to walk a couple of times and I ran the 10K in 55:36 minutes. This year I didn't stop, felt strong and I think my time was closer to 54 minutes.

Update: Here are the (soon to be) official times:

Place Bib  Name                    Chiptim Guntime Pace
===== ==== ======================= ======= ======= =====
489   1443 DAVID JOHNSON           54:31   55:18   8:54

We've got a new meeting place, Helios Coffee in the Glenwood South area of Raleigh. Please join us to talk blogging, podcasting, politics, tech or whatever else is on your mind.

Time: Tuesday Nov. 7, 2006 - 6:30PM
Place: Helios Coffee, 413 Glenwood Ave, Raleigh, NC (map)

Anton Zuiker wrote to tell me about the 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference coming up January 20th, 2007. I just registered and I'm looking forward to learning more about how scientists are using blogs and RSS/Atom blog tech in their work.