Blogging Roller

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.

And Helios is a very nice little coffee/bar, if a little crowded at times. Details are on the wiki.

 

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.

I meant to blog it last week, but I forgot. When I arrived at Cafe Cyclo last week for the bloggers meet-up I found Josh and Sam standing under the awning taking shelter from the rain. The outside tables were gone and peering through the dark windows, I saw that everything was gone. Wow. Sad to lose such a unique place (unique for Raleigh, that is). I'm not sure what happened. Maybe the Raleighing folks have a clue.

So now we need a new meeting place. Josh and I think Helios is probably the best choice. Any other ideas, Raleigh bloggers? Ideally we'd like a relatively quiet place with good coffee, beer, food and free WIFI.

Lots of reading material on rules or lack of rules for blogging today.

First, some posts about Tim Bray's use of the F-word in a blog about Sun's new Project Blackbox. My take on the F-word? It's good and I use it, but I haven't had the guts or the reason to use it on my blog (although I have posted quotes that include the word). I'm with Scoble on this one: when somebody like Tim says something is F-ing cool, then I sit up and take notice.

• Can a corporate blogger use the "F-word?"
  Scoble: "I paid attention to that new product launch BECAUSE of Tim's language"
• Tim's Bomb
  Douglas: "If you believe [free speech laws] carry over to your corporate blog, then we disagree."
• The F-bomb: never cool
  Robertson: "when you use coarse language, there's no upside. That's right - none."
• Oh My Goodness Gracious
  Bray: "I'm sincerely sorry. But that's really what I'm like."

Sun VP Dave Douglas' point about corporate vs. personal blogs seems valid, but as Douglas points out, it's not clear whether Tim's blog personal or corporate. Tim's posts are included on the front page of blogs.sun.com through the magic of aggregation (actually, only the first sentence or two). Do we need to add a bad language filter to the aggregator? Should Tim and other externally hosted Sun bloggers provide a safe-for-Sun feed for our aggregator that includes only polished professional posts?

And second, some links from Raleigh News and Observer's Sunday feature on blogging, which included articles by Triangle blogging mavens Ruby Sinreich and Anton Zuiker:

• Raleigh News and Observer: Rules to blog by
  Sunday feature on blogging, rules, ethics and journalism
• When blogging, face the conversation
  by local blogger Anton Zuiker, published in the Raleigh News and Observer
• Moving past the "blogs versus journalism" debate
  by local blogger Ruby Sinreich, published in the Raleigh News and Observer

The Southeast VC blog has a good summary of local tech news sites, recruiters, networking opportunities and actual companies that are currently hiring here in the Raleigh-Durham Research Triangle Park (RTP) area. He didn't mention Microsoft, which has around 100 employees (most working on Team System) -- last I heard they're hiring.

For details, check the Raleigh bloggers wiki.

Congrats and thanks to the organizers, volunteers, Red Hat and other sponsors for making BarCampRDU a great success. I really enjoyed it. In case you have no idea what a "barcamp" is here's the deal. According to the BarCamp wiki, a BarCamp is "an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment."

The event started around 9AM Saturday morning with a quick introduction from conference organizer Fred Stutzman. Everybody who wanted to propose a session lined up at the front of the room and gave a 30 second pitch for their idea. Most of the proposals were technical like "linux systems admin" or "atom publishing protocol," but there were some non-technical ideas too. For example there was a session on "how to juggle" and one on "how to dance with girls" (not sure how that turned out, given the M/F ratio).

After the session pitches, the session leaders claimed spots on the schedule, which was a 10-foot by 15-foot sheet of paper taped to the wall. Next attendees voted for sessions by putting tick marks on the schedule using magic markers. Based on the votes and conversations between session leaders, some sessions were combined and some were moved to smaller or larger meeting rooms -- all right on the spot. It was amazing how well that worked and how quickly we were able to arrive at a schedule and by 10AM we were all attending sessions.

The sessions themselves were not so unconventional. They were definitely more interactive than the usual tech-conference format, but generally followed the normal speaker/audience model. I'm not complaining. I enjoyed the sessions, learned a lot and heard a lot of interesting stories. I attended sessions on open source business and it's ability to innovate (Tarus Balog and ), RESTful Notification Architecture (Seairth Jacobs), social networks (Fred Stutzman) and the Atom publishing protocol (Joe Gregorio).

That's all I have time for tonight. If you want more info, Fred Stutzman has a great round-up of the blog and news coverage (and check it out -- I was mentioned in the News & Observer article) plus some guidelines for running your own BarCamp. I hope we'll do another one this year -- I'd like to help out next time around.

Tags: topic:[BarCampRDU]

Tropical Storm Alberto dumped a lot of rain on us yesterday. Normally I don't worry about flooding, since I'm on a hill, but we had 4-5 inches of water flowing through the backyard for a couple of hours. I waded out and took a couple of photos for Andi since she's at the beach. Also, WRAL's has a nice slideshow of Alberto-hits-the-Triangle photos.

Looks like WolfBlogs is live and my alma mater N.C. State University is blogging with Roller. I don't know the specifics of the setup, but I believe they are running on a cluster of Solaris/SPARC servers and using a pretty standard Roller configuration (i.e. Tomcat and MySQL).

Triangle Citysearch: Rust-colored walls, wooden chairs and a colorful row of mounted lights give Cafe Cyclo a cozy atmosphere, perfect for quiet conversations. By day, expect a quiet lunch spot. By night, expect a jazzy social scene with understated energy and lots of charm. The menu is as loaded with drink concoctions as it is with munchies. This is the perfect place for a light meal; the Asian-influenced dishes range from Vietnamese spring rolls to seared tuna.

That's us: jazzy and social with understated energy. Come on down. Josh has the details.

Congressman Brad Miller (house.gov/bradmiller) and his campaign manager PJ Puryear showed up at Cafe Cyclo tonight for the Raleigh blog meet-up to learn more about blogging and connect with fellow bloggers. How cool is that! I don't think he expected to run into a bunch of geeky tech bloggers, but despite that we had a great time talking blog search and RSS and politics (apparently, everybody present was a democrat). And, I made sure to get in a word or two about the evils of DRM and the broadcast flag. Check out Josh's and Bill's blogs for more about the evening.

Also... I almost forgot to mention that I got to take a behind the scenes look at the IBM  DeveloperWorks Roller implementation. Bill logged in and showed me around. They're still on Roller 2.0, so they don't have comment management/moderation, but they do have tagging and they've made a couple of small layout changes to the editor/admin UI.

And by the way, Wilco rocked! UNC's Memorial Hall is a great place to see a show. It's pretty sure it's been renovated at least once since the last time I saw a rock show there (Hüsker Dü, back in in the stone age).

With temps in the upper 60s in Raleigh for the past couple of weeks, warm enough for my traditional geek t-shirt, shorts and berks uniform, I'm starting to wonder if we're going to miss winter entirely this year.

Jason Caplain, a VC here in Raleigh, posted a rumor about Google to open RTP office. The story also made the Raleigh paper. The News and Observer story Google Looks for Local Offices quotes Andy Beal, who speculates that Google may be considering aquisition of local startups ChannelAdvisor or Motricity. Or perhaps they just want to syphon off some talented but bored IBM and SAS employees.

<a href= "http://townhall.townofchapelhill.org/agendas/ca051024/3a3/dan_coleman_new_federal_priorities_resolution.htm"> Town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina: NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED by the Mayor and Town Council that the Council hereby petitions the Bush Administration and Congress to immediately end the war in Iraq, re-establish a progressive tax code, curtail end favoritism toward corporate interests, develop responsible policies focused on renewable energy, and commit to priorities that reflect the common good.

According to <a href= "http://greenespace.blogspot.com/2005/10/chapel-hill-to-bush-end-war-now.html">Sally Greene, "the Town Council enthusiastically and unanimously passed" the resolution.

Cool. A blog about Raleigh. Via Wade Minter