I just got home from Charlottesville after having lunch with the folks over at OSC. During lunch, Eric Pugh informed me of the upcoming beCamp; I’m pretty sure I am going, it sounds like a great setup. I sorta worry that I will end up in a discussion on something I should know, but can’t remember because I took so much time off from this stuff. I guess time to refresh on stuff while I have a few weeks. Here is the current list on the wiki about topics people would like to hear about.

• Yahoo User Interface (YUI) Tools
• Yahoo Pipes
• RSS possibilities
• Ruby on Rails apps
• beTech web dev sandbox
• Groovy/Grails +
• MonoRail
• Web 2.0 concepts
• PHP5
• WWDC concludes on June 14th. Maybe someone who attends WWDC could present on news from WWDC.
• Blacklight
• Solr Flare
• beTech Labs + Code Bank(?)
• Scrum
• Dabble DB
• Selenium
• Subversion/WebDAV/Apache mod_filter

I would like to see Blacklight, Solr Flare, Subversion, Selenium, PHP5, RoR, YUI

If you are in the C’Ville area let me know if you are coming I’d like to meet some more developers in the area.

When I was a kid there were shows like Rambo and G.I. Joe and a lot of guys still remember those shows. They were taken off the air partly because of the violent nature I’m sure, but if you ask me kids these days are more fucked up than when I was a kid. One of my absolute favorite shows, Jericho, is most likely not going to be in the fall line up on CBS and I am 3900% furious about this. The show was real, not some stupid ass pokey man bullshit or something else like Heroes, which isn’t bad, but people don’t fly. With this world getting closer to nuclear war by the minute a show that might actually teach people something about survival and have good content needs to be left on the air. A comment was that after the mid-season break people lost interest in watching. Well no shit, why the hell did you take a break in the first place that was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever witnessed.

It was also nice to watch a show that people did what I would actually do instead of what a bunch of people who never stepped off the pavement would do. I once watched a couple movie people from Cali buy Carhartt bibs and it was hilarious; they are bibs, buy warm ones and leave it isn’t that hard.

Anyway I hear they might replace Jericho with some musical or something… if I wanted the sound of music I would put in the movie.

In Vista they did a great job of changing the location of files and I have changed my XP unattended installs to mimic that behavior. Mainly because I have had a number of problems with applications breaking with the space in Program Files or Documents and Settings and since I don’t use My Documents for anything really I changed the location to something easy.

C:\Documents => My Documents
C:\Programs => Program Files
C:\Users => Documents and Settings
C:\Windows => Windows

My Images, My Video, My Music were all moved to F:\Downloads\[NAME without preceding 'My']

I really only use My Documents for saving temporary test scripts to test quickly. I also moved everything to DVD, because I realized a while back that a DVD will read about 10x faster than a CD (I felt dumb for not recognizing that). Since I was moving to DVD I created an additional directory outside my unattended that holds all the applications I install by hand, which I think is a couple hundred.

I don’t believe I ever posted this.

February CSS Zen Garden Submission

That was a design I did for CSS Zen Garden a while back, I have not heard back whether the garden is still alive or not as it has been about 3 months since I submitted it. I was contacted by an individual from Dubai and I was just curious what the pay was like and ended up giving him some URLs to work I was doing. He said he was not convinced of my work. I do not consider myself a front end person and I try not to have criticism make me feel bad, but when I see a lot of work that really is crap and while I dislike some of my work I know that some of it is also not bad. And in the end the wanker still didn’t tell me what the average pay for design/development jobs in Dubai is.

I finally bought a Kill-A-Watt when I built my Core 2 Duo and it has been really handy. Right this second I have the following running on it and it is registering 513W.

• Celeron 433, 64mb RAM, 4.3 IDE, CDROM, Integrated Video, PCI NIC, no USB (Idling)
• P4 1.4, 128mb RDRAM PC800, 160GB, 120GB, PCI NIC, no USB, 4-80mm fans, 350W PSU (Wiping Drives)
• P4 2.6HT, 1GB DDR400, 120GB, 200GB, 32mb NVidia Geforce 2 MMX, 2 USB Devices, 5-80mm fans, 420w PSU (Idling Desktop)
• Core 2 Duo, 2GB DDR2800, 120GB, 400GB, 500GB, 500GB, 256mb NVidia Geforce 7600GT, 2-80mm fans, 2-60mm fans, 580w PSU (Idling Desktop)
• 4-100cfm Cabinet fans
• 15inch CRT in cabinet
• Linksys Wireless Router

I don’t think 513 is too bad for all of that, I should really reset the Kill-A-Watt to 0 on the kilowatt hour meter so I can see how much I use in a month. The accuracy on the Kill-A-Watt is supposed to be around 0.2% so you can trust the readings you get.