I’m attending CollabTech’08 - a conference being held at CASE about collaborative technologies on campus. It promises to have talks about things such as; OpenID, 2D Codes, Wikis & blogs.
All this in our own backyard.
So if you’re going, be sure to say “Hi”. If you can’t make it I’ll be twittering (#collabtech08) and perhaps sharing stuff on Evernote, WiFi permitting.
Tags: CASE, technology, conference, collaboration, cleveland
I’m happy to say that the first Refresh Cleveland gathering was a success. We met up for dinner and beers at the Winking Lizard in Lakewood, and topics of conversation included:
I’d like to thank the following folks for coming out to share their experiences (and some fine, fine boneless wings):
We have some big plans coming up…a Barcamp over the summer (probably in cooperation with the CWSA), more gathers, and hosting some panel discussions. If you’d like to be in the loop, please subscribe to the Refresh Cleveland mailing list.
And, as promised, here is the the excellent presentation video I brought up at dinner. Watch to the end. It’s worth it:
Here are the presentation slides, for the curious.
We’re having a little Refresh gathering tonight at the Winking Lizard in Lakewood at 7:30pm. There’s no set topic, other than tech in Cleveland and how we can improve it. Come join us!
Winking Lizard 14018 Detroit Ave. Lakewood, OH 44107-4522 Phone: 216.226.6693
In the past few weeks, I’ve helped some of my friends move their WordPress blogs to new servers. One of them had a consistent problem with their host because WordPress was hogging cycles on the shared server. We implemented the WP-Cache plugin, and things got better in minutes.
Jeff Atwood has written a terrific article about the perils of using WordPress without caching.
I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the community around WordPress, and the software itself is remarkably polished. That’s not to say that I haven’t run into a few egregious bugs in the 2.5 release, but on the whole, the experience has been good bordering on pleasant.
Or at least it was, until I noticed how much CPU time the PHP FastCGI process was using for modest little old blog.stackoverflow.com.
You have to learn why things work on a starship.
- James T. Kirk to Savik in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn
I attended Notacon 2008 this weekend. I’d like to tell you about it.
I learned a lot. See…I’m not much of a hacker. I’ve never played with Ham Radio for my own wifi, I’ve never attended a demoparty, and I know just enough about networking to get by. Notacon was an educational experience, one of the sort I don’t get often in day-to-day life. I don’t have much occasion to reflect on the necessity of editing information, but thank goodness Jason Scott does. I have not mulled over the current state of election technologies, but Smoke and Phreak had. Bruce Potter taught me more about the challenges of router monitoring than I’d learn in a year of working at my desk.
I attended Notacon the first year it ran and I felt like a stranger in a stranger land. I felt the same way this year. This is not the staff’s fault in any way, mind you. When I go to a developer convention, I know I’m going to have a lot in common with the folks there. This is a world where I’m a babe in the woods. Believe it or not, this is a very good thing. I have a lot to learn, and thankfully, the staff and speakers this year had a lot to teach.
This is not a “web development” conference, but web developers should attend it. Notacon will introduce you to new concepts and new ways of looking at problems. It will remind you of the complexity of the systems that you take for granted every day. It may even rekindle an interest, as it did with my friend Sean, who is unpacking his old sampling and mixing equipment as we speak.
Looking at the Notacon media archive, it seems like it gets more eclectic each year. Admittedly I’d love to see a web development track develop in the coming years. But even if one did not, I’d definitely go back, and I’d encourage friends to go with me. Too often there’s a wall between the folks who handle the nuts and bolts of servers/networking and those who upload their work to those servers/networks. Next year…instead of worrying about what “Web 3.0″ might hold, step back and dig into what Notacon is offering. You won’t be sorry.
