After a moderately unpopular sojourn to Las Vegas, RailsConf has been hinting about a move to the East Coast of the United States. Today, they dropped the bombshell that RailsConf 2010 will be held in Baltimore, virtually in our backyard, in June 2010. This is, unfortunately, also the timeframe when we were planning to hold RubyNation 2010. So, it looks like RubyNation will be moving out of the way of its much larger (and considerably more expensive) cousin. March 2010 looks like a major contender for RubyNation’s new date. More news later as it becomes available.
RubyNation Web Site Updated
Just finished the latest update to the RubyNation web site. Moved 2009 content into the archive area, and updated the remaining content to reflect the run-up to the next conference in June 2010 (exact date and venue still to be determined). Next step, we’re working on a new look-and-feel, thanks to some help from Don Anderson, graphic artist extraordinaire.
Making Money Online
This is a great round-up from Josh Catone on the Mashable site. It covers 15 great sites that people are using to make real money online.
David Keener Speaking at “Rails 101 Night”
David Keener will be speaking, along with Gray Herter and Arild Shirazi, at the Rails 101 Night being hosted by the NovaRUG (the Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group). The night is aimed at Ruby newbies, and will be focused loosely on “rails persistence,” i.e. – how data gets stored in the database. Dave’s topic will be “Rails Tips and Tricks” — basically, a compendium of tips that Dave wished he’d had in-hand when he started programming in Rails.
Loudoun County #4 for Job Growth
Loudoun County just ranked #4 in the United States for job growth according to CNN Money. There may be an economic downturn, but the IT market in Northern Virginia is hopping along just fine.
Atom Feed Now Available
I’ve just added an Atom feed to the KeenerTech.com web site. The feed makes articles easily accessible to users with any feed reader. It also makes it easier to leverage the content on other sites, e.g. – article entries are now visible on LinkedIn.
Just Finished iPhone SDK Training
Dave Keener just completed Pragmatic Studio’s “iPhone SDk” training course, held in Reston, VA this week. “Highly recommended for those who are serious about embarking into the realm of iPhone application development,” stated David Keener. The course covered the SDK, some fundamentals of Objective C, development tools (XCode and other tools), and various Cocoa Touch capabilities. The class was taught by Bill Dudney and Daniel Steinberg.
JRuby Teams Jumps to EngineYard
Oracle is in the process of acquiring Sun, where three core team members of the JRuby development team work. Charles Nutter and company have jumped ship to join EngineYard, a prominent hosting company and a major supporter of the Ruby community. In fact, they’re one of the sponsors of our local RubyNation Conference. There’s more information about this on Slashdot.org.
Steve Keener at Apraho National Park
Steve Keener was just on vacation in Colorado for some dedicated cross-country riding. On Day 7 of the “riding” vacation, he set up his Oregon Scientific helmet mounted camera to collect video showing what it was like to travel through Apraho National Park on a dirt bike.
From Steve:
Drew Marcum and I were running together on the trails, with other riders in our group further ahead. This was Day 7 of our group ‘riding’ vacation, and we were in the Apraho National Forest, near Granby, Colorado. I was recording video with my Oregon Scientific helmet mounted camera. We ended up doing about 29 miles out into the forest, and then came back by a different route.
New Specktrum Release
A new release of Specktrum.net went live today. As part of the release, the web site has been moved from Windows hosting to Linux (CentOS) hosting using the Apache web server. Specktrum is an accounting firm.