I’m here at the GooglePlex sitting a row away from the stage and enjoying the atmosphere.  It’s a great vibe here.  This does feel different than the Microsoft conferences I have been to.  Some observations so far is that the crowd seems a little younger for the most part and there is a comfortable atmosphere.  Of course there’s free food and drinks, free wifi, a great stage and screen for the presentations and the audio is flawless.  The only complaint I have thus far is the uncomfortable plastic daycare chairs.

Earlier I attended Guido’s App Engine keynote (blog post to follow later), and I’m now attending the High Performance Django talk.  I will try to make a post for each talk I attend.

Check back soon…

I’m going to DjangoCon 2008!

Am I still writing a blog – yes!  See, what had happened was…  I was moving right along until I saw these basic-apps.  I love reading source code so I grabbed the source and started reading through them.  I switched gears and decided to try implementing a few of them into working blog.  So far it’s still coming along nice and I’m learning a lot.  It’s very addicting to learn and make progress.

I also recently launched PaiWaterOasis.com, a water delivery business in Okinawa, Japan.  This site is built on Django and MySql and is deployed at SliceHost.

Because I can. Because I should. Because cool developers do it. I’m really doing it because I agree with an article from Geoffrey Grossenbach of the Nuby On Rails and PeepCode (actually, the guy does tons of stuff – go check his site out) fame. In it he says,

“I’ll add to this and say that every beginning Rails developer should write their own blog software. It’s a great learning experience and you can try things that aren’t possible with just an app running on localhost. It’s also a great environment for learning without the pressure of a mission-critical app. When you’re working for a client and deploying an important application, you’ll have made all the beginner mistakes on your own time (hopefully).”

It’s somewhat of a personal pride thing, as I want readers that come to my site to know that I took the time to build my own blog engine. It was a great introduction to Django and provided me a means to applying the knowledge I have gained from the tutorial and other reading.

So far I’ve done three 45 minute sessions during lunch and I have the Articles, Categories, Links, and Announcements working.  I’ve been keeping track of the time and once I’m done I’ll provide the stats on time and effort along with the source.

A lot of the referrers I’ve been getting are people looking for a Slicehost review.  Am I still happy – YES.  It has been great service with .001% downtime of which I was notified well in advance.  They have a great service and do a good job.  If you’re looking for a Linux VPS, I still enthusiastically recommend Slicehost.

So what else am I doing?  Well, I haven’t been blogging, that’s for sure.  I’ve been working on WPF at work and founding out there are some really cool things about it, and then there are a bunch of things it really lacks.  I hope to qualify that statement with some upcoming posts.

I also took a vacation – an actual road trip to a far away land (AZ) to see some family.

Shortly after I posted my last blog entry on installing RM-Install, I received a comment from an employee at FiveRuns encouraging me to contact their support team.  We had a few brief emails back and forth and in the end I was told “You need 32-bit compatibility binaries to use our product on 64-bit linux.”  I was confident that was the issue from the start as the error was specifically nagging about “ELFCLASS32″.

I honestly didn’t take the time to go and find out how to install 32-bit compatibility binaries. And of course I expect you, Dear Reader, to understand why.  I’m a developer and therefore I’m lazy.  If I can add a few lines to a shell script that will install the software I want, that’s an easy and known quantity.  It will probably take me a few minutes to write the script and a few more to run the script.

To install the 32-bit binaries, use the following command:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

So what do I really think of the RM-Install product?  It’s a good idea if you’re running on a 32-bit distro and need a Rails development environment quickly.  I’m sure there are many developers not using dual core 64-bit processors these days, I just don’t know any.   This is really more on par to what Instant Rails is for the Windows guys for a complete environment than the BitNami product is this time.

Congrats to FiveRuns for making it easier to start coding in Rails.

If you still haven’t tried Sinatra (which you should have by now) then maybe you just need some additional resources.  Here is a site with some tutorials and a screencast.

Through one of my feeds today I found a link to AppJet.  They’ve got a great site set up for building and hosting javascript based apps using Rhino and jQuery.  Try the shoutbox app.  It gives some great ideas for integrating into some of my existing apps…

After we all thought InstantRails was dead, Rob Bazinet has saved the day.  He has announced that he’s taking over InstantRails and will be soon updating it to Rails 2.0.1.

A friend and colleague of mine is searching for a Cold Fusion developer for some contract work.  I’ve seen some of the specs first hand and I can tell you that the software you’ll be writing is relevant and interesting.  It might even challenge you a little and will ultimately build up your skill set.  As if that wasn’t enough, the guy you’d be working with is talented and you’ll learn from him even if you’re not trying to.  Kind of makes me wish I had more time and experience with CF, and that I wasn’t having so much fun with an evolution right now.

Someone in the Google Group for Sinatra claims to have it working on Windows by removing all of the FileUtils#touch method.  He didn’t say what he put in it’s place and just removing it outright doesn’t seem to work.  I’m still working on it when time permits, so drop me a comment if you figure it out.