THE Mike Walsh did a nice writeup of Aron’s recent appearance at the Thursday Meeting at Berkman.  Thanks again to Mike for extending the invitation.

Time and place for WebInno 12 have been announced: Tuesday May 22nd 2007 at 6:30pm at the Royal Sonesta in Cambridge, MA.

They’re still looking for folks to give product demos at the event.  If you’re a Boston area web or wireless company, it’s a great venue to show your stuff.  Details of all sorts can be found here.

I’ll be attending the Waverley Trail dedication ceremony this Friday, April 27, 2007.  The event takes place at 3:30 PM, rain or shine, at Beaver Brook Reservation, 650 Trapelo Road, Belmont.

The Waverly Trail “celebrate[s] the remarkable history of the Oaks and the Waverley neighborhood.”  Beaver Brook Reservation, known colloquially as “Waverley Oaks” once housed enormous oak trees, some reportedly over 1000 years old.

This is where I grew up.  I used to catch crayfish in the brook here.  I’m really excited to learn more about the trail.

On a related note, WalkBoston will be sponsoring a one-hour guided tour of the trail on Saturday, April 28, 2007 at 10:30 PM.  It’s free, but reservations are required.  See here or call 617-367-9255 for details.

OpenCoffee is touted as “a place for people who love startups to hang out and meet.”  That pretty well describes OpenCoffee Boston which takes place every Thursday morning from 10:00 AM to noon at Andala Coffee House.  Andala is located in Central Square at 286 Franklin Street, Cambridge, MA.

This event has been going on for a little over a month, and I’ve spent at least a little time at most of them.  The environment is quite friendly, the coffee is quite good, and I always come away having learned a thing or two.

Attendance is generally strong, and has grown slightly since it’s started.  The crowd is mostly made up of web-oriented entrepreneurs, but there are folks with all sorts of backgrounds.  I’ve spotted at least one venture person in attendance.

The coffee is good, the environment is very informal (no name tags!), and it’s easy to pop in and out just to catch up and say hello.  Some people even work away on their laptops through the entire event.

So, if you’re remotely near Central Square and thinking about grabbing a coffee, come on by, meet a couple people, see a demo, hear about a new idea, or just enjoy a cup of coffee!

As Matthew mentioned, I was at the Berkman Thursday Meeting on April 12th. I had a great time talking about Spotstory to everyone in attendance.

Thanks to Mike Walsh for the invitation and Erica George for help with some of the logistics.

Extra thanks to everyone who braved the weather on Thursday. From my office window, I watched as the weather cycled through sleet, rain, and maybe a little hail. The Red Sox may have been rained out, but the Berkman Blog Group persevered!

We had a lot of fun presenting at the Boston Ruby Group last night.  We’d like to thank Tom Dyer and everyone else involved with organizing, setting up, providing space, and providing pizza.

Once again, the meeting was well attended: folks were standing along the walls and sitting on the floor.  This month’s program was more Rails-oriented than last month’s, but few people seemed to mind that.

Eric Mill from thoughtbot gave a talk on REST and ActiveResource.  The highlight was definitely Jester, a JavaScript REST implementation  developed at thoughtbot.  It’s modeled after ActiveResource and, boy howdy, does it look neat!

Jeremy Durham did a presentation on Memcache.  Jeremy has spoken at both of the meetings I’ve attended, and on both occasions he’s provided a lot of practical, meat-and-potatos info you can use.

You can find Aron’s presentation here, and mine here.

The group is always looking for speakers, so please volunteer!  If you’re in the Boston area and working with Ruby/Rails, it’s a great way to learn about the subject and to meet folks in the community. 

Aron will be showing Spotstory at this week’s Thursday Meeting at Berkman.  The meeting starts at 7:00 PM at The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett Street, Cambridge MA.  We’re really looking forward to this.

(Actually, I won’t be there.  I’ve already committed to attend the Social Media Club Boston event, “Ethics and the Social Media Generation Gap,” happening that same evening.  I am afraid can’t wait to see which side of the gap I’m on!)

Boston Ruby Group tonight

Finally, a reminder that both Aron and I will be presenting at tonight’s meeting of the Boston Ruby Group. It starts at 7:00 PM at One Broadway, Cambridge, MA.  Come on by if you’re an experienced Ruby hacker or just curious.

Aron and I will be presenting at the upcoming meeting of the Boston Ruby Group on on Tuesday, April 10th, 7:00 PM at One Broadway, Cambridge, MA.

Aron will talk about the regression testing infrastructure we use to validate all of our markup.  I’ll briefly go over another component of our Rails testing environment that we call Isolated Fixtures.

More details can be found here.  Come on by and say hello (not to mention last time there was pizza!)

When you launch your website, you’re supposed to have a schwanky launch party. Not wanting to flout tradition, that’s just what we did.

We held ours at the Bruegger’s Bagels in Belmont Center (Belmont, MA), yesterday at 10 AM. The event was held in the booth in the corner, which is ideal since it is near an outlet.

The first photo is of Aron enjoying himself. Aron had already eaten his bagel by the time I had arrived. He’s usually not that hungry and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t even late.

The photo to the right shows the lavish spread laid out for the festivities. That’s a honey grain bagel with jalapeno cream cheese and some sort of mango juice drink.

A great time was had by all.

Matthew claims that I am a superstar, but it’s really less glamorous.

Part of the BarCamp Boston 2 conference was a programming contest.

During the whole first day, people wrote words on a blackboard. At the end of the day, some 11 words were chosen. From these words participants needed to build software which used at least four.

My entry, Pixels to Penguins was one of about seven different entries from different teams of different sizes. All the presentations were very well done, and all quite light-hearted; a great end to the weekend.

Pixels to Penguins took user input, performed a flickr search for related tags, then performed another flicker API call to find images which matched those related tags. The images were mapped onto an ASCII-art rendering of Tux, the Linux penguin; JavaScript made these images appear gradually. To accompany this beautiful scene, all of the data was converted into an integer stream and a 4-track MIDI file was generated. What beautiful music!

The judges named Pixels to Penguins the winning contest entry. The top two teams (three of us in total) won a helicopter ride with Phil Greenspun. I’ve never been in a helicopter!

The (Ruby on Rails) code for Pixels to Penguins is here. I’ve found that it works best under the FireFox browser. My presentation is here.

Update: I’ve had reports that this hack hangs some browsers, so buyer beware. I have been using it successfully on Firefox/MacOSX, but Safari hangs. Firefox/Windows seems to also have problems. If you figure it out, please add a comment to this post!

Update2 I think the browser hangs have been resolved. I was toggling visibility by altering opacity from 0 to 1. A number of browsers were not happy with so much opacity changing so quickly. Now, I’m simply changing the visibility CSS attribute. Please let me know if you still experience troubles with my Pixels to Penguins hack. (Really, it’s nothing more than a cute hack.)