OpenSource Connections

Upcoming OSC appearances

In prepping for tomorrow's presentation on Social Media for the Shenandoah Ruby Users Group, Jennifer Till asked me where else we were going to be appearing at. I feel like a concert promoter who's failed to promote his band's concerts. We have several upcoming appearances; here are a few of ...

Using Scrum on grad school projects

Last week I finished Module 1 of the UVa McIntire School of Commerce grad school program I'm in, for an MS in Management of Information Technology. It was a great 2 weeks, and a lot of fun and hard work. The MSMIT program at McIntire is a 12 month program for ...

Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server to be published in July

The book Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server by David Smiley and OSC's own Eric Pugh will be published next month from Packt Publishing. You can find out more about the book at the Packt Publishing website. Some of the topics that the book covers include: Blend structured data with real search ...

CBS19 Blog of the Week for Tuesday, June 9

I'll be presenting the CBS19 Blog of the Week next Tuesday, June 9. If you want to watch it live, I'll be appearing between 6:30 and 7:00 PM, and you can also watch it streaming on http://www.charlottesvillenewsplex.tv/. Fans of Marijean Jaggers need fear not, for she'll be back in action ...

Arin Sime Awarded CBIC Leadership Award

On May 21, 2009 at the Charlottesville Business Innovation Council annual awards dinner, Arin Sime of OpenSource Connections was awarded the CBIC Leadership Award for demonstrating "exemplary leadership and [contributing] most significantly toward the organization’s mission.” Arin has served for the past year as CBIC's treasurer as well as serving ...

MonkeyCI: Super light-weight Continuous Integration for small teams

At OSC, we have a well developed methodology that we apply to our client work, and one of the core tenets is using Continuous Integration to ensure our code behaves the way we intend it to. However, recently we've had two projects were the usual CI solutions such as CruiseControl etc ...

Programatically Capturing Web pages as Images

I don't normally post blog articles that are reposts of other content, but this email thread answered a question that I've struggled with, which is how do you render a web page and save it as an image. I do this on HighTechCville, and our Fish4Brains RailsRumble entry a ...

A more Agile CIA?

This past weekend was my first as a graduate student at the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce, where I am working on a Masters degree in Management of Information Technology. It was a great 3 days of intensive classes on IT strategy, and I really enjoyed it. Over ...

Zend and ExpressionEngine Working Together

Have you ever tried to make two technologies working together? Has it worked well for you? Was it easy, out of the box type of task that took you about an hour to complete? Or was a week long thing, and you got out of it with less hair? If ...

Richmond SPIN on Continuous Integration

I have the honor of speaking to the Richmond SPIN group on Continous Integration next week Wednesday, May 13. SPIN is the Software and Systems Process Improvement Network, and are the local groups sponsored by Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute. My presentation is going to be a bit different ...

Attending FutureRuby09

Conference season is on its way, as I am writing this RailsConf09 is taking place in Vegas. And the people who brought us RubyFringe will try to repeat their success with this year's conference called FutureRuby. The conference will be taking place in Toronto, CA July 9-12th, 2009. From ...

Arin Sime speaking at Agile 2009

I was very excited to learn earlier this week that I had a session proposal for Agile 2009 accepted. In Chicago on Thursday Aug 27, at 4pm, I'll be discussing How to sell a traditional client on an agile project plan. Here's how I described the session: You’re negotiating a ...

OpenSource Connections Named University of Virginia Preferred Vendor

Today, OpenSource Connections received notification that they had been chosen as a University of Virginia preferred vendor for Web Design, Development, and Programming Services. The new contract should appear on the University of Virginia Preferred Vendor page within the next two weeks. The range of services covered under the contract include: Information ...

Slides Available From Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce Social Networking 201 Workshop

The slides from this morning's presentation of Social Networking 201 with the Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce, presented by me, Marijean Jaggers, and Sasha Farmer, is now available here. Thanks to Sasha and Marijean for making this such a great presentation! It was great to work with both of you!

A Scrum take on “Metrics and Analysis in Companies at Different Maturity Levels of the CMMI”

Last month Scott, Arin, and myself road tripped to attend the Richmond SPIN meeting, where Kris Puthucode of the Software Quality Center gave a talk on "Metrics and Analysis in Companies at Different Maturity Levels of the CMMI Model". The focus on the talk was what results you can expect ...

Time for a Time Based Database (TBDB)?

Yesterday Arin Sime and I saw Jean Bauer's presentation on developing the Early American Foreign Service Database that is part of her disseration attempting to identify why the Foreign Service was so effective when it was intrinsicaly a very chaotic unorganized period for what we now call the Foreign Service. Jean ...