HR Geeks

A number of locals participated yet again in assisting with 2600 magazine’s HOPE conference at the famous Hotel Pennsylvania, located in New York City. The additions provided DVD quality video streaming from the 18th floor to the 2nd floor over a fiber optic network connection (provided by the network guys - props to Dragorn, Binary, Porkchop and their assistants). The big new feature this year, implemented by Erik as we drove to Manhattan was a comment system. Members of the audience in front of the large projection screen had the ability to anonymously post comments on a web page that would scroll across the bottom of the large display. Being anonymous, one can only imagine what ended up on the scroll (full analysis pending). While it was only active for a periods, it still racked over 7,000 comments.

There is the possibility we will be working on a rapidly deployable media management system intended for “hacker” conferences, and usable by other groups.

HOPE 2008, the 7th Hackers on Planet Earth conference was great fun, and we are glad to hear there will be a 8th HOPE in 2010.

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Two Hampton Roads companies have made it into the best business category at Linux World 2008. One is xTuple (www.xtuple.com) with xTuple ERP 3.0, and the other is Concursive with ConcourseSuite 5.3 (www.concursive.com). Times must be ripe for name changing, xTuple used to be called OpenMFG and Concursive used to be called CentricCRM. Congrats to both Norfolk, VA based companies and good luck winning against Drupal!

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I noticed an article about yet another fine google service, AppEngine. It looks like google is releasing a set of tools that allow you to build a web application to run on Google’s servers. It is in preview right now (registration is already full, I tried). The idea is that you write an application using Google’s SDK which, according to Google, provides:

• Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies 
• Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)
• Automatic scaling and load balancing
• Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
• Fully featured local development environment

So basically google is giving you all the tools you need to build a shared-nothing web application with great scalability, running on their infrastructure. The glory of it all, is that you don’t even have to know what shared-nothing is or appreciate why it works. Just use the authentication system and database driver they hand you and it’s all done. Oh and the first 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day are likely going to be free. You have to pay if you want more than that. Right now it’s for python only but I see mention of support for other languages too. Oh and they include the Django template module built into the SDK for you Django nerds. I wonder how long it’ll be before they open up more devloper accounts. I quiver with anticipation.

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For those of you that are after an alternative to Symantec Corporate, I present to you AVG Network Edition. Over the last couple years I’ve become sort of a closet AVG fan, but I’ve finally come to respect it as a fine antivirus product, and the price is right. The Network Edition is setup to give you centralized management of the workstations via AVG Admin Console, letting you silently install it on workstations from the server, monitor client configurations and check for any problems. I didn’t really care for version 7, the network installer was really counter-intuitive and difficult to use but I just started rolling 8 out at a customer site earlier today and it’s as smooth as can be. It’s also worth noting that if you choose to buy their server packages like exchange server or file server edition, they also work with the Admin Console so you can control the servers from the same place. It’s definitely worth a look for small businesses.

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Welcome to the new HR Geeks website, live as of 12:30AM this fine Wednesday morning.

We’re going to try and run this new version of the site sort of like Slashdot, with a couple authors posting stories here on the page, but all the action running in the forums. Jump on over there and sign up for an account, so you don’t miss any of the fun. You can syndicate per-topic on this site, or grab everything that comes across the wire. Full site feed will be autodetected by most feed readers, and content-specific feeds are linked on the right-hand side of this page.

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