Ward Cunningham Presenting at CyborgCamp. Photo: Mark Coleman http://markcolemanphoto.com/

I’m extremely happy to introduce Ward Cunningham. He’ll be presenting “Missing From the Beginning: The Federation of Wikis” at NodePDX. Here’s a description of what he’ll be presenting on in his words.

Our new wiki innovates three ways. It shares through federation, composes by refactoring and wraps data with visualization.

The Smallest Federated Wiki project wants to be small in the “easy to learn powerful ideas” version of small. It wants to be a wiki so that strangers can meet and create works of value together. And it wants to be federated so that the burden of maintaining long-lasting content is shared among those who care.

Ward's Art Image, Click to Checkout His Site

Ward has a list of awesome insights and projects he’s worked on, including a little agile manifesto contribution.  Here’s a short bio of Ward,

Ward Cunningham currently serves in a one-year appointment as Nike’s open-data fellow. He has been CTO at CitizenGlobal, a growth company enabling the co-creation of media. Ward co-founded the consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc. He has served as CTO of AboutUs, a Director of the Eclipse Foundation, an Architect in Microsoft’s Patterns & Practices Group, the Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principle Engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory.

Ward is well known for his contributions to the developing practice of object-oriented programming, the variation called Extreme Programming, and the communities supported by his WikiWikiWeb. Ward hosts the AgileManifesto.org. He is a founder of the Hillside Group and there created the Pattern Languages of Programs conferences which continues to be held all over the word.

• Videos: http://wardcunningham.github.com
• Github: https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki

If you’d like to come and check out Ward’s Presentation and the other kick ass presentations lined up, get involved in some coding, hear what Node.js is all about, or just hang out please RSVP and get the event on your calendar! Besides, what better reason to come visit the amazing city of Portland, Oregon than to come hack some node.js and chill for the weekend!

Eric is going to get you pumped up about NoSQL, and depoying to NodeSQL, CouchDB, Neo4j, Redis, and maybe another solution or two! So buckle your big data belts on, this is gonna get huge. From Eric,

NoSQL databases are fun, and we’ve all wired up a Node.js project to use one. But what about two?

What about *three*?

That’s what’s on the docket for this talk. We’ll do **all the things**:

- Walk through a (very) quick intro on CouchDB, Neo4j, and Redis.
- Then learn how to interact with these very different databases using Node.js.
- Then wire them up into a single web application (using Bricks.js, for good measure)
- Write it all in CoffeeScript… *buzzword overload!!!*

If you do not walk out of this talk excited and maybe a little confused, I will have failed.

Eric Redmond

Eric describes himself as, “I work at MongoHQ and has spent the last 17 years writing a book on databases (seemingly). I also just might be the world’s most over-educated and under-qualified marketing directors.” <- His words, I’d never say such a thing about him.

• Company: http://mongohq.com
• Github: http://github.com/coderoshi
• Twitter: @coderoshi
• Book: http://sevenweeks.org

If you’d just like to come and check out Eric’s Presentation and the other kick ass presentations lined up, get involved in some coding, hear what Node.js is all about, or just hang out please RSVP and get the event on your calendar!

If you’d like to be among the presenters, submit a proposal, and you too can step up into the coder spotlight.

Kyle Drake, Chillin'

Kyle Drake, a Geoloqi Coder & frequent co-hackathon hacker & tea drinker I know, will be presenting how Kyle and team at Geoloqi built a real-time geolocation game with Node.js and the Geoloqi API & Services. A quick description of Kyle’s presentation,

There are very powerful things you can do with Node.JS, particularly with projects needing a lot of I/O operations. At Geoloqi, we have used Node.JS and Socket.IO to build a JavaScript client that allows our developers to map real-time tracking on a browser with almost no code needed. Our first project using this is MapAttack!, a truly real-time location-based geofencing game.

Hear about how we made the game, how we made it real-time, where we’re going, and where Node.JS is going to have a role in it. I will also cover what it took to build Geoloqi’s Real-time Streaming API, and how it can be used to bring real-time location functionality to existing applications.

I will also talk a little bit about the Reactor pattern, the mysterious thing underneath that powers Node.JS. I’ll discuss what Reactor patterns are good for (and not so good for), and compare them with threads. I will also compare Node.JS’s reactor pattern to ones in other languages.

Kyle Drake is a many-hats web developer and entrepreneur that speaks multiple languages, and has worked with numerous startups to build their infrastructure. As a software engineer for Geoloqi, he is helping to build their geolocation platform and real-time location-streaming API. He previously developed some of the top Facebook applications as a senior Facebook app developer for Dachis Group.

In his free time, Kyle likes writing more code, working on web site ideas, riding his bicycle around Portland, hiking in the mountains, skiing, reading anthropology and tech books, and he’s fairly good at playing the Star Trek pinball machine at Ground Kontrol.

• Twitter: http://twitter.com/kyledrake
• Geoloqi Developers Site: https://developers.geoloqi.com
• Geoloqi’s Github: https://github.com/geoloqi
• Kyle Drake’s Github: https://github.com/kyledrake

If you’d just like to come and check out Kyle’s Presentation and the other kick ass presentations lined up, get involved in some coding, hear what Node.js is all about, or just hang out please RSVP and get the event on your calendar!

If you’d like to be among the presenters, submit a proposal, and you too can step up into the coder spotlight.

Ken is Bringing the Battle Bots!

Ken Robertson is coming to us from the San Francisco area with a battle to wage. Join in for Battle Bots in the Clouds! Ken describes the presentation well,

Years ago I always enjoyed the BattleBots show on TV and loved teams’ ingenuity and inspiration to essentially build something only to have it gloriously destroyed. But is there a way we can bring that to the software world? What if we could leverage the cloud to orchestrate scalable battles.

In this talk, I will talk about using Node.js in the cloud, particularly within the Cloud Foundry ecosystem and demonstrate deploying to PaaS.io. Will then walk through this concept of software battle bots using a bot in Node.js. And lastly, will deploy the bot into the cloud and run several battles using slight variations to see which one can last the longest or destroy the quickest.

Ken is the founder of PaaS.io, a Platform-as-a-Service company built on Cloud Foundry.  PaaS.io is a language agnostic platform for easy deployment and scaling of applications.  Ken prefers working with clouds on sunny days, but enjoys venturing out into the fog from time to time.  When he isn’t writing bad metaphors, he spends his time learning about and building scalable architectures, operational automation, and making it all work together seamlessly to be leveraged by all.

• Blog: http://invalidlogic.com
• Twitter: @krobertson
• Company: http://paas.io
• Company Blog: http://blog.paas.io
• Company Twitter: @paas_io
• Github: https://github.com/krobertson and https://github.com/paasio

If you’d just like to come and check out Ken’s Presentation and the other presentations lined up, get involved in some coding, hear what Node.js is all about, or just hang out please RSVP and get the event on your calendar!

If you’d like to be among the presenters, submit a proposal, and you too can step up into the coder spotlight.

This next presenter, a Portlander, is Jerry Sievert. Jerry’s a good friend of mine, a connoisseur of awesome things (like beer, distilling, etc) and a bad ass Node-fu Master. Jerry has built the brick.js web framework and will be teaching us all a thing or three about this framework. Which as any self respecting coder would, Jerry has the brick.js code up on github. A bit about the bricks.js session

Bricks.js is an advanced modular web framework built on Node.js. Bricks.js is very flexible. It can be used as a standalone static webserver, a basic routing framework, a multi-level apache-like routing system, as well as being modular enough to have the capability to completely switch out its routing engine. This session will be a mix of an introduction for those who have not used it, and building a fairly simple application using it.

Node-fu Expert Jerry Sievert

Be sure to check out Jerry’s Github, follow him on Twitter, and be sure to give his blog & site a good read.

If you’d just like to come and check out Jerry’s Presentation and the other kick ass presentations lined up, get involved in some coding, hear what Node.js is all about, or just hang out please RSVP and get the event on your calendar!

If you’d like to be among the presenters, submit a proposal, and you too can step up into the coder spotlight.

I’m stroked to introduce another one of our NodePDX Conference Speakers today. Garann Means is traveling from the weird city of Austin, Texas to the weird city of Portland, Oregon so she can impart on us coders some of knowledge around “DRYing out of Client-side Apps”. As she describes,

“There’s plenty of cool stuff Node offers purely in terms of server-side architectures, but it also offers a way to solve a problem we’ve been wrestling with since client-side applications became a big deal: writing everything twice. Rather than having the templates that produce markup exist in one backend language and in JavaScript, you can reuse them. Instead of validating in JavaScript on the client for the user’s convenience and then again in some other language on the server for security, you can share a validation module that can be used in both scenarios. And so on. We’ll look at some of the ways to stop repeating ourselves in Node apps and focus on getting the most out of existing client-side code.”

Garann looking at the code to her upper right.

Garann is a JavaScript Dev in Austin with her dog and cat, who leap in for code reviews. She grew to love Node after a history of backend development combined with her passion for client-side apps. She has a, and I quote “colorful” blog, which I myself read every time she posts a new entry. She’s also an author of “Node for Front-End Developers” from O’Reilly, which she wrote when she wasn’t remodeling her house and coding awesome JavaScript magic!

Garann has some seriously good reads over on her blog, some of my favorites include:

• The 150k Solution -> Companies, especially those in sprawling suburbia need to take heed of what she writes about here, and even more so are those companies that try to throw money at developers. She’s got more insight into this than most people that are actually in charge of finding talent!
• Calling the github API with Node.js -> This post is pretty obvious why it’s a favorite of mine. She does a deep dive into use the github API, and, well, just go check it out. Great material.

Also, Garann is active & involved on github obviously. Give her a follow on lanyrd and also on twitter.

If you’d just like to come and check out Garann’s Presentation and the other great presentations lined up, get involved in some coding, hear what Node.js is all about please RSVP and get the event on your calendar!

If you’d like to be among the presenters, submit a proposal, and you too can step up into the coder spotlight.

Over the following days I’ll be introducing each of the speakers for NodePDX. The first speaker is someone pretty well known in Portland, has helped organize the JavaScript Admirers Group in town, and works for another well known Portland Company, Jive.

Jesse Hallett Doing the JavaScript Presentation Thing

Jesse Hallett

He’ll be presenting “Object-oriented Patterns in JavaScript” which is something I’d advise any new, experienced, or elder programming JavaScript to check out. Knowing these concepts is key to really digging in and creating manageable, readable, and usable JavaScript Code. Jesse provides a description of his presentation:

JavaScript is a language that is tremendously flexible, but that comes
with few clear conventions. Code organization is one are that has been
reinvented perhaps more times than there are JavaScript programmers.
I will examine a few tools that are intended to improve the experience
of writing object-oriented code.

Some of the specific tools that I plan to examine are [traits.js][],
[CoffeeScript][], [Prototype][], and [JiverScripts][]. The goal is to
get a look at different ideas to see what each approach has to offer.
We will discuss inheritance versus composition, and question when it is
or is not appropriate to use object-oriented code.

[traits.js]: http://traitsjs.org/
[CoffeeScript]: http://coffeescript.org/
[Prototype]: http://prototypejs.org/learn/class-inheritance
[JiverScripts]: https://github.com/jivesoftware/jiverscripts

Audience participation is encouraged: if you have a favorite OO
implementation, or experiences with JavaScript code organization, feel
free to come and to share.

Got JavaScript curiosities, want to get in touch with Jesse, or just lurk on his twitter feed or blog? Here’s the info:

• Blog: http://sitr.us/
• Twitter: @hallettj
• Company: http://jivesoftware.com/
• Github: https://github.com/hallettj

If you’d just like to check out Jesse’s Presentation and other great presentations that are lined up, get an RSVP and add it to your calendar!

If you’d like to be among the presenters, submit a proposal, and you too can step up into the coder spotlight.

Node.js Magic Logo

Also, if anyone is interested in taking the train down to Portland, the last two departures that Friday will have a group of attendees going; Train #507 Departing at 2:20pm and #509 departing at 5:30pm from King Street Station. (Schedules)  If anyone is interested in taking the train down please let me know and I’ll help coordinate so we can all get seats (preferably with tables) to hack together while enjoying the scenery.

Core Idea

The idea behind this Node.js Conference is a technology focused, node.js, JavaScript Lib, hacker conference. We felt that there needed to be a more tech focused event around the core technologies so Troy Howard (@thoward37), Jesse Hallet (@hallettj), and I thought “we’ll just get our own thing happening” and thus, PDX Node.js Conference was born.

So check out the site, come share your JavaScript chops, Node.js hacks, favorite js libs, or just come and check out the conference and meet some smart, cool, and sexy people in Portlandia, Oregon.

Click for a massive, full size, huge panoramic shot of Portland from the Aerial Tram.

First there is the getting started guide. This write up provides a basic description of what the Windows Server 2008 Core R2 is, laying out the services and other characteristics of the installation. Specifically for the R2 version of the core installation these services are available:

• Active Directory Certificate Services
• Active Directory Domain Services
• Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS)
• DHCP Server
• DNS Server
• File Services (including File Server Resource Manager)
• Hyper-V
• Print and Document Services
• Streaming Media Services
• Web Server (including a subset of ASP.NET)

One of the first things you’ll need to do is administer the server core installation. This document details the ways a server core instance can be administered such as:

• Locally and remotely using a command prompt.
• Remotely using Terminal Server.
• Remotely using Windows Remote Shell.
• Locally or remotely using Windows PowerShell.
• Remotely using an MMC snap-in.
• Remotely using Server Manager.

Known Issue: There is also an issue with core installations that is brought up. Not all management tasks can be performed by the MMC snap-in. An included script can be used to configure the things unavailable via MMC. The script is in \Windows\System32 folder. The following command provides configuration options for the unavailable MMC features:

cscript scregedit.wsf /?

Three more cool things before moving on:

1. Cheat Sheets or as they’re labeled “Job Aids for Server Core Installations of Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2“.
2. Additional References for Installing a number of features including; Backup, Bitlocker, File Server, and a host of other features.
3. Installing Server Roles onto the server core. This section provides step by step instructions to get various roles setup on the server including file sharing, etc.

Now that I’ve covered the standard things the server does and can do when configured, there are a number of things that need installed to really make the server useful. At least, for what I need it for. The first thing I need is to get .NET 4.0 running on the server. Onwards!

.NET 4.0 Standalone Installation for Server Core

I’ll admit right up front installing this shows a gross neglect that Windows 2008 Server Core has. First navigate, on a completely different machine, and download the .NET Standalone Installation for Server Core. Now, this is one of those situations where it appears Microsoft just completely misses how the Internet might work or should work. Why is .NET 4.0 not provided via FTP or some way that I could actually download it from the actual server that needs it? No idea, but you can’t. Once you do have it downloaded on a completely different machine (in my case, I used trusty OS-X) you can then find a way to get it onto the machine. I used a FAT formatted (yeah, in this situation I’ve had to return back a couple decades to FAT technology to get a 2011 piece of technology to work) USB Stick. Once I got the installation file on the USB Stick I just mounted that up and copied the file over the machine and installed it.

Instructions per the Download Page

1. Important: Make sure that your computer has the latest Windows service pack and critical updates. To find security updates, visit Windows Update.  Including the following requirements (The image (Fig 1) shows what items I included – the extra items I included are unrelated to this blog entry):
   1. Turn on WoW64:

      Start /w ocsetup ServerCore-WOW64

   2. Turn on .NET 2.0 layer:

      Start /w ocsetup NetFx2-ServerCore

   3. Turn on .NET 2.0 layer for WoW64:

      Start /w ocsetup NetFx2-ServerCore-WOW64

      

      Installing Multiple Services/Roles for the Server Core

2. On this page, locate the Download button and then click it to start the download.
3. To save the download to your computer so that you can install it later, click Save.
4. To cancel the download, click Cancel.
5. After installing .NET Framework 4 on Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Server Core, it is highly recommended you install critical .NET Framework 4 updates available on Windows Update.

Installing .NET 4.0 for Server Core

PowerShell, Now We’re Getting Somewhere!

Alright, the server is starting to be useful now. We have various services and prospectively other networking capabilities, all depending on what we would have wanted to install during the first section  of material. We also have .NET 4.0, so we can run some honest to goodness useful .NET Applications, such as web apps, and more.

Now that we’re all wrapped up, it is always a good idea to give a Windows Server one more firm kick before we put it into production. To shutdown, restart or otherwise give the server that kick, just type shutdown and you’ll find all the switches available. The most common one I use is to just shutdown right away (relatively, it still takes its time shutting down).

shutdown -s

Writing

I started writing a series which is being published by New Relic around “Removing the Operating System Barrier with Platform as a Service“.  Part 1 is live NOW – so go give it a read!  :)

Working

Currently I’ve been working up some Enterprise Prototypes using the IronFoundry Technology. The idea is to provide a seamless deployment option for Enterprises that may have a very mixed environment of public and private computing options, virtual and non-virtualized environments, and any array of other capabilities. I’ve also been toying around with Windows 2008 Server Core, which I’ll have more about shortly.

Public Cloud AppFog

AppFog provides a public facing PaaS supporting PHP, Ruby on Rails, Java, MongoDB and a lot of other packages. They’re currently in beta right now, which I was fortunate enough to snag access to, but I’m sure the covers will come off soon enough! The underlying technology is built on CloudFoundry, providing a robust, scalable, and capable infrastructure connection to provide PaaS on.

In addition to AppFog there is the CloudFoundry.com offering, which I’ve tested out a little bit, but mostly focused on AppFog and on building out…

Private Cloud Capabilities w/ Public Cloud Style Infrastructure

I’ve built out some images to test out how CloudFoundry and IronFoundry works. I did pull down the provided virtual machines but I’m also building out my own to understand it better. The Ruby + C# that I’ve seen from the VMware crew & Tier 3 team has been great so far (I always dig reading some solid code).

• Github CloudFoundry Code
• Github IronFoundry Code fork for .NET

That’s it for this short review, more to come, and let me know what you think of my entry “Removing the Operating System Barrier with Platform as a Service” over on New Relic’s Blog.