Day: 2 April 2007

Geekdinners LA style

spiderman%20large.JPG

I found this while looking around the blogging.LA blog. Why was I looking around? I met the organiser of LA Geekdinners, a women by the name of Heathervescent and we shared a lot of tips and tricks regarding Geekdinners.

Heather was not very popular while playing werewolf at Etech due to some bust up with Cal Henderson in a previous game. But she was very open and passionate about what she was doing. However there were strange differences in what we were doing.

  • Heather sets all the dates in advance at the start of the year instead of going by guests
  • She still has sit down meals, but since hearing what worked for us in London. Is considering buffet food in a bar
  • Shes also doing side games on different dates. We do Werewolf every 2 months while they do Powerpoint karaoke every 2-3 months.
  • I suggested we might do Delicious Petcha Kucha one day and showed her the salted script
  • Heather also does geekdinners at the start of the week like we do here because the end of the week is troublesome
  • LA geekdinners is currently using the BarCamp wiki, but she was consider other ways to do it.
  • Girl Geekdinners came up, but it seems the balance of women to men at LA Geekdinners might not be so bad?
  • LA Geekdinners also do not have guests as such, there more meetup style
  • We wondered who actually owns Geekdinner.com and is there something we could do to improve whats already out there
  • Is there a reason why LA, London and New York have geekdinners and places like San Francisco don't?

Since our chat I've been rethinking going to LA one day in the near future. Theres a lot we can do together and now Rachel Clarke seems to be running the New York Geekdinners maybe there is something we could all do together?

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Cubicgarden.com issues recently

So if you've not noticed already, cubicgarden.com has been up and down like a yoyo on a broken string. This was not the fault of Hub.org, actually Apache 2.x has been running flawlessly through-out the troubles. Thats why you could see the 503 error and not a 404.

Without boring everyone to death, I'm running on a virtual server FreeBSD (thats right Marc?) in which I'm running Resin 3.x and Apache 2.x together connected via jk or something like that. I then use Apache for static files and Resin the Java container for dynamic applications. Currently I have Blojsom, Cocoon and ZK installed in the Java container.

So what was actually happening? Well Resin was running out of memory every few hours. But why? It seems there was a problem with the crazy amount of spam I getting on my pipeline blog and so Blojsom was trying to load most of them into memory for analysis or something. So I have deleted all comments and trackbacks from Flow currently and made it a read only place for now. I was going to use Akismet on it too but decided actually it was better as read only for now. Those really interested will email me and spammers can just die.

Hopefully now cubicgarden.com and all the other blogs hosted on the same install of blojsom will be more reliable and I won't get the floods of emails saying your site is down again. Thanks to everyone who did write. Honestly I would have done this much earlier if I was in my regular timezone.

In the long run, I'm considering putting geekdinner.co.uk on the same blojsom install, but I'm worried this will screw up the other geekdinners around the country. And geez, everyone just can't get enough of WordPress. By the way Photomatt is a very cool, down to earth guy and well worth talking to if you get a chance.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]