Denver Mayor Proclaims Widespread Panic Day in Denver

Matt Good and I saw Widespread Panic at RedRocks on Friday night - what a blast! That's the first time I've seen them and although I was tired from the week, I was impressed.

We showed up about an hour early and entered the amphitheater about 45 minutes before the show started and boy were we surprised. There were tarps *everywhere* and they were taped down with duct tape! We'd never seen this before, how strange. As we weaved all around and worked our way upward through all the tarps and the people looking for seats, we happened upon a section of bench about 10 or 15 feet long where there were no tarps. We asked a dude sitting there if the seats were available and he responded by pointing his finger at us, 'Do you have a tarp?!' We both said no and he said, 'Then sit down - this is the non-tarpers' zone.' We were stoked, as were the people sitting next to us for having found some more non-tarpers.

The band played two sets and the second was even better than the first! And Friday was only the first night, as Widespread Panic played for three consecutive nights (Fri/Sat/Sun), all of which were sold out.

Evidently Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper even declared Friday 27 June to be Widespread Panic day in the city and county of Denver for having played 32 consecutively sold out shows at RedRocks Amphiteater. Awesome!

Service Oriented Integration Talk from Javapolis 2007 Posted

It looks like my talk from Javapolis 2007 titled Service Oriented Integration With Apache ServiceMix was posted on the Parleys website for anyone who's interested. This presentation talks about the definition of an Enterprise Service Bus, Java Business Integration, Apache ServiceMix 3, a little bit of Apache Camel and some info about Apache ServiceMix 4. It also shows a somewhwat basic app that wires together various JBI components to demonstrate how apps are built with ServiceMix. So if you are interested in a simple app this might help you.

Notice that Javapolis has changed it's name and it's logo and is now Javoxx. According to Stefan, the concept is the same and the great conference and events surrounding it will continue at the Metropolis in Antwerp (what a great city!).

Apple Announces MobileMe

Along with the 3G iPhone announcement, Apple also announced MobileMe, a service to automatically keep your iPhone, iPod Touch, Mac and PC in sync.

This service looks really nice but I wonder about the data plan being offered seems to be quite small. For $99/year you get 20GB of storage space and 200GB of data transfer. An additional 20GB of storage can be added for $49/year and 40GB of storage for $99/year. I suppose the storage needs to be limited because the iPhone storage is so small. Which begs the question, can I flag certain items so that they won't be sync'd to certain devices?

Anyway, there's a guided tour video here that spells it all out.

3G iPhone Announced With GPS

It looks like Apple has announced the 3G iPhone and it contains GPS. I've been holding off on buying an iPhone, waiting for the 3G announcement. I suspected that the price would drop, more features would be added and I had hoped that more service providers might be added.

The new iPhone will be priced as $200 for the 8GB model and $300 for the 16GB model, considerably less than the first generation iPhones, but I was surprised that more storage was not added. Unfortunately at&t is still the only service provider in the U.S :-(. That's the one big thing that causes me to pause on buying one.

What are your experiences with an iPhone and at&t? Also, what about roaming charges for international travelers?

Big Head Todd and the Monsters at Red Rocks

Tonight Raible, our buddy Matt and I are doing our annual ride out to Red Rocks Amphitheater in the foothills to see Big Head Todd and the Monsters. Every year BHTM plays Red Rocks in June and we ride our road/mountain bikes out there for the show.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love live music and I'm lucky enough to see a good amount of it here in Colorado. What's more, this is a great time of year to be out riding in Colorado because the weather is just about perfect. Of course, the scenery is always awesome with the snow-capped Rocky Mountains in plain view. And good music at Red Rocks during sundown with great friends is always a good thing!

Gonzo Movie Out on July 4th

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

-- Hunter S. Thompson, 1937-2005



http://huntersthompsonmovie.com/

The Google Shell - goosh.org

Check out goosh.org to see the Google Shell. Simply visit the website and it's interface is a command line shell that offers a set of commands and modes to expose Google services in the shell. I've posted some examples of simple searches I did for a band named Death Cab For Cutie and I like.



This is a cool concept, but I would much rather have shell access to Google services on my local command line. Don't get me wrong, this a useful idea but I'd rather pipe searches and stuff to the services from my iTerm than open a browser to get a command line. Seems a bit backwards to me. Anyway, it's a cool experiment, check it out!

Apache Camel at the Denver Open Source User's Group

Last night I spoke about Apache Camel at the Denver Open Source User's Group. Anytime I talk about Camel, there are people whose response is something like Matthew's: 'I can't believe I didn't know about this already! I already have places where I need Camel!' I love it when folks get the light bulb moment like that ;-).

Adam Sandler Buddy

Here's a goofy short by Adam Sandler from 1994 that I stumbled upon recently. Buddy, dude, homey - funny! :-)


via videosift.com

Apache Camel and ServiceMix at the Colorado Software Summit 2008

I've been accepted to speak about Apache ServiceMix and Apache Camel at the Colorado Software Summit again this year. This will make the fourth year I've spoken at CSS and it's always a good conference full of many talented speakers and attendees. The conference organizers, Peggy and Wayne Kovsky, always host a great event at Keystone ski resort.

The Colorado Software Summit is a software conference that takes place every year at Keystone, Colorado in October. During this time of year at Keystone, winter is definitely on the way. Sometimes there's even enough snow to ski already and we typically see some Colorado wildlife around the area as well. Last year there was a pretty big blizzard on Sunday night when I drove up that almost prevented me from making it all the way to Keystone because there were no plows out yet. Raible and I always rent the same condo and have a fun week in the mountains. And this year Jason van Zyl will be joining us in the condo for his first year at CSS. I'm sure we'll have a good week.