I’ve setup a repo on GitHub for the pub crawl project to get us started. No code as of yet, but I’ve created an organization and a team called Developers that I can add anyone to that would like to work on the app. If you don’t have an account with GitHub, it’s free to create and will allow you to access the project. If you haven’t used Git before, I suggest checking out GitHub’s help section which has some great guides and tutorials linked for learning Git. If you’re not comfortable with the command line interface for Git, download SmartGit or TortoiseGit, which are nice, simple UIs for working with Git repositories and has great GitHub integration.

If anyone needs help getting setup, just let the group know. See y’all next month.

Thanks to Sebastian, Darryl, Sarah, and Chris for making it out last night to the August meeting. Over the course of the evening we had some great discussions about HTML5, the new Google Maps API, Rails 3, Flex, tablets, and other fun topics. Congrats to Darryl for winning the channel developer contest with Litl and on his trip out to FITC 2010. He gave us a demo of his how the Litl development environment worked and the sign language channel he’s developed which very cool to see.

At the close of the meeting, we came to the consensus that we’d like to start building an application as a group. I shared my idea for a pub crawling application using HTML5, Google Maps and Geo-location, LawnChair, CouchDB, jQuery, and an assortment of other fun libraries that everyone seems to be into. Each meeting we’ll try to building a piece of the puzzle and see how it goes. If anyone has any suggestions or requests for features or technologies they’d like to use, come out to the next meeting and let’s dig in.

Our next meeting will be on September 21th, 2010 @ 6:00 PM at the Suntree/Viera Library, since the venue seemed to work out pretty well this month. See you then!

Just a friendly reminder that our August 2010 meeting is tomorrow, Tuesday, August 24th @ 6:00 PM at the Suntree/Viera Library. Bring some ideas regarding APIs you want to check out or specs you’re interested in learning more about. No food or drinks please, per the library guidelines, but if anyone has time, we can always swing by C&J’s next door for a beer afterwards.

The conference room we’ll be using is located to the left of the entrance next to the reference desk and computer station. See you tomorrow night.

This morning I stopped by the Suntree/Viera library and checked on the availability for a meeting room per Chris, Sarah, and Sebastian’s advice. They have a ~10 person conference room that has a large white board, plenty of outlets, and a large meeting room table. They can’t furnish us with a projector and don’t allow food and drink, but they do have free WiFi available. Based on their schedule, the 3rd Tuesday of each month is available if we’d like to use the room; Monday’s were completely booked. I went ahead and took the slot for 6:00 PM to 7:45PM on the 3rd Tuesday of the month; the library closes at 8:00 PM, so we have to end 15 minutes prior to close.

For this month, I grabbed the Tuesday slot (same time) on 08/24, since the 3rd Tuesday would be tomorrow and I’d like to give more notice to the group. There are only a few of us, so if this date is absolutely terrible for anyone, let me know and we can look into changing some dates around. Also, since there is no food/drink allowed in the library and since we’re meeting earlier in the evening, I figure we can grab a beer at Charlie and Jake’s next door afterwards for anyone who is interested.

I’ll update the blog, but let know what y’all think.

Max passed along some information about an electronics hacking group in the Central Florida area that I thought I’d share. FAMiLab is located in Altamonte Springs and has Microcontroller Mondays weekly @ 7:00 PM where they invite the community into the lab to learn and play with assorted electronics hardware and software. For those of you who remember Matt showing us his work on the Barduino, you’ve already gotten a glimpse as to how much fun this kind of stuff can be; check out Max’s latest endeavor as well for another cool example.

According to one of the guys running the show, they’re in the process of restructuring their website and such, but if you’d like to get in touch for more information (i.e. – the gate code to get in), you can email them @ familab.4am at gmail dot com or jump on their discuss mailing list @ http://familab.org/mailman/listinfo for some active conversation. If anyone decides to go, let the group know so people can possibly carpool into Orlando.

Over the last couple weeks I’ve looked into having meetings at BCC and Sarah has looked into possibly getting some space at her office building. Both options did not pan out for one reason or another, so we’re still in need of a venue for our meetings. Does anyone know of any spaces we could use for our monthly meetings or have any suggestions that I could look into?

We may have to give Indian River Coffee another shot until something comes up. Zach and Darryl, can we use your projector and screen again if this is the case? If so, how does August 23rd @ 7:00 PM for our next meeting sound to everyone? I was hoping to give Monday’s a try this year, what do y’all think?

Since Spain has won the World Cup, SitePoint is giving away their JQuery: Novice to Ninja Book for free!  The deal is only effective today, 07/12/2010, so make your way over now and grab a copy before it’s too late.

This evening (morning) I renewed the domain for the group (itsrandom.info) with my host.  After seeing an interest on the blog and speaking with Zach and Sebastian, I think it’s still worth keeping the group going.  I’m split pretty thin between the office and my OSS work, so I’d like to switch the meeting format to an open one in which we just meet and decide what we’d like to learn/mess with/etc.  Basically, I’m advocating no planned topics for meetings with the intention of just hacking at APIs based on the interests of those in attendance at the meetings.  I’ve been wanting to mess with HTML 5 a lot more, so there are plenty of things we can dig into.  Mobile is really hot right now too, so I’m sure we can find something in that arena or combination of the two.  Really any topic is on the table.

All this being said, to accomplish this open format, it’s my opinion, we’re going to need to find a venue that has a space to setup the projector and is a bit quieter than our normal spots; the coffee shop isn’t cutting it.  I’m going to need help to find a new place to meet though.  We basically need somewhere that is open until about 9:00 PM, that potentially has a projector/screen, can hold about 10 people, and is quiet.  I was thinking maybe the BCC library, but I think we need a student to book the room.  Any suggestions?  If we can find a new spot to meet, I’d like to start back up in August/September (2010 ).  We’re only a few people right now, so I’m open to suggestions for the day of the week, and will throw out Monday to start.

I’d also like to rename the group to something more generic, so I’m open to any ideas.  Thanks to everyone for their interest.  Let’s try to get something organized for August/September and see how it goes.

As you can probably tell from the contents of this blog over the last months, RAnDOM has been pretty inactive with its last meeting in August 2009.  Myself, Sebastian, and Zach were helping to organize the group, but slowly, we began to realize that we didn’t have as much time to contribute.  We all still like the idea of getting together on a monthly basis, but we’re curious if there is still any interest in the community for us getting together?  The domain name for this blog is coming up for renewal in July 2010, so it seemed like a good motivator to get some feedback.

What do y’all say?  Anyone up for giving it another try?

This month Adogo is going to have a joint meeting with the ORUG or using Flex, Rails, and RubyAMF.  Myself and Jake Swanner from the ORUG will be giving the presentation.  What’s really cool about this is that I’ll be using the code base that Darryl created for us for the Flex/AIR Restaurant Guide application as a basis for my presentation.  Thanks to Darryl for all of his hard work!  If you can spare a Thursday evening, the meeting will be held on September 10th, 2009 at 7:00 PM at Devry in Millenia in Orlando.  For more information on the meeting, check out the Adogo or ORUG blog.

Hope you can make it!