If you’re a geek in or around the Charlottesville metroplex or even if you’re merely tech-curious, this is the event you don’t want to [...]
The first planning meeting for a Spring ‘09 higher ed web design/development conference at U.Va. is set for next Wednesday (full details below). If you missed the earlier email several weeks ago announcing this effort, you can read it online. Jared Spool, of UIE, will be with us [...]
On November 19th at 4pm in Harrison-Small Auditorium, noted map collector DAVID RUMSEY will present “Giving Maps a Second Life with Digital Technologies.”
Mr. Rumsey will show how technology has transformed his work as an historical map scholar and collector. Using imaging software, GIS, and popular applications like Google Earth and [...]
Please say hello to Michael Prichard, the owner of Willow Tree Consulting and a Flex developer!
This is a quick update for you regarding our Flex Discovery Group meeting next Tuesday. A detailed agenda will go out on Monday. This week the annual Adobe MAX conference is happening in San Francisco, [...]
There’s a free conference about open-source databases planned for November 14-16 at Cityspace (inspired by beCamp, which is a local BarCamp event I attended earlier this year). Free meals, good times. (We have sponsorship from Sun, Google and others. There are opportunities for local sponsorship, too 
[...]
Please join us for a presentation on XUL on Wednesday,October 15th from 10:00 - 11:30 am in Clemons Library, Room 407.
What: Introduction to XUL Development
When: Wed. 10/15, 10:00 - 11:30 am
Where: Clemons Library, Room 407 (to the left of the reference desk)
Who: RJ Bruneel
Introduction [...]
MEETING DETAILS
When: Wednesday, July 30th: 1:00pm – 2:30pm
Where: Newcomb Hall, Room 168
Meeting Title & More Below:
Title: RDF, and OWL, the Semantic Web, and Linked Data
Description: While some may roll their eyes when they hear about the
Semantic Web, usually because of unfair associations with the
pie-in-the-sky failed [...]
Today Ian Brill demo’d ITC’s VMware infrastructure. A similar system is hosted by BeTech to host any number of web software development efforts. Currently ITC hosts ~150 web servers utilizing four servers clustered and running VMware. Ian described Vmotion (product for moving live virtual running virtual machines), Virtual Center Server (product [...]
Mark your calendars for beCamp! beCamp May 2nd-3rd 2008 @ Charlottesville Business Innovation Council (CBIC), 501 E. Main Street, Charlottesville, VA (on Downtown Mall)
We have 68 registered attendees so far. If you’re planning to come but haven’t yet registered, do it soon so you can get a t-shirt! You can [...]
Meeting: BeTech Presentation: VMware and You
Where: Newcomb Hall (Room 389)
When: Thursday, April 24th : 2:30 pm 3:30 pm (presentation) 3:30 pm - 4:00 (open discussion)
Join us this Thursday, April 24th, at 2:30pm for a presentation by Ian Brill from ITC Microsystems on the subject of VMware. Ian will [...]
On Wednesday, March 26, Madelyn Wessel and Bethany Nowviskie will present their experience in making the Library’s Blacklight project ([blacklight.rubyforge.org]) open source.
When/Where:
* Wednesday, March 26
* 3:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
* Byrd Seminar Room in the Harrison/Small Library
([www.lib.virginia.edu])
([www.virginia.edu])
Blacklight is an [...]
Please consider attending beerTech. We’re attempting to maintain the
tradition of holding the beerTech “meeting” on the third Thursday of the
month following the BeTech Community meetings.
Come on out, y’all! We had a great time last month, and I know there have been some new jobs in the community that [...]
Below is a quick synopsis of the meeting today. The room was packed. The meeting and info shared was great. Thank you Eric Pugh.
Eric Pugh started off the meeting with the following hilarious youtube.com video “Code Monkey”:
[youtube.com]
Eric explained the wide adoption of OpenID by many of the [...]
This Wednesday, February 20th, Eric Pugh will present on OpenID (using RoR specifically), a decentralized single-sign-on system now used by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and the rest of the world. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID for all the juicy tidbits/history/etc.
Fascinated by the “craft” of software development, Eric Pugh is the owner of OpenSource Connections, [...]
The beTech blog has been migrated to a new server, one of the beTech Labs virtual servers. Hooray! Watch this space for more changes.
[...]IEBlog announces “Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone”—translated: IE8 meets Web Standards!
[...]Join beTech next Wednesday, December 19, at 3:00PM to map out the future of beTech. This last beTech session of 2007 also marks the end of my run at the helm of this fine organization. In January my family and I will be moving West.
Three years ago Anna Tubbs and [...]
David Heinemeier Hansson proclaims “Rails 2.0: It’s done!”.
[...]Molly Holzschlag has a Conversation with Bill Gates about IE8 and Microsoft Transparency.
[...]I’d like to ask for input on an idea I’ve had for some time now. Would there be significant interest in a new community that included both ITC’s Local Support Partner (LSP) program, as well as the input and expertise from the beTech community? The community could be called [...]
Lachlan Hunt provides “A Preview of HTML 5″ for A List Apart.
[...]Robert Scoble chats with Doug Kaufman, CEO of ClearTXT, about “Keeping students up to date with ClearTXT”.
[...]Joshua Porter questions privacy in “Facebook’s Brilliant but Evil design”.
[...]Andy Budd really doesn’t believe that “Personas Suck”. But Jason Fried does.
[...]Peter Nixey answers “How will OpenID change your site?”.
[...]GNU identifies the four major species of Unix sysadmin in “Know your System Administrator”.
[...]ClickTale serves up their “Scrolling Research Report V2.0 - Part 1: Visibility and Scroll Reach”.
[...]The NYTimes recently had a short article about “The Google Way” in their Jobs section of the online magazine. Related by a Google employee (”A Googler”), the article starts: “GOOGLE engineers are encouraged to take 20 percent of their time to work on something company-related that interests them personally.” [...]
Mozilla Labs announces Prism—an application that runs Web apps on the desktop—and immediately stirs passions over in the Adobe AIR camp.
[...]For the designer or pre-production person, one of the top-ranking moments of dread has to be when you need a logo for the client’s Web site and print materials and they send you a 150 pixel JPG (or other bitmap/raster image) file. You, of course, need a vector graphic that [...]
Alex Faaborg reports that “The Firefox 3 Visual Refresh” will look more like your OS.
[...]MSN pays homage to “The 16 Greatest Moments in Web History”.
[...]A List Apart has published what they claim to be the “first data ever collected on the business of web design and development” in “Findings From the Web Design Survey”.
[...]If you’re interested in the evolution of the modern student, this video is worth five minutes of your time. Michael Wesch and his cultural anthropology students at Kansas State University just set the educational blogosphere on fire with their production of A Vision of Students Today. The video [...]
Nick La makes it easy to roll your own CMS with “WordPress Theme Hacks”.
[...]This Wednesday, Steve Johnson from the Office of Web Communications at UVa will present recent enhancements to UVa Mobile, the University’s web portal for smartphones and PDAs, and facilitate a discussion about strategies for the mobile web.
Steve is a senior web developer in the Office of Web Communications, where [...]
Inside Higher Ed explores the “Students’ ‘Evolving’ Use of Technology”.
[...]Seth Godin prescribes design before engineering in “How to create a good enough website”.
[...]Happy Webbies are like Happy Bunnies, but for web nerds. Nuff said.
[...]Intrigued by the compact JavaScript in CSS Sitemap? Check out Nathan Smith’s “jQuery Crash Course”.
[...]Luke Wroblewski, interface designer extraordinaire, reveals “Best Practices for Web Form Design”.
[...]Phil Rees demonstrates “Using Firebug to Aid GME Development”.
[...]UPDATE: See update notes below.
Recently I needed to crank out a visual sitemap (or is it a directory tree?) from a rather large site and had a devil of a time finding decent tools to help. Everything I found in my [...]
In an almost universally acclaimed decision, the University of Virginia will begin out-sourcing its student email to Google and Microsoft later this semester. Along with email, students will be introduced to a whole new [...]
ProgrammableWeb shares another illuminating JavaScript video, “Douglas Crockford on the Mashup Problem”.
[...]Okay, so JavaScript has to be one of the most conflicted languages out there. It’s ubiquitous and easy to pick up yet mysterious and hard to master at the same time. Everything is an object, sorta? Lamda functions? Prototype? Closure? Object literal notation? Different browser implementations? Come on, puh-leaze!
Yet you’re [...]
beTech Labs is a Web development environment where you can try out new ideas, explore mashups, and just plain push the envelope. You can join other projects (labs) or opt for a virtual machine lab environment of your own. If you’re raising the Web development [...]
i love typography shares 15 Excellent Examples of Web Typography.
[...]Before you bring your Web server to its knees with that application, be sure to check out Nick Skriloff’s beTech presentation on Load Testing next Wednesday at 3:00. Nick will walk you through some of the work he’s done to load test and profile J2EE and Ruby on Rails applications. [...]
TechCrunch reveals “Google Earths Hidden Surprise: A Flight Simulator”.
[...]Rob Goodlatte has “Three Questions for Jeff Croft”. Read Jeff’s thoughts on the current state of education in universities.
[...]
Throw flames on anything and it instantly becomes cool. beCamp probably wouldn’t have been nearly as successful if it weren’t for the gosh-darn flame logo. Face it. If ya want to attract the edgy, hip crowd (that’s us, right?), there’s no easier [...]
You’re invited to join the beTech bunch on September 12th at noon for an hour of rousing Web graphics conversation. beHungry is a low-key lunch gathering for Web professionals and the Web-curious. Bring lunch, relax, and enjoy Alan Musselman’s 30-minute Adobe Connect session on Fireworks. Following [...]
Coming soon to Photoshop and, one can only hope, the Web. Content-Aware Image Resizing is a remarkable technique for resizing images without losing the important elements of that image. A clever algorithm (20MB PDF), created by Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan, analyzes the image and strips [...]
Comparing files in Dreamweaver (DW) is so useful that it’s a wonder it isn’t already built in. Whether it be for comparing a locally saved file to one on a shared Web server or comparing recently downloaded source code updates to existing application files, finding files differences with the help [...]
InfoWorld considers the long-term fate of digital information in “Entering the Digital Dark Ages?”.
[...]Looking for a customizable Web development project sandbox to try out your latest, greatest ideas for the University of Virginia? beTech Labs is here.
Join beTech this Wednesday, August 15, at 3:00PM to pull back the covers on beTech Labs—a unique space to start new Web application experiments or participate [...]
Amber Simmons calls for quality in Web writing, not necessarily less writing, in her A List Apart article, “Reviving Anorexic Web Writing”.
[...]Business Week crowns “Jeffrey Zeldman: King of Web Standards” and reviews the importance of web standards to modern site design (see the slideshow).
[...]cvillenews.com reports on some interesting Web developments at Darden in “‘PayPal for Porn’ Booted from UVa”.
[...]Business Week has a great graphic, “Who Participates And What People Are Doing Online”, that breaks down, by age groups, who is online creating, commenting, lurking, etc.
[...]
YSlow for Firebug is the latest must-have extension for Web developers working the bleeding edge. It’s primary purpose it to analyze your pages and tell you why they’re so slow (get it?: [Yahoo||whY]Slow), but it also has some other handy tricks up [...]
Charlie Savage offers tips for “Making [Ruby on] Rails Go Vroom”.
[...]O’reilly Radar uses UVa Library’s ARL stats to note the Internet-era decline of book lending in “If Libraries had shareholders”.
[...]
The Creative Challenge finale presentation will feature graphic artist, Steve Stedman sharing his patented secrets of graphic art creation! Don’t miss your one time opportunity to learn how to create killer logos using Adobe Fireworks, Illustrator, and of course Photoshop CS.
It’s the third hour of the third day of the third week of the month… it must be beTech time! Since we’re in the midst of summer vacations, we thought we’d lay off the presentation schedule for July. However, in this magical time slot we’ll attempt to assemble the best [...]
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "If you can read this, thank your sysadmin.\n";
Friday, July 27th 2007 marks the 8th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day — a day we show thanks to the people who keep our machines safe from humans, force majeur, and developers like you and me. Between now and then, [...]
Smashing Magazine wants to help clean up your code with “Time-Savers: Code Beautifier And Formatter”.
[...]The beTech sidebar has received a few small additions in the past week to add to your Web technology information glut—cuz we thought you’d enjoy that! Actually, it’s nothing too major… just a little side blog and a couple of experimental feeds. In the not-too-distant future we’d also like to [...]
IEEE Spectrum notes in “Peer Review Starts for Software Patent Applications” that some semblance of sanity may be coming over the US Patent Office.
[...]Leland Scott discovers a new world of design possibilities in “Safari 3.0 Blazes a Rewarding Trail to CSS 3.0″.
[...]TechCrunch reports that “LinkedIn To Open Platform In Response To Facebook” (in 9 months).
[...]
Exactly one week ago, the center of the C’ville Web universe was undoubtedly beCamp 2007. Web professionals from across the region (and some from outside it) gathered at the funky Fry’s Spring Beach Club to share their knowledge, their stories, and their business [...]
One of the biggest beTech audiences to date showed up to hear ITC Unix Group’s Hamp Carruth and Steve Losen share their University Web server war stories. It was a fun session chock full of entertaining ‘misguided user stories’ and tips for making Web sites more secure. Now, thanks to [...]
This Wednesday, June 20, Hamp Carruth and his posse will host a rather informal, open session on the wide-ranging topic of the University’s Web servers. Come on out and hear from the Sage of Servers (official title: Computer Systems Chief Engineer) how the UVa Web server service blossomed into what [...]
The C’ville tech event of the year rips the roof off Fry’s Spring Beach Club in 24 hours! Thanks to our amazing sponsors—including the latest, ALTERthought—this event is FREE to you! Heck, we even have a live band rarin’ to go. But ya [...]
It’s not too late to check out the New Horizons in Teaching & Research Conference taking place on Central Grounds right now. Though focused on teaching and research, this event has plenty to offer to Web-heads like yourself—the only problem may be in deciding which event to skip [...]
Fire up your Adobe Illustrator creativity at the next Creative Challenge presentation on Thursday May 31st. Nancy Kechner from The Scholor’s Lab will present Adobe Illustrator and give out her class guide with exercise files at the meeting, don’t miss it!
Adobe Illustrator… fire it up!If you can break away to Fredericksburg this week, check out the Faculty Academy on Instructional Technologies—a free annual event hosted by the University of Mary Washington this Wednesday and Thursday (May 16-17). It’s an exceptional conference for edu-techies with a plethora of interesting sessions on the [...]
Next Wednesday, May 16th, Eric Pugh will present on the Selenium IDE, a test tool for web applications that runs directly within browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox. No other test tool covers such a wide array of platforms, running on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh. Eric will demonstrate [...]
Microsoft is reportedly attempting to acquire Yahoo! (worth potentially $50 billion) to fend off the ever-growing Google leviathan. Though this potentially Upcoming deal may be a del.icio.us, peanut buttery morsel for Microsoft, I can’t help but wish that the Yahooligans would Answer the Balmer [...]
Microsoft layed down the gauntlet at this week’s Mix 07 Conference with a Flash/Flex and Ajax competitor called Silverlight. This time around, the post-Gates Microsoft may have nailed it. Of course, the Microsoft faithful will love it—Silverlight provides a modern, well-designed [...]
This Wednesday, April 18th, Doug Chestnut and Mark Corum will present their latest mad, mad creation—a lightweight, low-investment XML publishing toolset using nothing more than Apache with some mods, Subversion, and a little bit of Ajaxy JavaScript. Throwing caution (and most of the documented warnings) to the [...]
Google recently launched a new feature for their Google Maps site that allows you to create your own personal maps and share them. One of the samples they developed to showcase the technology has some pretty interesting educational/historical/humanities content. It’s a map of oral [...]
The challenge is on, CS3 is here, and in the next creative challenge presentation, “Advanced Photoshop Tips and Tricks”, you will learn expert level Adobe Photoshop tips and tricks. Now that is cool!
One of the hottest communication tools around the University these days is digital signage. While digital signage may range in size, cost, and complexity from a single LCD panel to multiple syncronized LCD or plasma panels, all flavors need content and a means [...]
John Backus, father of the Fortran computer language, passed away earlier this week at age 82. Though he earns a solid place in the beTech Hall of Fame as much for his hacker spirit as well as for pioneering one of the earliest (and most enduring) programming languages, [...]
The Richmond Java User Group talk “Getting Started with Grails” is tonight (Wednesday, March 21st) at 5:30 PM in Glen Allen, VA.
Grails is an open-source web application framework that’s all about getting things done. Grails combines best-of-breed Java technologies (including Hibernate and Spring), convention over configuration, and [...]
C’ville Adobe User Group launches with BeTech “The Creative Challenge” meeting series. Don’t miss out on this chance to win a FREE boxed version of the soon to launch, Adobe Creative Suite CS3 software!
Google’s previous set of tools for webmasters were about as thrilling as a toilet plunger. Woohoo! Sitemap tools. Sigh…
So when the new Google Webmaster Central (GWC) rolled out of beta this past Valentine's Day, it was a completely pleasant and [...]
Thanks to all who came out this past Tuesday to the presentation and usability lab tour hosted by Dr. Stephanie Guerlain and Dave Bauer of the Engineering School HCI program.
Cindy Walters, of the ITC Advanced Technology Group, and Brevy Cannon, of UVa [...]
Anyone care to model the entire UVa Grounds for Google SketchUp’s Build Your Campus in 3D Competition? You’d better get going! Contest deadline is June 1, 2007. Did we mention that Virginia Tech has already thrown their hat into the ring?
This spring, you and your (presumably equally artistic) [...]
A new design for the University of Virginia home page and top level pages was posted this afternoon by the Office of Web Communications, and you can learn all about the redesign project here. Once [...]
ITCWeb consists of thousands of pages that include common snippets of code for headers, footers and such via Apache’s Server Side Includes (SSI). It’s a fairly typical practice for creating templates since you just need to change a single file (the include) to immediately affect all the pages [...]
