Like most ‘cookbook’ style books this book is good for those who are just getting started with Cassandra as well as those with experience with it. Like a real cookbook this book gives you over 150 ‘receipies’ that range from beginner tasks such as how to install to advanced topics such as performance tuning. So along with more common tasks, it also discusses more advanced topics like multi Datacenter deployments and working with Hadoop. The range of tasks makes it very useful once you are progressing from Cassandra novice to move serious Cassandra use.

This book also contains some value adds comming in many hands on books. Such as it covers third party tools. Also like most good hands on style book it gives you the code to look at and play with. The author also does a good job of explaining things in a in-depth manner and links to other documents when he feels it would be useful. This helps to give the reader a better understanding of how things work and makes for a more useful reading experience. Overall I thought the book was useful and worth a read!

Cassandra High Performance Cookbook; Author Edward Capriolo; Publisher: Packt Publishing; Pages in Print: 324;  Price: $38.72; Publish Date: 15 July, 2011; ISBN-13: 978-1-84951-512-2

TechBirmingham has a history of using a mixture of Initiatives to help make Birmingham grow and prosper as a technologically rich city.  It has created Industry Initiatives to help strengthen and grow existing and fledgling technology companies and entrepreneurs using many innovative ideas. Encouraged the entrepreneurial spirit of the community. Reached out to other states and countries to help grow our tech sector. Created support organizations that provide technology opportunities for students, from elementary school through college. And probably the biggest impact TechBirmingham has provided has been to spread the word about Birmingham’s technology ecosystem to those within and outside our metro area. By using things like tv commercials, touring other cities and countries, and using a myriad of digital communications.

My involvement with TechBirmingham primarily started when I joined the TechCouncil. It was a group of User Group leaders who would regularly convene as an ad-hoc group to talk about ways to work together and help the tech ecosystem. At one point it represented the leadership of more than 30 tech clubs. Ultimately this group spawned a social expo called the TechMixer. This events goal was to create a way to get the tech community to interact in an offline form and create better “interrelationships” between each other and the community.

The initial TechMixer event has turned into 3 events that happen on a yearly basis. The largest events regularly draw over a 1,ooo people annually. The fist event of the year is the TechMixer Expo which is the social expo event that started this off. The second event is the TechMixer University which is a day of free technical training and seminars for the local tech community. And finally TechMixer Unplugged which is a casual event with food and drinks to give the community a casual mingle event.

The TechMixer experience helped me in many ways. As the president of the Birmingham Area Linux Users Group it gave me a connection to other like minded groups to share issues and ideas with. It lead to sharing speakers amongst groups and a lot of people joining multiple users groups in town. And those connections have created lasting friendships and lots of utility for each user group

Another event I was involved with is TechBirmingham Ecycling Day.  Which was a program in which they take (un)used computers, laptops, cell phones and a number of other accepted items to be recycled. While most of the items received will be recycled and demanufactured, some will be refurbished. Many usable desktop computers will be refurbished and redistributed to select community-based computer learning centers whose programs would benefit from an additional supply of computers.

Looking back at my past and current experiences with TechBirmingham I couldn’t be more excited than I am now. We live in a time when there are great things happening in the area and through TechBirmingham we can be even more involved.  In closing I would ask you Birmingham to get involved with TechBirmingham in any way you can and help us grow this great city. And you TechBirmingham to make it easier for interested parties to get involved.

Pick the right tree

Arguably one of the most important task in bonsai, especially for the beginner, is picking the right tree. Choosing a suitable tree won’t guarantee a great bonsai, but choosing an inadequate one will guarantee the bonsai will never be truly great. While some bonsai artist can work well with even bad trees, most people can’t. And event the best experts can’t fix truly inadequate trees.

The trunk is all-important. It is also the hardest deficiency to overcome through normal growth. Bonsai can be grown from skinny whips of saplings, but it is often the case to spend large sums of money buying a bigger tree to begin with. Especially considering the amount of time it takes to grow a tree from saplings or seed. In nursery plants, the best trees are the ones that have been grown specifically for bonsai.

Look for three things.

1. Nebari: They are the roots that are or will be exposed. Use your fingers to scratch next to the trunk so you can get an idea what these roots look like. Choose a tree whose roots you can see, roots that taper out from the trunk, either at or just below the surface.
2. Taper: Look for a trunk that is fattest at soil level, tapering evenly to smaller diameter above that.
3. Interesting Features: Buy the tree with interesting bends in the trunk, unless you want a straight, formal upright style, such as with a redwood. It is difficult to make new angles in tree trunks that are very large, but is quite possible in smaller trees and in most branches. Sharp angles can be obtained by removing the entire trunk above a prominent branch, and making that branch into the new trunk. And the trunk can be curved in various ways if it is not too thick.

Don’t worry too much about how branches look because you will grow the tree to look the way you want it to look, which often means cutting off the top two-thirds. In fact, if you buy a large nursery tree grown for bonsai, you will probably have far too many branches. This gives you the opportunity to cut away all but those that will make the best design.

Make good roots

Just about everyone who doesn’t grow bonsai thinks they are made by starving them and chopping off most of the roots. In fact, very nearly the opposite is true. Bonsai must have a thriving root system, must grow in a medium that provides conditions for maximum growth, and must be frequently watered and fertilized. It is true you have to chop off  some roots to make sure the trees fit in the smaller pots though. Generally the way this is done is to remove the large roots that provide stability for the tree in the wild, especially those that grow straight down. In the bonsai pot, we substitute for that loss of stability by using wire to anchor the tree snugly in its pot.

So, do remove thick support roots when you repot your tree, but keep most of the network of fine feeder roots. The exception is the feeder roots that are so long that they would hang over the edge of the pot if stretched out. There may be a lot of these on a tree that has not been repotted for several years. Cut these roots to fit the limits of the pot when you remove the fat roots.

Fertilize and water enough

As a rough rule of thumb, most trees should be fertilized year-round (with some exceptions) about every two weeks. A simple way to do that is to fertilize on the first and fifteenth of each month. It is possible to damage trees with too much fertilizer, but if you use an organic low-level fertilizer and go a bit easy this is unlikely. Frequency of fertilizing is important; lots of fertilizer is not. You will see boxes of fertilizer with numbers like 8-6-4, or 0-10-10. Choosing numbers of 10 or below will help keep you out of trouble. These are the “N-P-K” numbers, which are the chemical symbols for the major nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Nitrogen makes green leaves, and the others nourish roots and blossoms. A good dose of nitrogen is needed when green growth should be encouraged, such as springtime. The exception is flowering plants such as wisteria. Here, nitrogen should be withheld until blooming is finished. 0-10-10 may be used instead.

Planting medium and watering are also of upmost importance. Many people consider the best planting medium to be one that is relatively coarse and that does not become packed and hard, like clay. This will allow the fine roots to develop more easily and allows air to reach them more effectively. Unfortunately it has virtually no fertilizing power and does not hold water for very long, so it is important to fertilize properly and to water often enough. On hot sunny days your trees may need to be watered twice a day. On days that are cooler and less sunny, water only when the soil has started to become dry, which may vary from tree to tree.

Fill out the foliage

If you have made it possible for the roots to function at their best, you will have gone a long way toward providing rich foliage. But there are other things that will also help.

The concept of “back-budding” is crucial. Back-buds are new growth that pops out, particularly during the strong spring growing season, closer to the trunk, rather than at the ends of branches. We can encourage such growth by cutting off the far ends of branches, especially branches that have become long and “leggy”. It is important to leave some green growth at the end of the newly shortened branch so that sap will still be drawn through the branch. The branch will then have more than enough nutrients flowing into it, which it will often turn into new growth in the form of back-buds that fill out to make the branch look healthy and full.

Foliage growing in the shade of branches above, or shaded by heavy growth closer to the ends of branches, is often anemic and unhealthy looking. This is overcome by removing unnecessary branches so more of the trunk is visible, by positioning branches so that they don’t shade those below, by removing excessive growth at tips, and by removing dead material, especially during fall “cleanout”.

Do things at the proper time

It is tempting to do work that needs to be done when you see it. Yielding to that temptation is how I lost more than one tree. It is far better to wait until the proper season. For example, most trees are best repotted just when they begin to wake up in early spring. In San Francisco repotting time begins in January.

There are occasions when you must repot at the wrong time. You may be successful, as I was when I collected an old rosemary bush in hot weather, but if it’s not really necessary you may risk losing your tree by repotting at that time. Likewise, there are best times for pruning, for fertilizing heavily, for defoliating and decandling, and for most other procedures. Sometimes you can get away with it, but cultivating patience will give you better results in the long run.

Final thoughts

Don’t forget that each type of tree is different and unique. Learn what each tree needs to make it flourish and look like a bonsai. For beginners i suggest starting with hardy trees such as ficus, Suriname cherry, or possibly a small juniper. These trees genrerally are easier to care for and are good for starting out. And always remember that bonsai is the art of making a tree into a miniture version of itself. So always be on the lookout for interesting trees in nature to get inspired about what you can achieve. And finally, always remember you get what you put in. To make great bonsai you must be willing to put in alot of time and effort to make sure your trees stay healthy and grow. Funny enough it is much like taking care of a child. And most of the trees I have killed, and there have been alot, have been due to not paying enough attention to them. Particularly in the winter time. Hopefully these hints will help the less experienced bonsai enthusiast to avoid some of the errors I made. And maybe encourage a few of you to try out this enjoyable task.

The first topic I want to take a look at is what prompted me to bring Ignite to Birmingham and what my vision was at the time. The jouney began over a year ago when I was lucky enough to get to attend a few Ignite events in serveral cities I traveled to due to work and it got me thinking. I saw the level of passion and enthusiasm at each of these events and how it brought people together. So I started to think since there are so many cool groups, conferences, organizations, and people in Birmingham that that it would be awesome to have a night once every few months where we can all get together and share all of those ideas that are burning inside us – technology, art, communications, or whatever the topic. It was allways my hope that bringing this event here would help bring that passion and enthusiasm I saw in other cities to Birmingham.

About the same time I was starting to finalize our first Ignite event, TED was starting localized events called “TEDx” events. After thinking about it a while I thought these 2 events would be very complementery if done in the same city and became interelated. This is were I started to think of creating “The Birmingham Idea Ecosystem”. The concept was basically as follows. We would have 4 Ignite events a year, which would allow people with passions and ideas to have a chance to speak and be heard. This would help us get a wide range of people and topics in our queue. To follow this up we would hold at “TEDxBirmingham” once a year and invite the best speakers from the ignites to speak at that event. That way we have a ready list of people with good ideas to showcase at TEDx. The upside here is people would have the short timeframe of ignite to get introduced and then possibly the long timeframe of TEDx to help propel there ideas.

And that in a nutshell is what I was thinking as I brought Ignite to Birmingham. After 4 Ignite events finished and another in the works I couldn’t be happier. Unfortunatly I wasn’t able to bring TEDxBirmingham into the mix the way I planned but according to the TED site there are 2 TEDx events coming to town this year so even if “The Birmingham Idea Ecosystem” isn’t able to come to fruition as I initally invisioned it, at least the events themselves are coming into being. So lets go Birmingham! Show us your ideas and Passions.

Work comes in many forms where bonsai is concerned: repotting, pinching, trimming, wiring, unwiring, styling, bending, cleaning, fertilizing, watering, transporting and probably many more things.  One of the most frequently asked questions is when to do what.  While getting into a routine is a good idea, proper timing of work depends on the growth and health of your trees.  Here are a few things that can help your bonsai improve as quickly and logically as possible:

Water by hand – yeah, it sounds like a pain, but watering by hand every day forces you to actually look at each tree that you own.  Using watering systems is convenient but with weeks between each time you look at your tree you may well miss a critical chance to improve your tree. But as you get to know your trees you can do what I do and use a zoned system and keep trees that need more or less water together. You will still need to monitor them but you can get away with not hand watering them.

Wire- well, it’s that simple.  Just do it.  Wiring can be a long process on a large tree, but the results of wiring and bending will do more to improve a tree than almost anything else.  Make the tree harmonious by making complimentary bends in branches and sub-branches, move an element that is jutting beyond the silhouette to fill in a void. It can be a hassle but your trees will look alot better for it.

Repotting – This really is the single most important thing that you do during the year to ensure that your tree grows well and remains healthy.  Using the proper soil mix will mean that your tree flourishes.  Repotting can seem complicated, but the most important thing is that when you acquire a tree you repot it at the earliest opportunity so that it is in a soil that you are familiar with and which has properties the same as that of all the soil you use.  This will make it so that you know exactly when a tree needs to be watered and when it does not.

Pinching, pruning, trimming – this is the thing that most people latch onto.  Cut off the part of your tree that you dont want.  But recognizing that each bit of growth is like a bit of paint on a brush, you must use as much of it as possible to complete the vision that you have for a tree.   Cutting it off is sometimes the right thing to do, but in many cases wiring is actually the better option.  Because afterall, don’t you want more branches?

Fertilizing – You will see the difference – no fertilizer no growth.  But what to do with that growth….remember, it’s like paint on a brush, use as much as you can.  Cut off the parts that you can’t.

All these things are work, if you miss the opportunity to fertilize your tree that is time lost waiting for it to grow, if you don’t wire a branch when it is young it will never have fluid movement, that is time lost.  If you dont repot your tree may become sick, more time lost.  Look at your trees daily, work on them when they need it, every week if needed. If you are like me you will go through ebbs and flows were you pay alot of attention to your trees and then times were you may miss a few days. But one thing is certain, the more effort you put in the better the results!

Vorpa Bunny

Since I never keep them I don’t really worry about New Years Resolutions. But I do like to set goals for the new year to gauge where I am at after each year. I have found that there are definitely some do’s and don’ts for setting goals though. For example, broad sweeping resolutions like “lose weight” just don’t work because they aren’t specific enough. You don’t know where to start so you don’t end up doing them. Setting something more specific like “don’t eat red meat” is a whole lot easier. But it is good not to get to specific so you at least have some room in case you need to pivot somewhere along the way. With that said it is time to get started!

My overall goal for 2010 was to recharge and de-stress, and I think I did fairly well at least on the recharge part.  So for 2011 I think I will shoot for finding the something that sparks my professional curiosity.

Here are some more detailed goals for 2011:

1) Help others to work with the tech community more

Towards the end of the year we had the Southeast Area User Group Leader Conference and one of the things I took away was the need to get more people involved in the communities and do a better job of motivating current community members. This is also something I have noticed that needs to happen in many of the small local tech conferences (aka. Barcamp, Wordcamp, etc) This really comes down to working with other people in the community to have more forward facing and inclusive roles in the current tech communities. We are both keen to have me work with some other Canonical staff members to have a more forward facing and inclusive community role with our community. Another big part of this is to find ways to motivate the members of these groups to be more active and help make the experience better for everyone.

2) Write Daily

Over the past year I have gotten back in the habit of doing a lot of reading again. To complement this I want to try to do more writing. Sadly I used to do write a lot but just got out of the habit so blogging is a good way to get back into it. At this point I have 2 active blogs: BonsaiHacker and BonsaiHackerLite that I can use. Along with this I can also write things for the Ignite site and a few others so hopefully it should be a fairly easy goal in the end. I’d like to write a post for one of them every day, meaning each blog will get one, maybe two/three posts a week, depending on the blog. Writing every day will help me to write better, think of new things to write about, and further my goals as a blogger. Here’s the specifics.

• At least 5 posts a week on one of the blogs I am associated with
• Length of the posts don’t matter.
• Posts should be finished before I go to sleep (so, I can finish after midnight, but should finish before I go to sleep).
• The night before, I should plan / outline possible posts for the next day.

3) Manage my productivity time better

Like many other people, I work a long week, but I feel like I can better tune my time. I spend huge amounts of time processing email and doing useless firefighting, and I feel like I need to protect more of my time so I can be working on projects and working with specific folks.

Other Things I Already Do but needs improvements…

There’s a lot of other things I already do – it’s so important to always be improving yourself (and others around you, if you can) all the time and every day. Improvements don’t come suddenly, they take a long time. So, creating habits that will improve yourself in the long run are good too. Things I’m already doing, and would like to continue doing are…

• Help grow the Ignite Birmingham Event and Community
• Help Grow the local *Camp’s in Birmingham
• Spend more quality time with the family
• Invest in a few Key startups if possible
• Read more

There’s so much more, I’m sure, but one person can only do so much. We’ll see how it goes, when 2012 has hit.

The quick and dirty discription of a a Jelly is an every-so-often casual coworking session. Which is basically a group of various devs, designers and freelancers getting together and working from the same locaton in a collaborative model. Anyone is welcome to come, bring a laptop, and work alongside other creative, fun people.  See workatjelly.com and this blog post for more background on the history and background of jellys. Go here for Birmingham Jelly info.

This week our friends over at Sparkbox Coworking have invited us to have a jelly at their facility on Friday. There will be snacks and refreshments at the Jelly. For more info check out the facebook event. It doesn’t matter who you work for, or what you do, if you think that working with smart and friendly people would benefit. Then join our facebook group or come to one of our meetings.

The event again brought together community leaders from throughout the southeast for a day of networking and brainstorming with other community leaders. 20+ user groups (listed here) were represented this year including people from Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham, Greenville-Spartanburg, and Augusta.

So what is the reason behind this event you ask? Well many tech community groups face similar challenges such as “Where can we meet?” “How to get Sponsors”, and “How to maintain and Grow membership” So why not get those groups together to share solutions and best practices with each other to help better the tech community as a whole? Well that is just what we did.

Since the goal was to make connections and share ideas/best-practices we started with a game like last year. Everyone was encouraged to sit next to someone they didn’t know and each lunch while we worked on the game, and afterwards the group with the most correct answers got prizes.

The event itself was run like a traditional “unconference”, and the schedule was not fixed. So after lunch and the * activity we started by soliciting topics from the leaders, and setting up breakout sessions to discuss each of the topics. After each hour of breakouts, each group gave a summary to the others of their conclusions, salient points and next steps.

The main breakout topics this time included “Alternative Meeting Formats”,  “Incorporating and Non-Profit Formation”,  “Cross Group Interactions”, and “Member Motivation, Participation, and Continuous interaction”.  We put notes and summaries of the conversations on the wiki to make sure the information is accessible to others. You can click on the topics above to get to the notes. We are still working on adding notes for some sessions.

After the event we enjoyed a catered dinner and then finished it off with some XBOX gaming (Halo: Reach and Rock Band), and some good old-fashioned socializing over beer.

I really enjoyed the event again this year and it always helps to see user groups from all over have the same issues we do. We heard a lot good ideas and learned from all sorts of various situations others have had. Hopefully we will be able to keep this group engaged and make the User Groups in the Southeast second to none.

This year I started the Ignite Birmingham effort and had arguably a decent amount of success. Based on this I am planning on trying to make it a quarterly event here in Birmingham. Over the last few years I have been involved with alot of other great people while working on Barcamp Birmingham, Wordcamp Birmingham and theTechmixer Birmingham Events. This post is an attempt to write down some tips for organizing events like ignite. Here are my thoughts on getting things to the day of the event as they stand today:

Know and stay true to your motives
One of the interesting things discussed at Dragon*Con is the concept of the Butt-in-Seat vs Specialized Con’s. So with that in mind I personally think both ways are just as valid but it is best to stay with the method that works with what you want to do with your event. (Note this could easily change) I personally find my motive with Ignite and *camps is to take the specialized approach. I like to be around like-minded people but tend to draw in people with views that don’t jive perfectly with my worldview, but I find a variety of view points generates better more thought out ideas. These motives are what drive me to want to help with these events. Looking at events I have been to the best ones seem to be driven by a pure motive. Sometimes an event looks successful on paper but in the greater scheme of things it was really a failure.

Know you audience but stay true to your style
This is for you, and your community. Know what you both need to get out of it. If you live in a place with glitz and glam you might put on an event that is trendy. If you live is a place that doesn’t have many events, make it as accessible as possible. If your community kicks ass and doesn’t have a lot of time, make it quick. Don’t put on an architecture Ignite if your community is Social Media Experts.

Build a Great Team

Doing everything yourself can tire you out. Besides the more people involved the more cool ideas you can bring to your event. Alot of great event series have died out because the team just got tired and didn’t want to do it anymore so be sure to bring in new blood from time to time to keep the zeal fresh!

Get the right Venue

Finding a good Venue is the hardest part for most people so start with this first! Get a venue for free(ish) and use social capital to give back if you can. Think about parking, where your core audience is coming from and the size. Ambiance is also a big bonus if you can provide a venue that has something unique. You should definitly try to fill up the room, since the feel of a full room than it is with a 50% full venue.

Look at other events in town and Define Success

Write down what you wold be happy with. 500 people coming / 15 people saying ‘best event ever’ / have fun personally. Work towards this goal!

Promotion

Get a “yourevent.com” or “.<something>” and put up a nice looking wordpress self hosted site. It should have the basics (time, where, what) and make a personal plea for people for people to show up. If it looks bad, people will not want to come . Create a facebook group, Twitter account and feedburner for rss and link to these from your home. I would suggest against using another Social Media Tool (facebook group, or Meetup site) as a home page since you get less freedom in what you can do and it looks less professional.

I suggest getting your friends and friends friends to the first few events. This helps to build an initial community to build upon and make the events better. Then reach out to promoting at traditional venues such as local papers, TV, and Radio stations to help get the work out. This worked well for our second ignite event. Don’t overhype your event, if expectations are too high then it could overshadow an otherwise good event. Consider how you promote the event carefully since different groups respond to messages in various ways. If you are shooting for a small target market it is easier since you can promote very concisely. If you are going for a broader group it helps to start small and slowly add the different groups at intervals to your event.

Sponsors

Find good sponsors. I suggest starting out with a venue sponsor and some smaller sponsors to help pay for small items like food, shirts, and beer. It helps to start out with a small group of sponsors to help build a good brand relationship with your sponsors and prove what you can do for one another. Sponsors can also help by providing swag which is especially a big hit with the younger crowds.

Final thoughts

Those are my thoughts on the Pre-Event Planning stages of running a Con. Hopefully some of this proves useful to you and your event. Please feel free to share you thoughts, One of the best parts of Con-planning is the cool community of planners! I will post updates as they pop into my head. I will also do a post on running the event itself and the post event.

Its been a month since my last Desktop Notes post. Mainly due to alot going on in the past month. This is what has been going on:

• Post Ignite Birmingham tasks
• BarCamp Birmingham 4 Planning and then the event itself
• Bringing back Birmingham Jelly
• Loads of new projects at work!
• IPSA Summer Networking Event
• Working on 2 new personal application projects
• Saving bonsai trees from #waspocalypse

The next month is also going to be busy it seems:

• Coming up this weekend is DragonCon 2010!
• Planning for Wordcamp Birmingham 2010

I picked up a dodo case a few weeks back as well. I really like it because it blends in well with my notebook of choice:  moleskine journals

An assortment of items has been accumulating on my desk as of late. The maid kindly piled it up for me