This entry is in response to/ inspired by Nate Rigg’s post: On Relationship Layers, Time and Facebook In days gone by, after meeting someone new, you’d probably have to wait to chat with them again until the next time you saw one another face to face or over the phone. Getting to know someone was a slow process. Now, you can add someone on Twitter or Facebook and casually interact with them for months in between. Then, next time you see them, you’ve already done a tremendous amount of “getting to know” the person, the “layers” have been broken down in...

Seth Elliot, a great guy I’ve had a chance to chat with at SuperConf in Miami and SXSWi in Austin, runs the weekly Miami StartupDigest newsletter. He included this in the latest, and I thought it was worth a share: Our startup ecosystem continues to grow and evolve. Each and every one of you can help in this process. How? Consider the following: Attend events – Remember, these are organized for your benefit. Even though it sometime seems like a pain at the end of a long day, do your best to attend some of these startup events. Connect – Take the opportunity to connect with fellow...

Michael Bishop wrote a great post awhile back called Beyond Barcamp Tampa Bay which inspired me to finally get some of my thoughts down on paper (or page, as the case may be). Since poking my head into Tampa’s tech scene, I’ve talked to a lot of people who share some of my own frustration with the state of community in Tampa. A lot of you have been here for years… I haven’t, but I’ll go ahead and put my thoughts out there… 1. We need centralized place(s) to find each other! (A) Events I’ve been maintaining a Google Calendar with tech (and related) events in Tampa for about a year...

I was hanging out at one of my very favorite websites this morning (feedmyapp.com, which is literally a massive list of applications, mostly brand new) when I became enchanted by Neer. Who they are in their own words: “Neer is an app, currently in beta for android, that lets users automatically and selectively share their location. Notifications are customizable, and based on user-defined lists of people and places. Neer allows you to privately and automatically share your location with the people you care about. Not everywhere you go, just the places that really matter. Neer works in the...

It’s that time of year again! In short, thousands of panel ideas were submitted to South by Southwest and now they take the public’s votes into consideration as they determine the programming for the 2011 event! (More info on how that works…) Walter Elly of MicroArts thought a SXSW panel about Foursquare Day and the foursquare community would be really interesting and Dr. Nate and I agreed! We’d love your help getting there! Foursquare Day: Realizing the Location-Based Services Revolution Location-based services are here and are revolutionizing the way people experience ...

I’ve had a lot of conversations about the content of and possible improvement of SXSW, specifically the Interactive portion (and really, tech conferences in general)… How SXSWi describe themselves: “brightest minds in emerging technology”… “the best new digital works, video games and innovative ideas the international community has to offer.” Quote from the SXSW site: 17. Do you have any specific programming needs for the 2011 event? - SXSW Interactive is specifically looking for more advanced-level ideas, as well as more sessions that cover technical issues....

Love this! I really need to break out my sewing...

Hey there! Thanks for visiting. I’m leaving this content intact, but I’m blogging at http://conjurecode.com now. Hope to see you there. I recently needed the ability to export data from my application in CSV format in my CakePHP application. It didn’t need to be anything fancy, mostly just a dump from a given model, which the customer could open in Excel. I’ve written it in an abstracted way. This fairly simple function takes a model name and an array of fields which should be excluded from the output, and delivers a CSV file. Rather than allow the function to be accessed...

Hey there! Thanks for visiting. This article is out of date, as you may know Unity is now the default shell in Ubuntu 11.04. I’m blogging at http://conjurecode.com now. Hope to see you there. Canonical recently unveiled a new version of Ubuntu, dubbed Unity (Ubuntu Light), built specifically with netbooks in mind, featuring super short boot times, and a whole slew of interface enhancements. It is still incomplete, but early versions of it are available to OEMs and to adventurous tinkerers. It is quite easy to get up and running if you’re using Ubuntu already. I have an Ubuntu desktop at...

The Foursquare Day event is catching on in every corner of the globe. In just a few short weeks, fans and new initiates of Foursquare and social media at large have self organized to plan and launch the first ever Foursquare Day. We created a website to help aggregate information about the many Swarm Parties and exclusive Specials on Foursquare day, but just browsing lists of information didn’t quite capture what was really going on. We’ve created the Foursquare Day map so you can see where people are participating both near you and all over the world. See who’s throwing events where,...