I just got back from the first Misoula BarCamp, and I think it was a success. We had about 18 people show up, which I think is very good for the first one. One attendee ( a fellow Rails developer ) came all the way from Helena. There were also some people that I was hoping/expecting would be there that weren't so hopefully they'll come to the next, whenever that is. There was a great mix of technical and non-technical discussions and presentations (I gave a little Rails demo). At any rate, big shout out and thanks to Harold for putting the whole thing together. I don't think anybody who went was the least bit disappointed in doing so, despite missing out on the first really nice spring weather in a couple weeks.

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Obama and BarCamp are coming to Missoula. Thankfully, not on the same day.

Thanks to my new Missoulian RSS Feed (what? huh? move along, nothing to see here... next post on that subject) I just found out that Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is having a free rally at the Adams Center Saturday morning. I'd be there even if it was Bush III, I mean John McCain. This is history in the making folks!

And on a completely unrelated note, Missoula is having it's own BarCamp on April 26th (also a Saturday). What's a BarCamp? According to Wikipedia....

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

The official site for Missoula's contribution is at http://missoulabarcamp.org. Registration is required. Early registration recommended. I hope to see a great turnout of Missoula's Tech Professionals.

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Well, it was a little more work than I'd originally anticipated, but 5Valleys is now both my personal OpenID server and a consumer for visitors wishing to use OpenID to identify themselves when posting comments. I used the ruby-openid gem, but otherwise wrote all my own code, trying to stay as RESTful as possible (OpenID itself isn't particularly friendly to REST practices), and getting a thorough understanding of the internals before my presentation at next week's Missoula Web Discussion Group meeting. If you have an OpenID, go ahead and post a comment to try it out. Hint: if you have accounts at any of these sites, then you've got an OpenID you can (hopefully) use here, or anyplace else that proudly accepts them.

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At last, Missoula has a Linux Users Group. The Mailing list is located at http://groups.google.com/group/msla-lug?hl=en. We had 12 people show up to our first meeting on Wednesday, and have another one scheduled for Saturday the 15th. Hopefully we'll eventually settle on a regular schedule of meetings so they can be easily planned for.
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