A brief personal review of Team Fortress 2, a free-to-play cartoon-styled first-person shooter on Steam built on the Half-Life 2 engine. Noted for its variety of classes allowing role and playstyle flexibility, ability to drop in and out freely, and preference for the Heavy class.

A review of Tom Hughes-Croucher's O'Reilly video series on Node.js, which provided excellent introduction and inspiration leading to installing NodeJS and experimenting with projects immediately. Strongly recommended for anyone getting started or wanting to understand the concepts behind Node.js.

An exploration of NodeJS for building scalable real-time web applications using JavaScript's event-driven, non-blocking architecture. Includes a live example hosted on Heroku using HTML5 geolocation API with Express web framework and Socket.io for real-time client synchronization, plus mention of npm package manager.

A personal update on technologies being explored for self and work, including NodeJS for scalable real-time web applications, NoSQL databases like MongoDB and CouchDB for web-specific data challenges, and Continuous Integration with Jenkins CI plus code review tools FishEye and Crucible from Atlassian for quality control.

A guide for managing multiple SSH private keys on a single system, useful for accessing different servers or working with Amazon EC2. Shows how to configure the .ssh/config file to specify different identity files, hostnames, users, and ports for each server, enabling easy SSH access by hostname alone.

Similar installation process to Groovy/Grails, guiding through setting up JRuby on Mac OS X. Covers downloading tar.gz release, moving to /usr/share, creating symbolic link for easy version management, updating .profile with JRUBY_HOME environment variable and PATH, and noting that JRuby's gem command overrides standard Ruby's gem requiring full paths.

A guide to setting up remote Git repositories on Linux servers via SSH or on USB flash drives. Covers creating a bare repository with git init --bare, using --shared flag for team projects, pushing to remote repositories, adding remote servers for easier access, and leveraging SSH keys for authentication.

Step-by-step guide for installing Groovy and Grails on Mac OS X with symbolic links for easy upgrades. Covers downloading binary releases, moving to /usr/share, creating symbolic links to simplify version changes, updating .profile with GROOVY_HOME and GRAILS_HOME environment variables and PATH settings, and verifying installation.

Report from first conference attendance, No Fluff Just Stuff Boston, focused on enterprise software development technologies and best practices. Highlights include Venkat Subramaniam's JVM languages talk with live coding, keynote on programming language evolution, emerging trends in HTML5, distributed version control with Git, and JVM languages like Groovy, Scala, Clojure, and JRuby.

A Ruby example demonstrating how to pull friend data from Twitter API and use Geokit gem to geocode their profile locations. Code retrieves friends list, checks for location data, queries Yahoo's Geocoding API for coordinates, noting API rate limits and that profile locations may not reflect actual posting locations.