Both the oral and written feedback by attendees of the 2007 Code4Lib Conference is now available.

The machine that code4lib.org (and panizzi, chukwa, and the code4lib planet) runs on has been restored. If you notice any problems still, please let someone in IRC know.

Voting on the location of Code4Lib 2008 is now closed and the offer from Oregon State University to host in Portland, OR is the winner. We received three wonderful applications to host the conference, and we hope that everyone who applied will consider applying again.

Following up on discussion over on #code4lib and the code4libcon Google group, I've set up a short survey. The survey polls respondents to see what interest there is in a European event, and to assess whether such an event should be as well as or instead of a North American code4libcon.

Please register your views, and raise awareness of this survey ahead of the closing date, 15 February.

As noted in the survey itself, neither the code4lib community nor Talis are bound to hold an event at a time or in a place solely on the basis of this survey. The results are freely available, during and after the survey.

Proposals to host the 2008 Code4Lib Conference will be accepted through Friday, February 16, 2007. A decision will be made the following week by popular vote. See the hosting information page for more information.

Pragmatic Studio does it again, putting on another top notch event: Rails Edge Reston. I was fortunate enough to attend and pick up a few more gems of Ruby wisdom. Some of the highlights:

• Met William Groppe (Mr. Ruby Brain) in person, after collaborting online on solrb for a little while. Putting a face and a handshake to a virtual collaborator is important.
• Also met two of edsu's co-workers. Nice to see so much Ruby library work. Times they are a changin'.
• Metaprogramming was the very first session. As it should be.
• Stuart Halloway did a solrb code review and his changes will be reflected in future commits. Speaking of Stu, he and his evil twin, Justin Gehtland, have produced a spectacular enhancement to Rails with Streamlined, a way to elegantly declare a user interface to a relational database. After seeing Streamlined again in more detail, I'm convinced that Flare is destined to be Streamlined Solr. Justin and Stu - thanks for your inspirations, in more ways than one.
• Got to see many of my good friends and heros again, including Mike, Dave, Chad, Jim, Duncan, Stu, and Justin. I met Bruce Williams and Marcel Molina Jr. for the first time. All presentations were well done, and informative to even seasoned Rails developers.
• I briefly presented Collex/Flare/solrb during Thursday nights "Open VGA" sessions, though a bit too frantically. My presenting chops were a bit rusty, and doing a 7 minute presentation illuminated the need to get a more succinct and distilled elevator pitch for Solr Flare. code4lib conference is the next Solr flare explosion for me.

The Evergreen team presented a "virtual keynote" that consisted of a PowerPoint presentation (see below), a conference call and someone on stage to run things.

(my first code4lib post)

Ed Summers and William Groppe have jumped in head-strong to crafting a Ruby DSL to Solr. solrb is coming along nicely thanks to our collaborations.

Another early adopter asked a question on the solr-user e-mail list, and I replied with a lot of juicy tidbits to whet your appetite.

We're moving as fast as we can in order to use this infrastructure for the basis of Solr Flare, destined to be faceted browsing plugins for Rails allowing your Rails application to easily benefit from what Solr and solrb offer. Solr Flare will debut at the code4lib pre-conference event in whatever form it happens to be in by then.

The 2007 Conference Schedule is now available. There may be some minor tweaks to be made still, but it is mostly set. It is an incredible line-up, plus there are a lot of cool unknowns hidden in the Lightning Talks and Breakout Sessions, for which ideas and sign-ups will be taken at the conference. See you there!

The audio for the 2006 Code4Lib Conference is now available online. You can get it the following ways.

• OSU DSpace Collection
• Atom 1.0 feed with enclosure links
• Odeo Channel
• Feedburner Feed with enclosures

Please let me know if you have any problems. Unfortunately quite a few of the objects in Dspace had multiple mp3 files associated with it. It looks like some presentations were cut across cd's and it also seems that some use the same file. Atom 1.0 allows multiple enclosures, which is what I used so that it was associated with the same URI. Unfortunately most aggregators only support single enclosures (RSS only allows one depending on the interpretation) so you may only get the first part. Also the files are rather large. I'm hoping to go through and seperate the individual presentations and then post an updated feed. I still need to determine the copyrights of the audio however.