In Valid Logic

Today, the Community Server 2007 Theming Extravaganza was announced.  Definitely something to check out!  The contest has two different "tracks" or categories you can enter.

The first is to build the best theme you can on top of the existing CS 2007 theme.  This would be mostly by leveraging CSS and the dyanming theming functionality in Chameleon.  With this, it could be easily exported/imported onto any Community Server site, with very minimal changes to the filesystem (maybe needs some new images or something).

The second is to build a completely new theme, including all the pages customized to your creative desire.  This isn't for just a cool new blog skin, but rather aimed at an entire site skin.  In the past, CS has been difficult for people to do entire site skins, however Chameleon really does make it far easier.  Chameleon controls are leveraged throughout the entire site, so there is a lot of similiarity between how all the controls work and how they can be extended or customized.

So what is there to make it all worth it?  Beyond the good feeling you'll get from contributing to the CS community (*grin*), this contest has the biggest prizes we've ever had before.  First place in both tracks is a brand new MacBook, followed by a second place prize of a new Xbox 360 Elite (the cool new black 360 with HDMI and a 120gb HD), and third is a $100 Amazon gift card.  Even better, everybody who enters with a valid entry (ie, didn't just change 1 color) will win a license for Community Server 2007 Personal Edition.

Also worth noting, Telligent employees can enter, but can't win, so this will guarantee that the community will be getting these awesome prizes.

Definitely check out the announcement, and then head over to Ben's blog and check out his series on Chameleon to get up to speed!

After being out of town in Dallas, came back to find a lot of new things blooming all over the backyard.  Also, I'm planning on buying a new lens in a couple of months, but I'm torn between two, so decided I'd rent both of them for a week or two to try and figure out which one I like better.  It can take 2-3 weeks to get on with availability, so trying to evaluate them now even though I won't buy a new one for a while.

Earlier this week, I got the Canon 24-105mm 4L IS, so have trying it out lately.  I'm going to be putting it up against the Canon 24-70mm 2.8L, whenever I can manage to rent that one (it goes quick at the online rental store).

Here are some of the results I've gotten with the 24-105.

It has come.

Just a couple of minutes ago, we posted the official release of Community Server 2007.  Go and check out the announcement (linked above).

What all is available?  Everything!  Web installer, MSI, demo tool, SDK (on release day!  a first!), Mail Gateway, News Gateway, FTP Gateway, Enterprise Search, and Security Modules!  Did I cover everything?

Also, be sure to check out the new store at get.communityserver.org.  And buy a bunch of stuff!  All downloads go through the store now, so you'll be going there any way.

And now I get to pack to get ready to head to Dallas tomorrow for the post-release party/planning week.  Lucky me has to get up at about 2:30-3am tomorrow morning to get ready to go to the airport.  Going west to east always sucks.

Well, seeing as how we are now like T-minus 72 hours on the Community Server 2007 release, I figured I'd take a quick break to post an update showing I'm still alive.

Probably needless to say, but we have all been frantically working to get Community Server 2007 out the door on Monday.  As Jose had already mentioned, Jose and I have been heads down on building a new version of the Telligent Store to coincide with the release of CS 2007.  The new store is going to be a very welcomed change.  We have been swamped with sales inquires lately, which is a good thing, but can be overwhelming some times.  The new store is aimed at streamlining the order process much more.

One of the things with the new store and Community Server 2007 that I am most excited about is the changes to how license files are handled.  The new store will be able to generate and email out licenses automatically, rather than this being a manual process done by the sales or support team.  The licenses themselves are much simpler now.  Before, you had 1 file for each product, so you could have one for Community Server, one for Mail Gateway, another for Windows Authentication, etc.  Now, all of those are wrapped up until one file.  And finally, the best thing, is that now Community Server can download the licenses for you!  Emailing out license files is a royal pain, as many places straight block emails with attachments.  So we could email someone their licenses, but they will never get it because the email was blocked, then they emails us a few days later asking where their licenses are.  With the new release, you will only be emailed a license key.  You can then paste this license key into your Community Server Control Panel and it can use it to locate your license file from the store and insert it into its database.  And in case you are on an intranet or have medium trust, you could still log into the store and view a list of all your available licenses, so you can download it to store it locally, or manually upload it to CS if it was unable to download it.

CS2007 overall is leaps and bounds better than CS 2.1, and when paired with our new license handling and store, it is outstanding.  The order process is much smoother, and the license handling is more intuitive.

Also, as a side note, if you've emailed me recently and I haven't responded, I apologize.  Haven't been able to keep up on my personal email, as I got a few emails about people looking for the blog themes I was going to release.  They are still coming, I promise.

Lately, it has been interesting as new things blossom in the backyard.  Every few days, I'll go out there and look around, find something new has come into bloom, and then go grab the camera and take a few shots.  It makes for a nice 15-20 min afternoon break, and then can mess around with processing the photos some later on.

Also gives me some nice opportunities to play with colors.  Those photos were actually from like last week (a bit behind).  There have been some new things sprouting I'll have to take some shots of, perhaps over the weekend.

With it now being spring, its nice to finally be able to make some good use of my macro lens.  I got it back at Christmas, but in the winter, there aren't a whole lot of interesting things to take macro photos of in the winter in California.  But in the spring, that all changes.

Before all the spring flower really come (things in our backyard are still working on blooming), I'd like to figure out some better ways to make those spring colors pop out.  Get vibrant red/yellows and greens.  During a little break earlier this afternoon, had gone out back to snap some photos and was toying around some color adjustments.  Not quite as easy as I thought… there are a lot of things you can do.  I like this photo for its nice "cool" look, but the greens turned out a little darker than I would have liked… perhaps "cool" and vibrant greens don't mesh well.

But I do like taking some of the photos and turning them into black and whites.  There are several ways to make black and whites.  Overall, I think B&W is easier since there is less overall to them, but still several methods, each that produces different results, and there are several styles.  Lately, I've been playing with another method for B&Ws I'd found.  So far, I like some of the results.

This one had a little bit more pop to it and think it turned out better.  I also liked the greater level of contrast in its B&W version.

I've been sitting on these photos for nearly 6 months and finally got around to posting them.  Back in the beginning of October, I took these shots of my nephews at Lodi Lake as a part of a Christmas present with my in-laws for my sister-in-law.  I would take the photos, and then they would get them framed.  It isn't easy getting a 22 month old and an 18 month old to cooperate to take photos, but we got compliance for about 20 minutes, while I shot around 300 photos, and ended up with about 30 keepers.  You can see the full collection of the keepers in my Flickr set.  Below are some of the highlights.

They loved the photos. I had to sit on them until at least Christmas, since we didn't want to let anyone else see them to possibly let it leak out that we'd taken the photos. Since Christmas, I've been meaning to post them, but never quite got around to it. Finally decided to do it.

Over the weekend UltraMon 3.0 beta was finally released.  UltraMon has been the only thing missing from my system since my switch to Vista.  The previous releases of UltraMon were somewhat unstable/unreliable on Vista, and did not support the Vista styling.  Finally, they have released their 3.0 beta and I have been using it for a few days without any problems.  Very glad to get back to my old taskbar layout… helps to reduce the clutter a lot.