fnokd!

As my summer winds down, Lance and I are proud to launch Food Jaunt, a directory of local-food providers with reviews, ratings, and maps. Plus, we point out locavore news as we see it.

For my non-American readers, the US has a tendency to eat food that was grown at least 4 timezones away, and many times from the opposite hemisphere. That’s a long way for fruit to fly.

Food Jaunt aims to support the locavore/100-mile-diet movement. Plus, it was just fun to build.

I imagine word has gotten around some already, but I’m on sabbatical from my gig at JBoss/Red Hat.

I stepped down from my role at JBoss.org because I found that I wasn’t very good at it. I gave the idea of “management” the ol’ college try and have decided it just doesn’t really fit me. I think I’m still an engineer at heart.

At any rate, to clear my head, spend some time with the family, and pick up some more development chops, I bumped off on this leave-of-absence.

I’m spending a lot of time in my garden and planning an off-the-grid homestead/farm in Virginia.

But I’m no Luddite.

So I’m also pitching in on this local startup some friends have created, called Greenthumbr.

It’s a consumer-oriented social-network (yes, another one) for gardeners, farmers, homesteaders, or other organic/eco/green thinkers and doers.

Closed-source, written in Ruby. A nice change from being management in a Java-centric environment.

So, I’m taking the summer off, ignoring the whole open-source/enterprise world for a while, and broadening my horizons.

We’ll see where September finds me. Until then, you can find me in my garden.

It’s summer, which means no school for the kid. Which means I now have relatively cheap day-labor available for yard-work.

I am a capitalist, so I intend to pay my son for the work he does.

Growing up, mom got me a physical paper ledger, where I’d record the $15 I made mowing the lawn, or the $20 I took out to buy gas. Mom was the bank.

With Noah, we’ve started the same thing. And then came Zefty.

It’s a really nice, really simple site to allow Mom (or Dad) be the bank, and provide online-banking to their children. No, really, it’s actually useful.

As parents, you can login, setup an account, give it an initial balance. You can schedule recurring deposits (weekly or monthly allowance), or you can manage deposits manually ($15 for mowing the lawn).

Children can login and calculate how long it’d take to save for some item, or they can print checks to be redeemed by the parents to make a withdrawal.

Being a true capitalist and having a son who likes to wantonly and intentionally destroy things, I was glad to find Zefty supports negative balances and debt. And it doesn’t allow a child to bounce a check he can’t cover with funds in his account.

All in all, Zefty is small, but seems to perfectly fit the bill for a parent of an 11 year old.

Today, I took the wife on a lunch date to the newly opened restaurant Nine Mile in Asheville. I’d give a link, but their web designer is apparently slack. The restaurant is run by Aaron, husband of my web-designer friend June.

The atmosphere was excellent, mellow with some reggae music. We got an excellent seat by the window. “Nine Mile” is a tribute to Bob Marley, and the Caribbean atmosphere translates well without being at all campy. There’s no faux palm huts to be found anywhere. Instead, the walls are adorned with rich abstract art, and a portrait of Marley. There’s a lot of Jerk sauce on the menu, plenty of pasta, vegan-friendly dinners and desserts (provided by Butterbugs).

Rebecca got the Nigril Nights, a tangy pasta dish with the finest rare tuna we’ve seen in a long time. You could taste the freshness and the fantastic flavor of the fish. I got One Foundation which included nicely grilled and sliced chicken over noodles with a creamy sauce. It was augmented by pineapple and peppers.

The portions were generous, the staff super-friendly, and the atmosphere lovely, looking out the windows at the old houses of Montford.

Plus, I got to wash it all down with Cheerwine. Cheerwine!

Overall, I highly recommend Nine Mile, and not just because June’s a buddy.

It’s located at 233 Montford Avenue in Asheville.  Super convenient if you’re in Montford for the Music & Arts Festival.

Francois, the guy who leads up the support group for JBoss, let us know that his excellent team is expanding even further. If you’ve got the chops to support customers, write tutorials, and maybe even fix some bugs, JBoss is looking for you.

Two different jobs are available.

There’s the SEG position:

Our JBoss Expertise Team consists of J2EE/JEE architects who deliver Developer-to-Developer Assistance as well as Production Technical Support. This team is the connection point between Customers and R&D. As such, you will be in contact with our customers’ top developers and architects. You will also assist our front line Support Engineers when dealing with complex issues. Last but not least, your daily contacts with our R&D team will allow you to work with some of the best J2EE/JEE developers in the world.

You will also be expected to prepare sample code and write technical tutorials. Therefore, excellent Java coding skills are required. In addition to writing original code, the position requires the ability to read and understand JBoss middleware code. You should also be able to fix bugs and submit features to the JBoss code base if time and interest allow.

And the Senior TSE position:

You will experience every day how we do support differently, by working hand-in-hand with our team of Middleware Support Experts as well as with R&D and Engineering. This day-to-day cooperation will offer a great opportunity to learn beyond regular training. Primary responsibilities will include providing Production Technical Support as well as Developer-to-Developer Assistance for the JBoss and MetaMatrix products.

This position offers the opportunity to support enterprise Java applications delivering middleware solutions to customers of all sizes. It is a very fast paced position offering nearly endless learning and growth opportunities.

If this sounds like a good opportunity for you, head over to the Red Hat careers page. This is a chance to see many of the JBoss enterprise middleware projects used by a variety of customers in a stunning array of configurations and deployments.

Note: The careers page does not yet have a listing for these openings.  They should be posted by Monday, so that gives you time to brush up your resume and make it sparkle.

Gavin King recently gave a talk down in Canberra, Australia. The kindly folks from Red Hat down there organized some filming. Many thanks to our upside-down friends with the Queen Mother on their money.

Gavin provides an exceptionally nice walk-through behind not just how Web Beans works, but why it works the way it does. He provides comparison to AOP features, and even demonstrates the recursive nature of Web Beans functionality being used to define Web Beans functionality. Meta-annotations are cool. Meta-meta-annotations are even cooler.

We’ve broken the talk into 3 easy-to-digest chunks:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

Tonight, the fine folks on the JBoss.org team managed to reach a significant milestone. In fact, JBoss.org is now actually hosted at http://jboss.org/. Imagine that! We’d been satisfied living at http://labs.jboss.com/ for quite a while, so this is a nice change.

Additionally, http://wiki.jboss.org/ has been moved off the old Nukes wiki and onto a more modern wiki. Along with being merged with the wiki that used to live at http://labs.jboss.com/wiki. Like many organizations, we’d ended up with too many. We probably still have too many. But now we have one fewer. You can thank Tomek for that.

Probably the coolest bit of tonight’s update is the new feeds subsystem created by Adam. You can check it out, and notice that you can now submit a blog for inclusion in our aggregator. Project leads have more control over their project’s aggregator, and we’re archiving everything we touch, now.

Today is the day to make sure you’ve filed your GSoC application if you’re a student hoping to participate in this year’s Google Summer of Code.

We’ve got our ideas page up still, or feel free to invent some great project of your own related to JBoss. We’re open to new ideas.

Google selected the combined Fedora+JBoss.org group as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2008.

The JBoss guys have started gathering project ideas. If you’re hoping to participate in the GSoC, take a look, and maybe you’ll see something that’ll inspire you.

If you’re a student, the GSoC is a great way to spend your summer and get some bonafide open-source work under your belt. While being paid. Plus, you’ll get to work with top-shelf Java developers like Manik Surtani, Ales Justin and Tim Fox, amongst others.

So, get thinking about your projects, because the student application window is about to open.

Just a couple of quick notes:

Max and the JBoss Tools team have released version 2.01. What I personally find exciting is that this release sees bundles for OSX. The JBoss Tools project is what ultimately feeds into the JBoss Developer Studio, so you know it’s good stuff.

Also, Tom, Koen and the jBPM team (with the assistance of the .org designers) have published an updated site that includes a fancy new logo and some diagrams to help you get your footing in the world of BPM.