Our next ORUG meeting is this Thursday, July 8th, 7 PM at Devry
Room 114.  A few of us will be meeting at Panda Express for dinner at
6 PM before the meeting for lunch, so feel free to stop by.

    First up we'll have a presentation by Nathaniel Bibler entitled
"Building a Video Portal in Rails, How the Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles Started Streaming".  Nathaniel did this talk at Railsconf, and
he'll be redoing it for our group.  Using a project built for 4Kids
Entertainment (http://www.4kidstv.com) as a basis, he'll talk about
technical issues, creative solutions, and many other hurdles involved
in building a successful video portal in Ruby on Rails.

   Then I'll be doing a quick talk on "Scaling your Database".  I've
been working on two new videos for the Scaling Rails Screencast series
with this topic, and I thought it'd be fun to run the talk here before
I film it.  We'll be talking a lot about Database Replication, Data
Sharding, and other strategies for avoiding a database bottleneck.

   In the next day I'm going to be talking to Ezra Zygmuntowicz (from
Engine Yard), Mark Imbriaco (Sys Admin for 37 Signals), and Mike
Perham (author of the Data Fabric gem and the memcached-client gem) to
hear about their recommendations for scaling the database.  I'll take
their recommendations, and put them into my talk Thursday.  Should be
interesting!

   Hope to see you there.  Oh, and I do want to mention that CoLab
(http://www.colaborlando.com) is free this Friday if you want to come
work with a few other Ruby doods.  RSVP here:
http://colabfreefridays.eventbrite.com/

-Gregg

    Just want to confirm that the ORUG meeting is this Thursday, July
9th (I accidentally said the 8th in my last email.. Oops).  See below
for more details.

     Hopefully see you then, and if you're on twitter, please add
@orug so you can get updates.

-Gregg