Announcing the WorkSpace B3 series designed to help you Build a Better Business -- Presented by WorkSpace Cafe and MindHeap Technology. This October we present the first sessions in both our business and technology tracks hosted at the WorkSpace Cafe on the Gastown waterfront in Vancouver, BC.

Visit EventBrite to see all WorkSpace B3 Events or to purchase tickets for this event.

From the WorkSpace B3 October Technical Track:

WorkSpace B3 Scalability Workshop

October 21, 2008 - 9:00AM to 4:30PM

Many companies tackle scalability and performance when it is already too late to avoid embarrassingly bad performance or damaging downtime. Both should instead be part of your process from day one.

In Wednesday's two-page spread about the concept of co-working, The Globe and Mail Travel Section turned to WorkSpace General Manager Dane Brown for advice and comment on the topic.  After all, Dane was one of the first brave pioneers of co-working and the caretaker of Vancouver's premier open work environment.

If you can't find the full print copy, or wrangle a copy from Dane, see the shorter online version on the Globe and Mail website.

The Vancouver Ruby/Rails Meetup is being held tonight at WorkSpace from 7PM until 9PM.

Topic:
New Ruby Patterns: Tools to improve your code. Reduce code clutter. Increase readability.

Description:
Sunny Hirai, founder and CEO of MeZine Inc., a successful and profitable Internet company, will be presenting several Ruby patterns, many of which you've never seen before. These patterns will make your Ruby code cleaner, easier to read and more powerful. If you like discovering new ways to make your code better, you will enjoy this in depth discussion.

Presentation includes free handouts of the patterns and how to use them.

There is currently a power outage affecting Gastown and WorkSpace.  The BC Hydro website shows an ETA of 10AM for repairing the outage and the status of the outage can be viewed on their website.

Open position for a short-term contract (2-4 months) for a Senior Java Developer. The work is mostly back-end data processing and pipeline development using the following technologies:

• PostgreSQL
• ActiveMQ / Camel / JMS
• Spring
• Solr / Lucene

You must have experience working with larger data sets and a proven track record.

Work will be performed from WorkSpace in Gastown.

Please reply with resume, hourly rate expectation, code samples, and any other interesting details. References will be required.

See the posting on TechVibes at http://www.techvibes.com/job/senior-java-developer-contract

Come meet the staff and new owners of WorkSpace and enjoy an evening of wine, snacks, conversation, Q&A and tours of WorkSpace. All rolled into one evening at WorkSpace in Gastown: August 14, 2008 from 5:30PM until 8:00PM.

WorkSpace is a shared work environment in downtown Vancouver. Our Gastown loft has meeting rooms, a lounge & a café surrounding a beautiful open concept work environment. We provide memberships (not leases) to independent professionals and small firms looking for a better place to work.

Today we revamped part of the wireless network in WorkSpace to stabilize the wireless network.  We introduced two main wireless access points that are part of the overall main network that also includes any hard-wired plugs.  These new access points are:

"workspace-front" which is positioned near the coffee bar while "workspace-back" is near the back open area of WorkSpace.  Both are on the same network and both can access the printer.  

Earlier this morning, a Fiber line feeding Navigata customers in Gastown was cut.  Internet service within WorkSpace was down during this time and restored around 8PM.

As internet is a key service for WorkSpace customers, we are currently working with other providers to provide both better performance and also redundancy in our network connection.  Since most other high speed providers do not currently have fiber to the building, and some alternatives are not economical, it will be a few months to establish a new primary internet connection as we work on a fiber build.  We have alternate backups that we hope to have in place quicker.

In addition, we are reworking some of the internal network within the space and although the changes will be transparent, the impact will be noticeable as it will be more reliable and provide faster internal networking.