You have all seen the news broadcasts of the incredible devastation caused by the earthquakes in Haiti. In addition to the staggering loss of life, hundreds of thousands have been left without food, water, medical care, or shelter.

At New Relic we have decided to try to make a small difference by contributing $25 for each new customer account deploying RPM into at least one Java app before February 1. If your organization has Java applications, open a new account and try RPM, either RPM Lite which is free, or one of our paid subscriptions. Maybe you have friends working at other companies who use Java. Give them a shout and have them give RPM a try.

They will thank you later when they find out about how cool RPM is. And you will have the satisfaction of knowing you were part of a much needed relief effort for the people of Haiti.

Today the team at FiveRuns announced the end of life of Manage, their Rails application monitoring product. If you are a Manage customer and need a solution for application monitoring, troubleshooting and tuning, we would be pleased if you consider New Relic RPM.  We have a free version, RPM Lite, which is always free and allows you to monitor Rails and Java applications.

We also have three paid subscription levels beginning at only $40 per month. After you sign up for a Lite subscription, send us a note in the Sales Discussion at our support site and you can receive a 50% discount on any paid subscription you open before September 15, 2009.

We have always held the FiveRuns Manage team in high regard. They are great developers and innovative engineers. While we have competed in the marketplace against them, we always found them to be good guys and tough competitors at the same time. We just know they are busy cooking up something down there in Austin to keep our job interesting.

Thanks to Josh Knowles and a band of dedicated Rubyists in the New York metro area, GoRuCo (Gotham Ruby Conference) will be better than ever this year. This event sold out after just a couple weeks after tickets went on sale. BUT, New Relic managed to score one ticket. And, we are giving it away.

If you can prove you work full time at a not-for-profit organization in the New York tri-state area and you want to go to the event on Saturday, May 30 in downtown Manhattan

UPDATE: The GoRuCo ticket has been won by David James who is a web developer at The Sunlight Foundation, a congressional watchdog group based in Washington, DC. Congratulations David!

Good luck to the GoRuCo gang. Thanks for all your hard work. We are proud to be a sponsor.

Whew! Long day.

Day 2 at RailsConf started with DHH’s keynote. Always interesting to listen to David. The focus this time was on some of the guiding principles for the team working on Rails 3, helping all of us get realistic expectations about this critical release. It won’t be all things to all people. As David put it “I guarantee there will be things we didn’t do that you wanted done.” But look at those omissions as incentives for adding to the platform, not for knocking it.

Heard about some exciting new things from Engine Yard: Solo is really taking off; Tom demoing some exciting new tools.

Great chatting with “Koz” Koziarski (below) who admitted to be “pretty slammed from jetlag – Auckland to LA to Vegas, ugh.” Congratulations to him on the coming birth of his first child.

James Lindenbaum from Heroku stopped by. Their product officially launched a couple weeks ago and are doing great. Only company we know with Fugu and Koi on the price list outside the Tokyo fish market. Just kidding guys, you have an amazing service for rapid deployment.

Lew, Bill, and friends made it a late night (or so we’re told) at the blackjack tables. We keep telling them “never draw to a straight between a four and an eight.” But do they listen? Ach! Why do we bother!

Nice to talk with Lior Shiff from ProductMadness, Andrew Carter from Getty Images, Arun Gupta from Sun, Ian McFarland from PivotalLabs, John Fan from Cardinal Blue (the guys who make FriendStock on Facebook), Joe Clark from Blue Box Group.

Great to see Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify and developer extraordinaire. He, too, was jetlagged – Cologne to Frankfurt (by train) to San Francisco to Vegas. “Its a blur.”

Tomorrow we host the Rails Entrepreneur Panel: Starting and Running Your Own Company. Lew will moderate an all-star panel with DHH, Tobi Lutke and Obie Fernandez. You will not want to miss this one at 1:50 right after lunch.

More news later.

Day One of RailsConf at the Las Vegas Hilton. Most of our team got here Sunday and they spent time today attending tutorials, setting up the booth, posting job listings, hosting the Affiliate meeting and hosting a rockin’ party for customers and partners.

Saw lots of friends all day and lots more at the customer party. Some shouts:  Brian Doll of Wells Fargo; Gregg Pollack of RailsEnvy (I like to think of Gregg and Jason as the “Click and Clack” of Rails); Leah Silber and lots of other Engine Yard friends;  Jesse Proudman of Blue Box (dudes, nice integration of RPM into Box Panel); Peter Cooper of Rails Inside (its not a party until Peter shows up!); Phil Misiowiec from Webficient (He just included New Relic in their EC2  AMI); The RightScale gang; plus Robert Dempsey, Wolf Arnold, John Hwang, Blythe Dunham, Matthew Carriere, Chris Nagele and a couple hundred other friends we can’t all list here. Thanks for coming to the New Relic shindig.

Heard Obie Fernandez and our Lew Cirne both like the Beatles tribute show at the Mirage. Watch for exciting conference news from Obie. Heard one of our guys say “who’s Barry Manilow?” I sang Mandy for him. Dude, just this: its about his dog. Saw Saxon, Jim, Bill, Thomas and George play App Doctor helping customers diagnose their apps.

Tomorrow I am catching the Ruby Heroes presentation from Gregg Pollack. Also looking forward to Obie’s Blood, Sweat and Rails. And I will catch Arun Gupta’s presentation on Glassfish.

Working the New Relic booth all day Tuesday. Booth 5. Stop by and say hey.

Want to give us some of your ideas for RPM? Come to the BOF at 7:30 in Conference Room 11 Tuesday night. It will keep you away from the tables.

More tomorrow night.