Posted by Rick DeNatale
Mon, 20 Aug 2007 20:34:00 GMT
One of the things I learned at the Ruby Hoedown, is that a sizeable number of the Ruby community who
attend such conferences are into a psychological game called Werewolf.
At the hoedown various presenters, among them Marcel Molina, Jr. and Chad Fowler, repeatedly asked
for a venue in which to play the game. After the contest, a group of experienced and newbie werewolves (count me amongst the latter), went to the Velvet Cloak Inn in Raleigh and spent Saturday evening
trying to either hide our own lycanthropy or flush out the lycanthropes, among us.
For those planning to attend a Ruby conference for the first time, be warned, there are werewolves among us, and playing with them can be a fun experience.
Posted in ruby | Tags community, werewolves | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Rick DeNatale
Mon, 20 Aug 2007 18:25:00 GMT
Besides being a master werewolf, Marcel Molina Jr. gives great presentations!
In his keynote presentation on the second day of the Ruby Hoedown, Marcel talked about
“What Makes Code Beautiful”,
click on the link for the confreaks video of this session.
The talk started with an exploration of the classical Philosophy of Beauty, from Plato to Descartes.
Marcel summarized this by proposing that beauty lies in the balance between three aspects which,
at times, either strengthen or oppose each other:
Read more...
Posted in ruby, best_practices | Tags beautiful_code, ruby, rubyhoedown | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Rick DeNatale
Mon, 20 Aug 2007 14:13:00 GMT
I notice that master werewolves
Coby Randquist and Carl Youngblood
have gotten all of the
videos from the
inaugural Ruby Hoedown (at least
in rough cut form) on their confreaks website.
I’m stoked about this, and the site in general.
Like the way infoq web publishes presentations, confreaks
shows synchronized live action video and the “slides”, however I like the confreaks site better.
- The “slides” are directly captured as video from the presenters laptop. The big plus here is that
live demos are also there.
- The presentation is “widescreen” with the two components laid out side by side, which I think
works better.
As for content, there was lots of good stuff at the hoedown which is now available for viewing on-line. Check it out.
Posted in ruby | Tags conferences, rubyhoedown | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Rick DeNatale
Tue, 14 Aug 2007 15:03:00 GMT
The first Ruby Hoedown, sponsored by the Raleigh Ruby brigade, has finally come and gone. I had a great two days, saw some old friends, and made lots of new ones.
Here are my initial thoughts after more than a bit too litle sleep after a night trying to root out werewolves.
Read more...
Posted in ruby, war_stories, smalltalk, rails | Tags history, rubyhoedown | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Rick DeNatale
Tue, 07 Aug 2007 21:30:00 GMT
This weekend, the Raleigh Ruby Brigade
is hosting the Ruby Hoedown, at Red Hat Headquarters in Raleigh, NC.
I’ll be there, so if you will be too, and you want to beat me up about something I’ve written here,
or just want to talk, look me up.
Posted in site_news | Tags conferences, raleigh.rb | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Rick DeNatale
Tue, 07 Aug 2007 19:24:00 GMT
Not long ago while working on an existing Rails application, (i.e. code I hadn’t written). I was mystified
when a logical expression seemed to be returning an odd result. The expression had been written with not,
and, and or, and was the right hand side of an assignment statement. ventually I changed to using !,
&&, and || which fixed the problem.
I never completely
understood what was going on, until I encountered this
blog entry by Jay Fields.
One of the big differences between Ruby and Smalltalk is the use of operator precedence. In Smalltalk, the grammar is
very simple, unary message selectors bind tighter than binary selectors, which bind tighter than keyword selectors.
The assignment operator binds more loosely than any of these. This is often a stumbling block for newcomers to Smalltalk
when they find that in Smalltalk 3 + 5 * 2 evaluates to 16.
Ruby in comparison has quite a rich and flexible syntax.
Usually, it’s quite intutitive, but, depending on where you come from there can be some surprises.
I understood the relative precendences of, say && vs. and in Ruby, but the fact that
and had weaker precedence than = escaped me, until Jay’s article turned the light on for
me.
As they say, you learn something new everyday, or at least you hope you do. I don’t expect that I’ll forget this little
corner of Ruby in future
Posted in ruby_for_nubys, ruby, smalltalk | Tags gotchas, syntax | 1 comment | 1 trackback
Posted by Rick DeNatale
Fri, 03 Aug 2007 00:11:00 GMT
This looks interesting.
I wish I had a nickel for every time I’ve typed something like:
grep whatever -R . | grep -v .svn
Posted in ruby, rails | Tags grep, svn, yeah_its_perl_but | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Rick DeNatale
Thu, 02 Aug 2007 16:23:00 GMT
I live in the fastest growing corner of one of the fastest growing counties in the US.
Lately that has seemed to come with more than my share of power interruptions.
This blog is hosted on a ‘server’ in my home office, which also hosts several other things, some for internal use, and
others, like talklikeaduck are public facing. Besides this blog I have a
wikimedia based site on the technical history of
Project Mercury, a personal interest of mine.
One of my frustrations of late has been the fact that the blog doesn’t suffer those power interruptions well.
For deployment, I’m using a combination of Apache 2.0, with pen for load balancing, and mongrel_cluster. That last has
been the main source of that minor annoyance. The version of mongrel_cluster I’ve been using doesn’t properly deal with
stale pid files, so that when the system reboots after a power outage, the blog doesn’t come back without manual
intervention.
My frustration level finally rose to the point where I started to look for a solution.
Read more...
Posted in rails | Tags deployment, mongrel, mongrel_cluster, monit, server, ubuntu | 1 comment | no trackbacks
