Talk Like A Duck: Category site_news

See You at Ruby Conf

Rick DeNatale — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:42:00 -0400

Word arrived this morning via email that my talk on “The Fall and Rise of Dynamic Programming Languages” has been accepted for Ruby Conf 2008. Which will take place on Orlando, Fl, just days after the U.S. Election.

I’m scheduled for 4:20-5:05, on Friday, November 7.

tomorrow at 7:00 p.m., at Red Hat HQ to the Raleigh Ruby Brigade.

Originally this was going to be a slightly revamped talk I gave some months ago to the local Agile group, with a slight change of emphasis from the history of agile methods to focus more on Ruby and other dynamic languages. It’s morphed into a completely different talk.

I plan to take a journey from the 1970s to today, and compare and contrast static and dynamic languages, and examine the recent resurgence in interest in dynamic languages and virtual machines. Along the way, I’ll have a few things to say about whether or not the recent news from RailsConf about MagLev is hype or reality.

If you’re in the area, please come by. Luckily the salmonella scare will probably keep the supply of (rotten) tomatoes to a minimum, so I should be fairly safe.

Ch-ch-changes

Rick DeNatale — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:45:00 -0400

Things have been hectic over the past month or so, and big changes have been in the wind.

As of the 3rd of March, I’ve been working full-time at Near Time as a Senior developer.

I really enjoyed the projects I did with Terralien and I can’t thank Nathaniel enough, but the opportunity to have a steady diet of work, and to work on a large-scale project with a talented group which is enthusiastic about my favorite tools and technologies like Ruby, Rails, and RSpec was just too good to pass up.

I must admit that I’m still adjusting to the idea of a 9-5 job (actually more like 9-7 or 8), and a 30+ mile commute instead of waking up the stairs, or out to the family room, but I’m having a blast.

I still plan to post my thoughts here, although perhaps a bit less frequently, albeit more frequently than over the past month.

Agora disponível no português

Rick DeNatale — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 08:18:00 -0500

Fabio Akita emailed me this morning to tell me that he had translated my recent article about variables in Ruby, Java, and Smalltalk into Portuguese.

I think this is the first time I’ve been translated!

It's Official

Rick DeNatale — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 11:34:00 -0400

I haven't said anything publicly, but for some months I've been doing some work for Terralien. and Nathaniel made me an official "crew member" just over a month ago.

He's finally updated the people page so I guess I should make my own announcement here.

I love the arrangement. I get to focus on consulting work, and Terralien acts as a manager/agent, and provides some infrastructure and team support. Nathaniel has built a great team, and if you've got a great idea and need experienced Ruby/Rails developers to realize it, contact Terralien, and tell Nathaniel I sent you.

See You at the Hoedown?!

Rick DeNatale — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 17:30:00 -0400

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.

I Got an iPhone!

Rick DeNatale — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 09:09:00 -0400

Well, I can’t afford a real one, but:

$ sudo grep -i iPhone -R /var/log/apache2/
/var/log/apache2/tlad_access.log:www.xxx.yy.zz – - [01/Jul/2007:18:49:45 -0400]
“GET /articles/2007/06/29/perspective-on-the-static-vs-dynamic-type-debate HTTP/1.1”
200 22551 “http://programming.reddit.com/” “Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3”
...

So in the heat of the iPhone intro weekend, at least one iPod owner managed to find talklikeaduck. I’ve obscured the ip address to protect the identity of the reader.

Typo Update Update

Rick DeNatale — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:41:00 -0400

I’ve been having a problem for the last couple of days with the URL links being generated by this blog back to itself.

After spending too much time chasing down what I thought was an Apache misconfiguration, and after getting a couple of reports of the problem from readers, I think that I finally tracked it down to a settings change of the blog’s url in typo.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if this problem recurs.

Typo update

Rick DeNatale — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 12:02:00 -0400

I finally spent some time yesterday to update this blog to use the latest version of typo.

Things were a bit shaky for a while so there might have been some trouble getting to the site. I ran into a bug in typo database migration and had to do some creative mysql work to get back to normal

Things should be working now. Let me know if there are any surprises.