A couple older pages here that you may find entertaining (or horrifying) if you are a PowerBook user: my titanium and aluminum PowerBook adventures. I sanded the paint off the former; my body chemistry ate the surface of the latter.
I’ve been called a destroyer of PowerBooks, but my PB 100 from 1992 still boots, so I can’t be that bad. I promise I’ll be nicer to my new 15".
The place to be during the afternoon break today was the Portland Ballroom, where the Artist Currently Known as why the lucky stiff and musical accomplices unleashed a multimedia explosion involving Ruby, cartoon foxes, animation, repeated MPlayer crashes, video artifacting, rocking out, shadow puppets, and network timeouts. I think this is the show he did at FOSCON last night. The quality of the stuff that did work was so high that the stuff that didn’t work wasn’t such a big deal. My favorite bits were the hilarious animated imaginary Ruby Cabal meetings. A good time was had by all and I don’t think that there will ever be another conference presentation where someone says, “You’ll notice we’re using octagonal paper… as seen on Battlestar Galactica.” Check why’s site to see if he comes through on his promise to post those media files.
I have a hunch that the OSCON crowd has more than its share of people with nostalgia for classic arcade games. If that’s you, check out the list of classic video games and pinball machines at Ground Kontrol, “the Pacific Northwest’s best collection of arcade and home video game classics.” It’s just a stone’s throw from Powell’s Technical Books (who are offering a 20% discount with your conference badge, if you haven’t heard). And it’s cool – hell, they use a private wiki to keep track of work on the machines. Play some games, have a beer, and reconnect with the world of proprietary software. I’ll see you in the pinball loft.
Ruby on Rails has inspired a lot of admiring imitators. In theory you can keep on using Python, Perl, PHP, Java, or C# while reaping the benefits of the Rails model. Ruby fanatics will tell you that the language’s intrisic qualities are part of the bargain, which may be true, but all this activity is not just faddishness – Rails is essentially doing evangelism for a structured style of rapid development that is unfamiliar to many people.