Posts tagged: RUBY

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.

The PDX Ruby Brigade (“PDX” is the airport code for Portland) is hosting a sort of alternative/extended OSCON called FOSCON. It’s being held at Freegeek.

Several of us in Portland got into OSCON free the last couple of years by volunteering. When we found out that there would be no volunteer opportunities this year we decided to see if any of the Ruby speakers would like to practice their OSCON talks on us local Rubyists - thus FOSCON (or as Lennon calls it: OSCANT) was born.

O’Reilly has been running CodeZoo for a few months now. Today they announced CodeZoo subsites for Python and Ruby. CodeZoo is very slick – you can track changes to a particular app or component via a special RSS feed, for instance. Downloads are fast and simple, even for Sourceforge-hosted projects. And they’ve got this new thing called DOAP (why do you think they call it DOAP?), an XML schema for component information. (Tangent: I’m thinking that DOAP could be a nice standard upon which to build phone-home version checking features.)

I sat in on most of DHH’s Ruby on Rails presentation this afternoon, and I have to say I’m in danger of catching the religion. Like a good cult leader, Hansson is energetic, intelligent, and unwavering in his faith that his is the right path. Within 30 minutes of the end of the session I had installed Rails via DarwinPorts, though my schedule hasn’t left me much time to play with it.