Chat With Me, The RubyHead
As you can see by that annoying thing on upper right corner, you can now chat with me in real-time. It comes alive whenever my instant messenger is on. Just click it and say “hello” or ask a question. Just remember to say your name first so I can call you by your name.
Look forward to chatting with you guys.
5th Annual Philly Emerging Tech Conference
From Andrea…
Registration is open for the 5th Annual Philly Emerging Tech Conference (a.k.a. Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise), which is set for April 8 – April 9 at the Society Hill Sheraton: www.phillyemergingtech.com
Rubyists on the roster include David Black (author of Ruby for Rails and the Well-Grounded Rubyist); Yehuda Katz (Rails Core Developer); Brian Marick (author of Every Day Scripting with Ruby); Ezra Zygmuntowicz (creator of the Merb framework and co-founder of Engine Yard); Mike Dirolf (who has developed Ruby drivers for MongoDB) and Adam Blum (CEO of Rhomobile, which developed the Ruby-based Rhodes framework for smartphones ).
Talks about a wide array of languages and technologies complement the Ruby content. The event features Clojure creator Rich Hickey; Twitter platform lead Alex Payne; Venkat Subramaniam (author of Programming Groovy); Mary Poppendieck, who popularized Lean Software Development; Linda Rising (co-author of Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas); and many others.
The keynote speakers will be “Uncle Bob” Martin, who served as the first chairman of the Agile Alliance, and industry analyst Michael Cote.
The list of confirmed speakers can be viewed here: http://www.phillyemergingtech.com/speakers
More speakers and session abstracts will be added in the coming weeks.
The Early Bird rate, available through February 15, is $275 per person. The rate goes down to $206 per person if you can take advantage of the group discount (4 colleagues or friends, not necessarily from the same company, registering at the same time).
To register, or for more information: www.phillyemergingtech.com
KataCasts
Similar theme as the RubyHead Screencast Shorts, Enrique Comba Riepenhausen, Chris Parsons, and Corey Haines are publishing their katas screencast online. Here’s the description from http://www.katacasts.com.
Software Craftsmanship Katas is a place dedicated to promote screencasts of coding katas to a wide audience of people interested in seeing other craftsmen perform a given kata.
If you don’t know what a kata is, check out Dave Thomas’ explanation at his site.
I’m also subscribing the video feed through Vimeo. Good stuff!
Ruby & Rails Screencasts
***update***
Thibaut emailed me with an aggregator site at http://www.learnivore.com that lists screencasts, free or paid. Check it out, it’s well worth it.
***
I once wrote that the term document should not only refer to paper, but to any communication vehicle that can be used to transfer ideas/knowledge from one person to another regardless of time. At the same time, I also stated that it is the technology that allows us to communicate and express ourselves far more effective than just words alone. This is the reason why I laugh at people who criticize Leo Laporte of ZDTV fame for saying that he reads audio books by Audible. He is absolutely correct as I’ve been reading audio books for years.
Having said that, one of the things I love about Ruby community is that we share our information lot more effective through the use of screencasts. Here’s a list of screencasts I found extremely useful:
- Railscast – no need to explain
- Teach Me To Code – little self-serving, but it’s simply awesome!
- Ruby Pulse – good stuff from Alexander Peuchert
- Remi – nice stuff on Rack, jQuery, and etc
- Inkscape Screencasts – hey, we need to learn other tools to get things done.
Let me know if you find other FREE screencast sites.
All Future Full-Length Screencasts
I’m extremely pleased to announce that all future full-length screencasts (not the shorts) will be posted on http://www.teachmetocode.com. My goal is to consolidate resources so that people don’t have to excessively google (yup, i’m using it as a verb) in order to find information.
I was stunned that number of Ruby developers didn’t know this site. If you haven’t seen teachmetocode.com, do it now!
Ubuntu 9.10 & Ruby – Installation
Being forced to stay in due to falling off the roof, here’s how I got the Ruby working correctly on new Ubuntu 9.10.
Amazingly, the old sudo apt-get install from my Hardy Heron post still works well. I tried doing sudo apt-get install ruby-full, but it installed a bunch of garbage that relates to emacs which I don’t use.
~$ sudo apt-get install ruby irb ri rdoc ruby1.8-dev libzlib-ruby libyaml-ruby libreadline-ruby libncurses-ruby libcurses-ruby libruby libruby-extras libfcgi-ruby1.8 build-essential libopenssl-ruby libdbm-ruby libdbi-ruby libdbd-sqlite3-ruby sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev libsqlite3-ruby libxml-ruby libxml2-dev
It still holds true that you have to install rubygems from the source, NOT the repository. Why? Rubygems should not be installed using the apt-get again due to the fact that it will not let you do gem update –system. This can lead to future upgrade later on. Therefore, download and install from Rubyforge.
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/60718/rubygems-1.3.5.tgz
tar xvzf rubygems-1.3.5.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3.5
sudo ruby setup.rb
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem
And for those of you still using MySQL, this changed just a slight bit.
sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client libdbd-mysql-ruby libmysqlclient-dev
sudo gem install mysql
The Ruby is version 1.8.7, and if you want the true 1.8.6 version running, you should also install it with the old versions of the library. I found that even with 1.8.6, you still get 1.8.7 problems due to libraries, especially the bindings, but YMMV.
By the way, there’s a bug in 9.10 with gvim where you get stupid gtk gravity failure notice whenever you start gvim from the command line. Although it’s harmless, I find it extremely annoying since it is my editor.
Ubuntu 9.10 Released
My favorite Linux distro Ubuntu 9.10 is released today. As always, I’ll break down what it means for RubyHeads and will post the screencast tonight or early tomorrow.
Stay tuned!
Scary Trend – Charging for Service Packs
Sorry, I wasn’t one of those jumping up and down when they announced Snow Leopard and its “low” price. In fact, I’m disturbed by the fact that software companies are beginning to charge for service packs.
When I opened up ScreenFlow to record my next short screencast, I was unpleasantly greeted with an upgrade notice that says I now have to pay $29 for what appears to be a service pack. I find this insulting even as a person who makes living writing software. All I can say about this is that Telestream, the company that makes ScreenFlow, just lost a customer.
I live by a simple rule, treat everyone like the way you want to be treated, and if that’s not the case, well, do my part in punishing them.
Functional Programming Workshop 2009 Videos
I know this site is all about Ruby, but this is just too awesome.
http://www.vimeo.com/album/128851
Scaling Success Story
My buddy at work sent me this link.
http://highscalability.com/how-ravelry-scales-10-million-requests-using-rails
See, it’s not all that bad.
