Posted 7 days back at Cody Fauser
Last night I gave a presentation on Ruby for Open Source Bootcamp #8. The event was held at The Code Factory, a very impressive co-working space in downtown Ottawa. I went on last after Yanick Champoux, who presented on Perl, and Michael P. Soulier, who presented on Python. Both presentations were excellent.
I had forgotten how eerily similar Perl’s syntax is to Ruby. I was speaking with Michael after the talks and he mentioned that this actually causes quite a lot of trouble for people fluent in Perl when moving to Ruby. He mentioned that quite a few times he would write out a Perlism in Ruby, but that the code just wouldn’t behave as expected. For example, the fact that 0 is true in Ruby causes a lot of grief when writing idiomatic Perl.
The other thing I noticed was that although Ruby and Python people are always having huge flame wars about which language is better, both groups have similar goals: to rapidly develop applications, and to enjoy themselves while doing it. Although at this point I favour the syntax of Ruby over Python, I am definitely interested in doing a full project with Python in the future.
You can download the slides and you can get the videos, once available, from the page for the event
Posted 7 days back at Moves On Rails
It's always great to see how a great concept can become even better. Lighthouse has been our issue tracker for quite some time now and we've been very happy with it so far. But I always felt something was missing. I don't mind going to a web page when I want to report an issue for some open-source project or to post a message to a dev, but during working hours I like to be as efficient as possible.
One of my pet peeves has always been that it takes such a long time to find a specific ticket when you don't have a browser open. Sometimes we get helpdesk calls and then it's always good to see if an issue is already in the system. To figure this out we need to open safari, go to lighthouse, log in, go to the tickets page, click search, figure out a search term and wait for the page to load. All in this process can take quite a while.
Using Lighthouse Keeper this has been reduced to Command-Tab, click search field and go. Instant results, so no more waiting. But we still have all of the advantages of the web-based system we've come to love. Sure the program has some rough edges but nothing that cannot be resolved with a few minor updates.
I recommend every Lighthouse user to take a look at this nifty little program, and at € 30 it's a real steal. Keep up the good work guys!
Posted 7 days back at Riding Rails - home
We have a twitter account for Rails at http://twitter.com/rails. You can follow it to receive regular updates about the framework.
Posted 7 days back at Riding Rails - home
We have a twitter account for Rails at http://twitter.com/rails. You can follow it to receive regular updates about the framework.
Posted 7 days back at Inter-Sections
Recent news has pointed out that gold farming in China has become a $500m industry.
Blizzard should be ashamed.
We have many challenges in the world today. Entertaining people (as Blizzard does with their main products) is a worthwhile activity for a business. Hard-working people do need it, and even though there are some extreme cases of “entertainment abuse” (similar, in many ways, to drugs abuse), the abuses of the few should not limit the many from enjoying a perfectly healthy, if somewhat fruitless, activity.
However, gold farming is not entertainment. Gold farming is an entirely sterile activity. It produces nothing other than a transfer of wealth from one part of the world to another. The “gold” that is being farmed is purely artificial. It represents no value creation whatsoever. It is merely a symbol of time that has been wasted on a pursuit that is designed to be entertaining. Each piece of gold farmed represents a small amount of wasted productivity for the human race. In aggregate, the $500m gold farming industry represents $500m of wasted human productivity.
Moreover, Blizzard could very easily stop this trade, by creating an official gold market where people can exchange dollars for gold. There would still remain some market for rare items, but those are necessarily less fungible than gold coins, and so would at least greatly decrease the $500m black hole.
If anything, Blizzard should see its own self-interest here: if it can get even a 10% slice of this $500m market (and there’s little reason to think that it couldn’t get 100%), that would represent $50m - not an amount to be sneered at. From a business sense, Blizzard should be ashamed not to have opened up a gold market yet.
Posted 7 days back at OnRails.org
Is Ford is jumping on the Flex bandwagon? And powered by Microsoft?
Posted 7 days back at Inter-Sections
Recent news has pointed out that gold farming in China has become a $500m industry.
Blizzard should be ashamed.
We have many challenges in the world today. Entertaining people (as Blizzard does with their main products) is a worthwhile activity for a business. Hard-working people do need it, and even though there are some extreme cases of “entertainment abuse” (similar, in many ways, to drugs abuse), the abuses of the few should not limit the many from enjoying a perfectly healthy, if somewhat fruitless, activity.
However, gold farming is not entertainment. Gold farming is an entirely sterile activity. It produces nothing other than a transfer of wealth from one part of the world to another. The “gold” that is being farmed is purely artificial. It represents no value creation whatsoever. It is merely a symbol of time that has been wasted on a pursuit that is designed to be entertaining. Each piece of gold farmed represents a small amount of wasted productivity for the human race. In aggregate, the $500m gold farming industry represents $500m of wasted human productivity.
Moreover, Blizzard could very easily stop this trade, by creating an official gold market where people can exchange dollars for gold. There would still remain some market for rare items, but those are necessarily less fungible than gold coins, and so would at least greatly decrease the $500m black hole.
If anything, Blizzard should see its own self-interest here: if it can get even a 10% slice of this $500m market (and there’s little reason to think that it couldn’t get 100%), that would represent $50m - not an amount to be sneered at. From a business sense, Blizzard should be ashamed not to have opened up a gold market yet.
Posted 7 days back at OnRails.org
As you may know we started a while back with Tony on concocting some of our experiments, war stories, successes, discoveries, real life project experience on using Flex with Rails into a book titled “Flex on Rails: Building Rich Internet Applications With Adobe Flex 3.0 and Rails 2.0”. We are now “code complete”, wrote all the chapters and are in what I suspect (/hope) is the final editing stage. Yea!... well, that may end up being a longer process than I imagined and was told that it may take up to four month once the final manuscript is accepted. Nevertheless it was funny seeing our book appear on different book selling website as pre-order. Being my first (published) book I was curious and did some googling to see when it will be really ready. It’s pretty ‘funny’ to see how the dates are moving as the days go buy, but in short here is a quick overview on when the book will be released according to google…note..we are not totally done yet…so I wouldn’t really announce a date yet, but if google says…then it must be true :-) !!! Well, I was really hoping it hits the shelves earlier than some of these:
Posted 7 days back at the { buckblogs :here } - Home
Capistrano 2.5.0 is now available! You can read the full release announcement on the capify.org news blog.
Posted 7 days back at Ruby Inside
It has not gone unnoticed that random announcements of individual events do not work well here on Ruby Inside. With events taking more of a local focus these days, it makes more sense to pool the announcements together. This post, therefore, is a rather uncelebrated launch of a new series of event-related compilation posts. Please make sure to post in comments if you have other events you want to mention or visit our Contact page.
MerbCamp - October 11 and 12, 2008 - San Diego, CA, USA
MerbCamp is an upcoming official gathering for the Merb community. Confirmed keynotes are by Ezra Zygmuntowicz and Yehuda Katz. The conference will take place in San Diego, California on October 11-12 on the UCSD campus. Registration is not yet open, but a mailing list is available. The camp is also looking for sponsors.
Great Lakes Ruby Bash - October 11, 2008 - Ann Arbor, MI, USA
The Great Lakes Ruby Bash is a general Ruby-focused event in Michigan. It's on October 11, 2008 - the same date as MerbCamp (above) and takes place on the University of Michigan campus at Ann Arbor, Michigan (y'know, where Kevin in American Pie went to college). The conference has its own Twitter account (@greatlakesruby) and they're still looking for speakers.
Rails Summit Latin America - October 15 and 16, 2008 - São Paulo, Brasil
The Rails Summit Latin America is an ambitious attempt at giving South America its own large Rails conference (a la RailsConf and RailsConf Europe). South America isn't an area that established conference players tend to head to, so Locaweb, a Brazilian Web hosting company, are bravely picking up the baton. Registration costs 300 Brazilian Reals(about $180 US) until September 8th, then goes up a little to 400 Real. The event takes place in October and speakers confirmed so far include Fabio Akita, Dr. Nic Williams, Chris Wanstrath, Chad Fowler, and lots of local speakers who it'll be excellent to see represented.
Voices That Matter: Professional Ruby Conference - November 17-20, 2008 - Boston, MA, USA
The Voices That Matter: Professional Ruby Conference is a Pearson Education event - Pearson are the team behind Addison-Wesley's Professional Ruby Series, headed by Obie Fernandez. The organizers say that the conference will "provide practical, people-oriented and in-depth information about using Ruby and the Rails platform to create dynamic technology solutions."
Obie Fernandez is the conference's technical chair, and heads an extremely solid speaker list including Ruby and Rails luminaries like Giles Bowkett, Thomas Enebo, Hal Fulton, Chad Pytel, Tammer Saleh, Ezra Zygmuntowicz, and others.
This post supported by Notifixious - Notifixious - a new notification service startup based in San
Francisco - needs a Rails expert to become its CTO! Knowledge of messaging technologies (XMPP) and REST API development is a must. You can learn more here.
Posted 7 days back at Jay Fields Thoughts
Matt Aimonetti has a client that believes Rubyists don't scale. Sorry Matt, your client is wrong.
It's as easy to hire great Ruby programmers as it is to hire great Java programmers or great programmers for any given popular language.
The problem is, it's not easy to hire great programmers in any language. Worse, companies still think they need to hire one or two great programmers and a supporting cast of average programmers. As Martin Fowler pointed out, cheaper developers are actually more expensive than experts. To make things worse, if you end up with a NNPP or two you'll be headed in the wrong direction.
As I've said before, 50% of all programmers need to find a new profession. In the short term this will create a much larger demand for developers, and salaries will rise. However, since one expert programmer produces significantly more (up to 28 times more) than two terrible programmers, companies will ultimately save money. It's unlikely that salaries of experts will rise to the sum of 28 terrible programmer's salaries.
Some people believe that the average programmers are valuable because they do the jobs the experts don't feel like doing. This is simply wrong. Average programmers will do average jobs on mundane tasks, which often turns into a mess for expert programmers to fix. Even if the solution proposed by average programmers doesn't require an entire rewrite, it is often sub-optimal and can have implications with other pieces of software that rely on it.
There's a better way. Give mundane tasks to expert programmers. Expert programmers remove or automate mundane tasks. The solutions will be superior, and either way the experts won't be doing mundane tasks.
If you have great programmers producing up to 28 times more, and you only hire great programmers, how many programmers do you think you need? Of course the answer depends on how much software needs to be written, but in general teams can become a lot smaller.
And this is the problem with Matt's client's statement. While they may not be able to easily build a team of average Ruby developers, it doesn't matter, that's the wrong goal. Of course, I have no way of knowing the caliber they were looking to hire. But, I do know if they wanted Ruby experts that will travel, ThoughtWorks employs several. So, I'm left to guess that they fell into the same old misguided pattern of trying to pay average salaries to average developers.
I'm left wondering why they would take expert advice on what technology to use, hire an expert, achieve success and then stop pursuing experts. Of course, I'm not surprised. As a consultant, I saw it time and time again.
The question isn't whether you can hire rubyists or not, it's whether or not you are willing to put the effort in to hire experts. It isn't easy to hire experts regardless of the language, but it is worth it.
Posted 7 days back at InfoQ Personalized Feed for unregistered user - Register to upgrade!
Greg Luck provides an overview of alternate deployment configurations for a 1 terabyte cache based on EhCache Server. By Gavin Terrill
Posted 7 days back at Inter-Sections
Dear readers,
I’m very sorry, but for some time the commenting system was utterly and totally broken. And in a very frustrating way, too, giving no useful feedback to the commenter.
I’ve now fixed this, and I recovered what comments I could from the logs, so they’re now up (although it looks as if they were all posted at the same time) - and it is now possible to add comments without tearing your hair out!
Thanks for your support!
Posted 8 days back at Inter-Sections
Dear readers,
I’m very sorry, but for some time the commenting system was utterly and totally broken. And in a very frustrating way, too, giving no useful feedback to the commenter.
I’ve now fixed this, and I recovered what comments I could from the logs, so they’re now up (although it looks as if they were all posted at the same time) - and it is now possible to add comments without tearing your hair out!
Thanks for your support!
Posted 8 days back at Fun With Radiant
I’m excited to announce the Radiant CMS Sprint Weekend.
What
A day to weekend-long hackfest to help finish some features for the 0.7 release of Radiant CMS. The official goals are—refactoring the admin controllers toward REST, implementing a new UI, adding blogging features, improving the extension registry, and writing more documentation.
When
Saturday, October 25, 2008, 8:00AM-6:00PM (official hours at the venue—unofficially all weekend)
Where
Carrboro Creative Co-working
205 Lloyd St, Suite 101
Carrboro, NC 27510 USA
map | website
Who
Members of the Radiant dev team and community – hopefully you!
THIS IS NOT A CONFERENCE! The focus is on hacking out a lot of code/design/documentation in a short amount of time. We encourage anyone who can contribute their code, web design, or writing skills to attend. If you’ll be coding, we expect a workable knowledge of Rails, RSpec, and Git - bonus points if you’ve worked on Radiant before, built extensions, or have experience with RESTful controller design and web-services. If you’ll be doing design, we expect a workable knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and image manipulation - bonus points if you know Haml, Sass, Prototype, Scriptaculous, and LowPro. If you want to do documentation, we expect you to be able to write clearly and use the Radiant wiki—bonus points if you write clean HTML.
All work and no play makes a dull Rubyist, so rest assured that we’ll have some free-time to relax, see the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill sights, eat, drink, and be merry.
If you plan to attend, please fill out this form so we know you’re coming.
If you will be traveling to North Carolina from out-of-state or need assistance making travel plans, please feel free to contact me privately at sean cribbs AT gmail DOT com.
On behalf of John Long and the rest of the dev team, I sincerely hope you can make it!
Cheers,
Sean Cribbs, Lead Developer
P.S. If you are a business or individual interested in sponsoring some food, drink or swag for the attendees, please contact me privately.
P.P.S. My apologies to those who expressed interest in attending in the Northeast USA and those from outside the USA – since the scope of this weekend is small, it was easiest to host it close to home. Watch the mailing lists for information about a more formal conference-like gathering soon.
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