Conference Introduction

David Black did his usual "Welcome to RubyConf" thing. Sounds like one or two presenters didn’t make it, so we will be doing some creative scheduling. The new PickAxe books are here, but they won’t be handed out until this afternoon (boo hiss). Oh, well.

Teaching Ruby in a Corporate Environment (Jim Freeze)

Jim is working for an EDA company. His company has established Ruby as the "knighted" language for development in this company consisting of mainly Electrical Engineers. Jim has a 3 day course on teaching Ruby to the EEs. It is oriented toward coding neophytes. I really appreciated his examples that were targetted for particular kinds of engineers.

Ruby as Maestro (Rich Kilmer)

Rich’s talk was a last minute addition to the presentation list to make up for a missing presenter. Rich’s company used Ruby to automate a component based blackboard system running on more than 300 nodes. The active agent program is a huge distributed java program, but Ruby is used to configure, build and control the system.

Rich’s project uses one of my favorite features of Ruby … the ability to create domain specific languages for specific purposes.

  wait_for "SocietyQuiesced", 2.hours do
    do_action "StopCommunications"
    do_action "StopSociety"
  end

(an aside)

There seems to be a running commentary on IRC #ruby-lang if you want to listen in.

Lunch Break

Using and Extending Ruwiki (Austin Ziegler)

Ruwiki looks like a very promising wiki clone. I’ve considered using it for my comments page. Ruwiki is very extensible (tweakable markup, different markup engines, different storage backends, etc.).

(another aside)

Bill Kleb from Langley just asked for help getting Ruby to run on the IA64 architecture.

Tycho: A Proposed Ruby-based PIM (Hal Fulton)

Hal talks about his implementation of a Personal Information Manager inspired by Info Select (a.k.a. Tornado). Tycho looks like a rather interesting way to organize information. The executable node feature could do some really interesting things (I’m thinking of a contact list that could dial your phone for you … Ok, that’s lame, but you get the idea)

Pickaxe II

Woohoo! Time to hand out the PickAxe II books.

Hacking Ruby (Paul Brannon)

Paul shares some ideas about hacking ruby code … i.e. messing around with Ruby internals, changing the meaning of built-in functions and classes, and generally having fun.

Alph (Rich Kilmer)

         In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
      A stately pleasure dome decree
    Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
    Through caverns measureless to man
           Down to a sunless sea.

Alph is a Ruby/Flash bridge allowing you to write Ruby code to control a flash application. Now that sounds simple, but there are really "interesting" hoop Rich had to jump through to get here.

Rich always thinks big. MacroMedia’s new license scheme for the layout managers makes it impossible to use layout managers with Rich’s scheme (without paying a lot of money). So, Rich is thinking about implementing an open source component library to run on the Flash VM. (note to self: Never piss off Rich)

After Conference Activities …

The formal part of the conference was over around 9:30 and we had to vacate the meeting room so that the hotel could lock it up. A large fraction of the conference attendees drifted into the hotel lobby and claimed any spot that was near a power out to continue talking and hacking. Here’s a quick rundown on some of the mini-gatherings:

• Charlie Mills was helping Bill Kleb get Ruby compiled for the IA64 archtecture. Charlie is the fellow who helped Rich Kilmer and Chad Fowler with their DNSSD service wrapper at OSCON this year. It looked like Bill and Charlie had some success by disabling optimization on the C compiler.
• At least on person was working on their presentation for the next day.
• There was a fairly large group talking to Charles L. Perkins regarding the history of Smalltalk. Charles was involved with the early Xerox Parc Place developers and had some good inside stories about the early days of Smalltalk. Later when I dropped by it sounded as if they had moved past Smalltalk history and were discussing some of the capabilities of Prolog.
• Right next to the Smalltalk history group was another cluster of folks watching as David Heinemeier Hansson helped Jim Freeze through a tutorial on Rails. I’ve used Rails a little bit and am very impressed with the framework. When I dropped by, Jim had just got a login screen working for the demo weblog.
• Chad Fowler was helping Shashank Date work on Gemifying some of the windows tools that Shashank is planning on releasing. This is where I landed for a while. By the end of the evening, we had Shashank’s WxRuby application running as a gem.

Oh, and by the way, it looks like Genx4R is the 100th ruby app/library to be packaged as a Gem.

(More Ruby Fun tomorrow)

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