| Conference Link: | www.rubycentral.org/conference/ |
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.
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.
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
| Quote: | "I loved Java at one time too. I just grew up." |
| Reference: | cougaar.org/projects/acme |
There seems to be a running commentary on IRC #ruby-lang if you want to listen in.
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.).
Bill Kleb from Langley just asked for help getting Ruby to run on the IA64 architecture.
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)
| Quote: | (speaking of other examples of mind-mapping software) "They call it Visual Mind … but they don’t provide any ScreenShots" |
| Quote: | "People have asked for all kinds of features… everything from making it prettier to time travel." |
| Quote: | "Hey, it’s version zero!" |
Woohoo! Time to hand out the PickAxe II books.
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.
| Matz_Quote: | Matz: "Macros are too easy to abuse." Someone else: "But callcc is easy to abuse too." Matz: "Yes, but you have to be really smart to abuse callcc" |
| note: | Gabriele Renzi provides a more accurate version of the quote in the Feedback section (see Feedback) |
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)
| Quote: | Question (refering to MacroMedia): "Are they really that stupid?" Rich: "Yes." |
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:
Oh, and by the way, it looks like Genx4R is the 100th ruby app/library to be packaged as a Gem.