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Ruby Conference 2006 – Day 3, Afternoon (Sunday, 22 October 2006)
Tuesday, 24 October 2006

Posted by austin in: Ruby, RubyConf, comments closed

This afternoon we heard from Adam Keys with a one-act “play”, originally from the RejectConf evening. For your viewing pleasure, USSRuby: Star Trek meets Ruby. Funny as can be.

I gave a quick introduction to the Google Summer of Code process and what it did for Ruby. The introduction was an adaptation of the talk that I gave at LRUG in July. The numbers: 17 volunteers; 96 applications; 84 eligible; ~25 desired; 10 accepted; 7 or 8 completed (I know we had 8 at the beginning of July; I think one more dropped out in the interim).

Greg Brown presented about his experience of doing Ruport for the Summer of Code. He was mentored by David Pollak.

Jeff Hughes talked about porting Ruby to Symbian phones. He was mentored by Dibya Prikash.

Jason Morrison spoke on Ruby Type Inference & Code Completion for RDT. The approach he used was naïve, but based on DDP by Lex Spoon (S. Alexander Spoon), which is Demand-Driven Analysis with Goal Pruning. Type flow analysis; it unions types over contours. He was mentored by Chris Williams.

That ended RubyConf 2006. I’m looking forward to next year, and I’m campaigning very hard to have it in Toronto.

Ruby Conference 2006 – Day 3 (Sunday, 22 October 2006)

Posted by austin in: Ruby, RubyConf, comments closed

Justin Gehtland presented the sole Rails-related talk, as he was presenting Streamlined. I’m quite impressed and would have loved to have known about this for my simple wedding guest list manager application that I wrote in Rails. The purpose of Streamlined is to fill in the stuff that’s necessary for the administrative work for a Rails application. It wholly rocks. By the new year, Streamlined will have a visual configuration mode for this.

While waiting for Sasada Koichi to set up, I suggested to Matz that perhaps something like RubyInline be included with the Ruby 1.9/2.0 release so that Transaction::Simple can dump singleton objects and the marshal format would be compatible between the various interpreters.

Sasada Koichi presented on the current state of YARV. He has recently gotten a job in Akihabara Sanctuary. The advances of YARV look impressive. He was running a Rails application on YARV with no problems. Nice.

John Lam reported on his Ruby/CLR bridge, which was started because he writes programs for his son’s birthday. Fascinating work, and amazing enough that Microsoft finally twisted his arms well enough for him to work on them to improve the CLR so that it better supports dynamic language. As someone—possibly James Gray—suggested at lunch: we’ve heard from three major platform vendors that they are taking Ruby very seriously. That rocks.

Ruby Conference 2006 – matznote, Day 2 (Saturday, 21 October 2006)

Posted by austin in: Ruby, RubyConf, comments closed

Matz’s keynote this year was entitled “The Return of the Bikeshed, or Nuclear Plant in the Backyard.” Ruby is often seen by people as either a scripting language (which in the west is often seen as derogatory), a programming language (so vague as to be useless), a lightweight language (popular in Japan), and a dynamic language (relatively new). Matz applied the insights of the Agile Manifesto to programming languages (Steve Yegge is right that most people take the Agile Manifesto wrong and do it wrong; Steve Yegge is wrong in thinking that it’s therefore useless).

Looking at this, matz concludes that Ruby is an Agile Language.

Matz noted that Ruby has Good things (it’s a sweet language, Rails, the community—as Martin Fowler says, Ruby people are nice); Ugly things (eval.c, parse.y); and Bad things (Ruby 2 being vapourware for such a long time: it’s close to being the longest vapourware in open source—Rite the concept is older than Parrot and Perl 6).

The Bikeshed represents an easy problem. People tend to argue about little things that they know enough about to do so, such as what colour a bikeshed should be. The amount of argument caused by a change is inversely proportional to the size of the change. Ruby has several bikesheds: the discussions on String and Symbol; the possible removal of private and protected; whether Ruby needs (optional) static typing.

On the other hand, nuclear plants are complex and important, so we tend to leave discussing them to the experts. So we spend most of our time discussing relatively unimportant things, leaving important things yet to be discussed.

Some consider Ruby a fragile language, but Ruby 1.8 is generally good enough. This means that although Matz would like to get Ruby 2.0 out, we’re not in a hurry and each idea has its own value which must be discussed. Instead of stopping bikeshed arguments, matz says we should accelerate them: Extreme Arguing. If arguing is good, we should make things easy enough to be argued by anyone.

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Ruby Conference 2006 – Day 2 (Saturday, 21 October 2006)

Posted by austin in: Ruby, RubyConf, comments closed

I overslept today and have a high-altitude headache. I ended up missing Nathaniel’s talk, which was how he’s running his Ruby consulting company and approaches that others can take.

Laurent Sansonetti’s demonstration on OS X integration with Ruby was very well done, with excellent demonstrations of controlling iTunes with Ruby from irb and with a Ruby/Cocoa GUI. It’s nice to see Apple committing at least Laurent’s time to Ruby support. It’d be nice to see Microsoft committing resources, too.

My headache was too bad for me to attend Glenn Vandenburg’s talk about Rinda in the real world, which is too bad, because the parts of it that I caught seemed really interesting. Lunch, and then I came back half-way through the lightning talks. Very interesting stuff.

Rich Kilmer presented because Jim Weirich couldn’t be here this year, and he presented about the Indi service that he and Tom have been working on. Very interesting, and I think it could be an interesting service. I’ll probably play with it soon. (Or at least as he makes it available.)

Tim Bray presented on I18N and M17N as they relate to Ruby. The most extensive effort so far for identifying characters in human writing forms is Unicode; the Unicode Standard 5.0 is soon to be released. Unicode 5.0 and ISO 10646 are identical. Unicode characters are represented in 17 planes; the first plane is called the Basic Multilingual Plane. There’s only 9% usage in the total plane (1,114,112 available). Tim’s presentation was mostly a survey over what various languages do—and what Ruby should do. I had a chat with him after his presentation to clarify a few things, and I think we’re mostly in agreement. One interesting point: when Tim asked the audience if they understood Unicode, only about FIVE of us raised our hands (myself included). Tim recommends reading The World’s Writing Systems by Peter T. Daniels, the W3C’s Character Model for the WWW 1.0: Fundamentals and the upcoming Unicode Standard, Version 5.0.

Michael Granger presented the Linguistics package. Really neat. When it was done, I offered him the Text::Hyphen package for multilingual hyphenation. I need someone to pick it up and maintain it as I no longer have time to maintain most of the projects that I work on. He seemed interested, but I’ll catch him tomorrow and talk with him in more detail—or I’ll try to catch him after the conference by email.

Dinner was acceptable (barely; the vegetarian dish was the same thing that they had served for lunch on Day 1), but I met Kirill Sheynkman who may end up joining the PDF::Writer project in the near future to work on things that I don’t have time to work on, freeing me up from having to worry about certain maintenance issues so I can work on the next generation that includes reading. After that, the matznote.

Ruby Conference 2006 – Day 1 Evening (Friday, 20 October 2006)
Sunday, 22 October 2006

Posted by austin in: Ruby PDF, RubyConf, comments closed

Dinner tonight was at Old Chicago with Hal Fulton, Ara Howard, Patrick Hurley, Tim Pease, and various others whose names I can’t remember offhand. Great dinner, and I was able to fully explain the problem with WHY the Ruby extension situation on Windows is so bad. I also started talking about THE big problem that I have with Transaction::Simple and haven’t figured out how to solve in a general way (details below). They weren’t quite understanding it, so before the matz Roundtable came up, I showed them a test case that I had come up with while talking with Francis Cianfrocca (who is behind EventMachine and the implementation of Net::LDAP).

The matz Roundtable was pretty short; not too many questions were asked this year, and the discussion didn’t continue for an hour as it did the year before. I was shot down when asking for “become” behaviour (related to the Transaction::Simple bug). After the Roundtable, I managed to snag matz to talk about the problem which led me to request this. I showed him the test case:

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Ruby Conference 2006 – Day 1 (Friday, 20 October 2006)
Friday, 20 October 2006

Posted by austin in: Ruby, RubyConf, comments closed

The Embassy Suites is a relatively nice hotel, although the air is far too dry for me to comfortably to sleep in. The breakfast area this morning was very nice; they make omelettes to your taste.

We were told that Bil Kleb and NASA have provided power cords throughout the room and we shouldn’t be daisy-chaining if we want to continue having power in the room. Josh Susser has the flu and so will not be presenting tomorrow (“More than enough rope to hang yourself”) and his talk will be replaced with nine five-minute lightning talks. I made an announcement that I’m in discussions with the VS developers at Microsoft and am trying to get real examples of problems with Win32 extensions. I’ll post a summary of the discussion so far to my blog a little later. When the discussion has been held, I’ll post a summary of what we got from it. Ryan Davis re-announced the RejectConf scheduled for after matz’s keynote. Wireless access has been spotty all day; the Embassy Suites isn’t much ready for a room of 300 people, all with computers that they want to get on wireless.

The first talk of the morning is Masayoshi Takahashi about the history of Ruby. As should be expected from the inventor of the Takahashi presentation method, he’s an excellent presenter. His talk was highly entertaining and informative. Most people know that there was no Ruby conference in Japan prior to 2006, although there were conferences that included Ruby (the LL day/weekend conferences, culminating in this year’s LL Ring; also the YAPRC (Yet Another Perl and Ruby Conference) events for a few years. The reason for this? There wasn’t enough passion in the Japanese Ruby community to spur the planning of such a conference. There were so many books published for Ruby in Japan that there was a bubble that burst in 2003.

The second talk was Evan Phoenix’s (née Webb) discussion of Sydney and Rubinius. This is a fascinating project that may provide some direction in the future, but is something Evan will be working on over the next while and will be worth watching as it possibly becomes another Ruby interpreter.

After lunch, Geoffrey Grosenbach gave his talk about the various dynamic graphic libraries in Ruby with demonstrations of why one would use graphical representation of data with example Ruby code on how to generate many of them. There’s definitely a lot of things to consider for future projects. I may be pulling some of this into PDF::Writer (both SVG and PNG generation will be directly useful) when I finally get back to working on that.

Kevin Clark’s presentation about mkrf (a Rake-based replacement for mkmf) was fascinating, and I think that there’s a possibility that it could be a very useful thing in the future, especially if dist-utils style capabilities are added in the near future, increasing the ability to use alternative compilers. I think it’ll be a little while before mkrf is really production-ready. Chad asked Kevin to write some code for RubyGems to help look for external capabilities (such as the presence of the MySQL library); I’d have some concern about this working well on Windows because mkrf doesn’t yet really have good Windows support, but I think it’s very important to add.

Zed Shaw gave an interesting presentation about security testing with fuzzing and and some statistical analysis. If you’re doing anything with anything that has to do security checking, you really want to read his slides when he’s posted them—the concepts he presents are good for that. By the way: if you’re writing software that people use, you’re writing something that needs security checking.

Finally, John Long talked about Radiant, the Rails-based CMS which now runs ruby-lang.org. It seems like it could turn out to be a very interesting CMS in the future, but it has a ways to go now.

Ruby Conference 2006 – Day 0 (Thursday, 19 October 2006)

Posted by austin in: RubyConf, comments closed

I landed safely in Denver and managed to find the express shuttle to the Embassy Suites. Somehow, I didn’t manage to find the ticket desk for the express shuttle, but I was allowed on the shuttle and paid cash when we arrived. Both Caleb Claussen and Ogino Jun-ichi were on the platform. Of the eleven people in the van, five of us were Rubyists coming to the conference (I believe the other two were Mike and Claire from England; I may have the names wrong).

Shortly after arriving, Jim Freeze, Bil Kleb, Hal Fulton, Chris Lehman, and Alan Whitaker and I went to Casa Bonita: a Mexican restaurant with third-rate food (especially the vegetarian food; Velveeta is not Mexican) and second-rate entertainment, including a sketch artist, a too-loud Mariachi band, and a gal who did high dives into a pool not too far from our table. I’m not sure I’d go back to it, but it was well worth the visit, especially with the folks who were there. We had a really good time and had some interesting discussions. RubyConf is off to a great start.