Ruby Conference 2006 – Day 1 (Friday, 20 October 2006)
Friday, 20 October 2006
Posted by austin in: Ruby, RubyConf, trackback
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.
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Blogging about RubyConf 2006
RubyConf 2006 started today in Denver, Colorado. I wasn’t able to go this year, but fortunately