Ezra’s Merb presentation was useful for someone like me with no exposure to the framework, but could have been sexier. Where’s our 10 minute blog app?

Adhearsion looks like it might make VOIP accessible to me, which is a pretty ridiculous notion. If you’re thinking VOIP and Ruby, think Adhearsion. I know the speaker is probably frustrated that his demo didn’t come off at the end, but that was going to be incredible if he pulled it off.

I’ve heard Bruce Tate speak a number of times, but it’s clear to me that getting out of the Java sphere has actually been good for his psyche. He speaks with a lot more passion now and asks interesting questions. He’s not the only one asking them, but I think it’s pretty likely that some of my fellow attendees could really get something out of reflecting on his talk.

Our social schedule led to missing the games development talk. Ooops!

The lightning round was relatively informative, and I preferred it to what I saw during the security talk at RailsConf.

The birds of a feather session that I attended about using Rails for social good included discussion of a mailing list that I hope ends up happening.

The presenters on the second day after that all did a great job. Ken Ault gave a great talk about the Rails ecosystem and how the interrelations were important for Smalltalk and what Ruby can learn. Smalltalk got a lot of “face-time” this weekend.

Jared Richardson gave a really illuminating talk on the interrelationship between C and Ruby.

Both talks I’m going to watch again at some point, and I think that’s one of the highest compliments I can pay.

Marcel Molina wrapped up with a talk on beauty which really wasn’t to my tastes, although clearly many people in the crowd responded well to it.

Overall, I think the organizers and the presenters did an incredible job of getting a lineup of interesting speakers and topics together in a place, delivering a great value, and bringing it off almost without a hitch. Awesome job, and I give my compliments to everyone involved.

I’ve been using OS X on my new MacBook Pro for some time now, and I’m elated with it. I have used OS X before, at Rice. At that time, it was the only computer that I could do everything I would ever need to do from. I’m over that, this time around. I needed to be able to do even more, and OS X did not let me down. I have had to pay a lot for software this time around, but we’ll get into that in a later post.

What I Run

Web Browsing (and del.icio.us) posting

Camino and dashLicious are my preferred combo here, although I do run Firefox right now for GMail. I may try out BonEcho, but my computer hasn’t shied under the load so far, so running two browsers is OK by me. Camino delivers a Firefox level of browsing quality almost always, and pairs perfectly with dashLicious, which is kind enough to be browser agnostic.

Quicksilver

Quicksilver is the majordomo for OS X. “Albert, open my newsreader!”, “Albert, send this file over IM to my friend Jeremy!” Quicksilver has most of its functionality tied to Apple software, but plugins are available.

Flickr Uploadr

I use Flickr for my photosharing needs, and you can view the bigfleet photostream to check it out yourself. The tools are so much better than uploading directly using the web interface, it’s kind of a joke that I ever used the web in the first place.

If you use Flickr, this tool is a must download.

Google Notifier and GMail Macros

The whole reason that I run two browsers is that the combination of GreaseMonkey and GMail Macros is so powerful. The real inspiration for this post is that I have finally reached an empty inbox on GMail after clearing out nearly 2600 unread messages. You can fly through tagging, archiving, and deleting messages with barely any time at all. It really facilitates the sort of session that is advocated in Getting Things Done.

Google Notifier does the job of letting me know when I have new mail. It also lets me know if I have just read a piece of mail (by displaying a “new” entry in the ten newest unread messages list) which is annoying but still worth it.

Handbrake, iSquint and Lostify

Just read this if you have an iPod.

NeoOffice

Even if NeoOffice is slow to start up, you can’t beat free. Maybe the new iWork releases are awesome, though, and they’ll be worth paying for.

SSHKeychain

If you use SSH a lot, you can use SSHKeychain to stop typing your passwords. If you’re like me, that actually makes a big difference.

Adium

Although I really wish that either Adium would work with Quicksilver or Yahoo would work with iChat, since neither of those seems to be imminent, it’s Adium for me. Although I did get laid off, so I’m not really required to use Yahoo! IM anymore, so the iChat door is open again.

CocoaMySQL

MySQL is my favored database, and CocoaMySQL is my favorite interface to it on OS X.

Transmission

For BitTorrent on the Mac, my favorite application is Transmission although BitRocket shows a lot of promise.

Colloquy

IRC is taken care of by Colloquy. It’s the best IRC client that I’ve ever used.

Have fun with this!

The gang will show up in about an hour for us to all head to the Ruby Hoedown. I’m printing resumes, thanks for the reminder, Jeremy! And CVReg is back up, you can ditch the apology. Thanks, Strategy Cafe.

Matt tagged me, and this seems like a decent enough way to catch everyone up with the basics of what’s going on at this extremely busy time in my life.

“list eight habits or facts about yourself, then tag eight more people.”

1. I am not going to finish up writing RailsConf 2007 like I said that I would. I blame my readers for their utter lack of caring. It’s just too far in the rear-view mirror now. Next year, I’ll move more quickly.
2. I left on a trip for Europe on July 16 and returned on July 30. It was an incredible trip, undoubtedly one I will remember for a long time. The trip was with 10 high-school children from King William county where Megan taught this year. I’m certainly going to try to blog about this.
3. The time between RailsConf and Europe was spent primarily on XSLT project with a Flash front-end. That was different.
4. Two days after I came back to work, I was laid off by my employer. It was four days before my ten-year high school reunion, and just over two weeks before The Big Day. I’m interviewing with several places around the country, and having an enjoyable time considering the possibilities. I am looking outside the Richmond area, and if you know of a senior level Ruby/Rails position with some managerial responsibilities, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
5. I attended my ten year high school reunion, and I would describe it as surreal and anticlimactic. I expected to know more of the people who came.
6. I get married in less than ten days.
7. I use Twitter habitually, even though there’s really no point to doing so.
8. I tend to be a very calm person typically, but if I am hungry, that is a dangerous time to irk me.

I’m not going to tag anyone, you can do this if you want.

(Via mattwalters.net: lost ramblings.)

From the “Totally Believable Department”

Iraq war plans are totally useless — otherwise our Determined Enemies might learn something from all the supposedly Top Secret documents just sitting on web servers that anybody can access.

If you want to know when and where the Army Corps of Engineers is building oil-pipeline stuff or security fences around U.S. bases or new torture prisons whatever, it’s all online! You don’t even need a password or anything.

To fuck with the military, Associated Press reporters are constantly downloading this stuff and then telling the Defense Department about the security problems. Then the Army guys scream and yell and demand that the AP reporters delete the secret plans and maps and whatever, but a week later it’s all back on the same computers again, ready for download.

The Pentagon is clearly trying to give this stuff away, but there just aren’t any takers.

Military files left unprotected online [AP/Yahoo]

a/wonkette/full?i=HD4qYA” border=”0”>

Jeremy is winning! Who would have guessed?

Dept. Of National Disgrace: Majority of Americans Now UnAmerican; Nation Renamed UnAmerica: “

A shocking new survey proves that the majority of Americans are now, in fact, anti-American. According to the Pew Research people, only 49% of Americans now completely agree with the statement, ‘I am patriotic.’

The percentage of True Patriots hasn’t been so low since 1999, when the nation was wealthy and at peace.

Who Flies the Flag? Not Always Who You Might Think [Pew Research]

a/wonkette/full?i=7BbfBV” border=”0”>

(Via Wonkette.)

For me, this was the slowest day of the conference by design. I was so exhausted, and my feet hurt so badly that I wondered if I would even make it to the keynote in the morning. I did manage to get there without too much problem, and the Aleve that I brought came in extremely handy.

My day included:

• Exploring Virtual Clusters for Rails Development and Deployment
• Memcaching Rails
• The Dark Art of Developing Plugins
• A short brain break
• Open Mic Demo Session which I was asked to leave because my presence established a fire hazard. Whatever.

During the Memcaching session, I missed my own solitary mention “on the floor” in the Joyent Slingshot presentation when I was mentioned as having worked on porting an application to it. I later got together with the person who was asking about it—Luke Melia is a commiter on Tracks.

Jon, a friend of his, and I walked out to McMenamin’s for dinner. Jon didn’t like the beer that I got (It was named Ruby!) but the meal was decent. After that, we walked back to the hotel and called it a day.

We ended up seeing a clip I had shown Jon at the start of the day on Inside Edition. Jon and I were both tickled because we are evil persons. When I reminded him of the clip, he sent me a link to a better one.

Unfortunately for the fellow at RailsMachine, this talk is an area that I’m really trying to stay abreast of. I historically have had very little money to spend on architecture, and the concept of virtualization has had a huge impact on my professional development. As such, I thought that I would give some time to a practitioner in this space that wasn’t Joyent

Applying the concept of virtualization to Rails deployment is something I’ve already done, and his presentation was more about his offerings than how he engineered them. Any development shop that is concerned with how they will run their product when it becomes successful should have had both ears open. I have been spending a lot of time on this, though, so it wasn’t so useful for me. I’m sure others had a different experience.