Rush The Shell

I just read the latest posting from Adam Wiggins, very cool dude, hard-core Rubyist, and friend. He has a new project called Rush, the Ruby shell. Adam is one of the guys behind Heroku, which is a pretty amazing pure web browser-based IDE/deployment/hosting solution for Ruby on Rails, if you haven't seen that yet.

Anyhow, like many of us, Adam seems like he just wants to use Ruby for everything. And when I say everything, I mean EVERYTHING. Writing bash scripts.... sucks. Destroying the sanctity of your Ruby code with

`bash-shell-command /ugly /madness`

is not hardly any better. My man is trying to help us do away with all that, by applying a friendly familiar Rubyness, not just caging the ugliness away.

Here is a little taste of Rush, from the Rush site:

How about killing those pesky stray mongrels? Before:

kill `ps aux | grep mongrel_rails | grep -v grep | cut -c 10-20`

After:

processes.each { |p| p.kill if p.command == "mongrel_rails" }

But rush is more than just an interactive shell and a library: it can also control any number of remote machines from a single location. Copy files or directories between servers as seamlessly as if it was all local. bash and ssh, we love you, but your era is past.

Example of remote access:

local = Rush::Box.new('localhost') 
remote = Rush::Box.new('my.remote.server.com')
local_dir = local['/Users/adam/myproj/'] 
remote_dir = remote['/home/myproj/app/']
local_dir.copy_to remote_dir 
remote_dir['**/.svn/'].each { |d| d.destroy }

I have not had a chance to play with Rush yet, but I'm sure I will be. Unix shell scripting is not syntactical sugar, that is for sure, and Rush looks pretty sweet.

Everybody Into The Pool

A few weeks back, I indulged my current obsession with grid computing, and Amazon's EC2 and S3 services in particular, with a lengthy post. I mentioned how friend Ari Lerner and I had built a really neat solution, and were going to put all of our processing farm goodness into a nice neat gemified package. Well, mostly thanks to Ari, we now have a new Ruby gem called ProcessorPool that uses EC2 and S3 to do all the hard work for you.

Based on Sinatra, with a bunch of S3 goodness mixed in, the ProcessorPool gem makes it staggeringly easy to exploit the power of the EC2 grid. More info about it is available at the Blog @ CitrusByte, and you can also check it out on RubyForge here.

All kinds of fun applications await you in the pool... image processing, video/audio transcoding, heavy computational stuff, long crawls of content... and it is fun to delegate to a pool of worker machines in the EC2 cloud.

Come on in... the pool is fine.

Getting To Usable

I read a great posting last night from Matt Rogers, founder of startup Aroxo, on a strategy for usability testing. Suddenly, I was flashing back a few years to the early salad days of web usability...

When I first read Steve Krug's tiny masterwork "Don't Make Me Think", I was very excited; at last, a nice practical approach! After the pedantic and overly academic work of guys like Jakob Neilson, Krug's book hit me like Dr. Seuss taking out Dick, Jane, and Spot.

Somehow, Rogers' post reminded me of that sudden flash of clarity in the fog. Yes, we can DO this! Gentlemen and ladies, start your testing...

You Got Your DS In My Robot

The French press may be reeling in financial scandal, but the cool kids there are still concentrating on what is really important: drinking wine and controlling an open source robot with a heavily modded Nintendo DS.

The Pekee Mobile Robot and a whole bunch of DS hacking. That in itself just sounds like hours of fun. But then can you just imagine real-world robotic battles in your living room, fought remote controlled by DS. Can I preorder now?

C'est Manifique!

Ruby.NET, We Hardly Knew Ye

It comes as not entirely surprising that the Wayne Kelly of the Ruby.NET project from down under has finally given up the ship. Microsoft had already grabbed the spotlight with IronRuby and the DLR. Despite some early gains, it seemed that development momentum had peaked, until Ruby.NET finally made its way up onto Google Code and a "real" open source project.

How, how will John Lam and team proceed without Ruby.NET around? I seem to recall a conversation I had with John when we were at RailsConf, and he was telling me since his M$ cannot look at open-source source code due to patent issues, they were unable to look at the MRI code in order to implement IronRuby. He said they WERE able to look at the Ruby.NET code due to some weird licensing thing. Does this mean they have now had their way with Ruby.NET, and they are done with it?

The DLR is a very cool concept, but it seems like is a lot more than many developers want, particularly polyglot ALT.NET folks who just want to add some capabilities most easily implemented in the Ruby-language, more than they want to switch over to pure Ruby.

Reading further in the mailing list thread, it seems like others in the Ruby.NET project are not quite ready to throw in the towel quite yet... but is it already too late for them?

Recaptcha On Rails

UPDATED Oct. 15, 2009 with most current info

I hate implementing captchas. You know, those annoying things that your users think are deciphering hieroglyphics. I have hated them because I do not want to install a whole massive assemblage of software like ImageMagick/RMagick just to provide some basic protection from spam and bots.

To avoid this, I had hacked together a simple implementation using some free public captcha. However, a client recently turned on SSL on their signup page, and my free public captcha gave a nasty error cause of the domain name in the SSL certificate not matching the domain of their site. How cheap!

I needed a new solution. I waded thru pages of search results with the dreaded RMagick sotuions. But then, lo and behold, I discovered there is a fantastic simple plugin for Ruby on Rails from Ambethia that supports the marvelous Recaptcha.

Recaptcha is a really neat project that uses crowdsourcing to implement a form of human OCR on old books that defy machine OCR. They need human scanners, and we need proof that the people signing up on the site are human. Perfect match!

Less than 10 minutes later I had the plugin installed, implemented, and deployed in production. It is that easy. Here is a four step process that will have you up in moments:

Step 1 - Install the Recaptcha plugin

script/plugin install git://github.com/ambethia/recaptcha.git

'Nuff said.

Step 2 - Set Your Recaptcha Account Data in Rails
OK, so I lied. You need to tell the plugin what your account info is, and if you do not yet have a free Recaptcha account, you will need to sign up for one. Once you do, save your keys into config/initializers/recaptcha.rb

ENV['RECAPTCHA_PUBLIC_KEY'] = 'youractualpublickey'
ENV['RECAPTCHA_PRIVATE_KEY'] = 'youractualprivatekey'


Step 3 - Display The Recaptcha Widget In Your View
You will need to display the Recaptcha widget somewhere. In my case, it was the signup page for the site. Just put this view helper where you want the widget to appear:

<%= recaptcha_tags %>

If you are using SSL, use this instead:

<%= recaptcha_tags :ssl => true %>


Step 4 - Validate The Recaptcha
You need to make sure that the user entered the proper values for the Recaptcha. Just add this to the controller action that the view submits to:


If you want to display any Recaptcha errors right along with any model errors of the model you are trying to control adding using the Recaptcha, you could do this instead:



You may have guessed by now that it took me longer to write this posting than to implement Recaptcha using the Ambethia plugin. Hey, that is just the kind of guy I am. It was just so cool, and such a quick solution to a common problem, that I couldn't help myself.

Let the digitizing begin!

RailsConf 2008 Registration Is Open

Get ready, get set, go!! The annual frenzy of registration for RailsConf 2008 has begun.

Yes, I have already received my registration confirmation. No, I have not received my speaker confirmation...yet? Oh well, looks like RejectConf again!

See you all there... ahem, not all of you, unless you register right now!

The Patent Apocalypse Begins?

Software patents... as, Obi-Wan warned, "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious." Well, the dark side has struck back, people. A massive salvo has been launched, this time aimed directly at the open source community in the form of Trend Micro vs. Barracuda Networks.

I was thinking about a cute little pictograph that would describe the public awareness and attitudes about software patents. Yes, this is highly unscientific. Also, I was too lazy to do it, so I settled for pie charts instead:




75% - Huh? Pass the beer...
24% - I know ALL about software patents... shoes, right?
1% - Programmers & Patent Lawyers



Within the programmers and patent lawyers, we could break it down this way:
75% - I don't mess with them, they don't mess with me... please don't hurt me...
24% - Ban the patent!
1% - Sue me? Sue you!

Is that last group now large enough to start the patent apocalypse? Just like any conflagration, some small sparks can result in a firestorm with devastating consequences.

Just ask yourself... really... are the ideas of free open source software and software patents compatible in any way? Are these two not overdue for a showdown? And what if we lose?

Be afraid... be very afraid...

I Want My API

I just ran into a really great resource for open source API documentation. Called gotAPI, it links in a delightfully searchable way all of the APIs we love, but turn out to not actually know. Well, we know them, just not well enough to have their numbers setup for speed dial on our cell phones. Or our code able to call them directly without looking up a reference first.

Here is a small sample of ones I will actually use regularly:

• HTML


• CSS


• JavaScript


• Prototype


• jQuery


• Ruby Standard Library


• Ruby on Rails


• Erlang


• MySQL


• PostgreSQL


• Selenium

Plus gotAPI is a domain name I can probably remember. That should keep me from several pointless button mashing Google searches per hour just to end up back on the same sites that gotAPI is already linking to.

Beware Of The Merb

Apparently the Merb team was not yet satisfied with just having created a better Rails than Rails itself. Now, they are going after even more conceptual high ground, and creating an even more flexible web development paradigm that incorporates many of the great ideas percolating around the mongrel community.

According to Yahuda Katz, the next version of Merb will completely revise the existing Merb framework, in order to provide for many more ways to utilize it. He has an excellent writeup about what they are up to, and it sounds really cool.

The upcoming Merb 0.9 will break Merb into two parts: merb-core, and merb-more. merb-core will be a separate gem based on Rack, and as such will be able to plug into any web server like mongrel, evented_mogrel, thin, or even the venerable WebBrick. With this stripped down merb-core, you could create mini one file applications like those that you might been thinking of doing with Sinatra or Camping. Back to the Merb roots, if you will.

The other part of the new Merb, is the merb-more gem, which supports a more complete application structure like Rails or the current Merb. Combine this with a bunch of plugins, and the new Merb sounds to be an excellent way to really recombine elements to create an application.

I will be checking it out as soon as practical... stay tuned for more Merb.

On The Grid With EC2

Lately, I have had a chance to get seriously into Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. I doubt any reader of this blog is unfamiliar with the existence of EC2, but many of you have probably not even gotten to the tire kicking stage, like I had been until recently.

Even after attending several sessions about Amazon's EC2 at RailsConf 2007, I still had only a very general idea about the service. However, it is true that there is no substitute for experience, and now that I have finally been getting hands-on, I am pretty excited about what you can do with it.

A client with a pretty complex Ruby on Rails application needed to create a processing farm for doing video conversion, as well as serving up the resulting video files. Sounds like the perfect application for Amazon's utility computing services. I dug in to the myriad of online sources of information available...

I decided to base my Amazon Machine Image (AMI) on Ubuntu 7.1. Oh, Ubuntu, such a modern operating system you are! That turned out to be a very good decision, and apt-get was quite co-operative getting the myriad of prerequisites my open source video processing farm would require.

I also decided to base my upload processor on Sinatra. My application's entrypoint is a single stateless call, but there are lots of these calls, and each requires a bunch of intensive back-end processing. Something nice and multithreaded, like some kind of mongrel handler, was called for. In this case, even Merb seemed like it was too heavyweight!

Luckily, I had colleague Ari Lerner available to help me strap Sinatra into my processing farm, who proved to be indispensable. We ran into some issues with Rack, which I am sure Ari will be blogging about. Thanks, Ari, you are the man.


Some lessons learned about working with EC2 and S3:

• When you can launch a new instance whenever you want, you can really work on your machine configurations in an iterative way. Treat your AMI like source code, and don't be afraid to bundle and upload iterations of the AMI as you go along. If you mess up something, you will be glad you did. And there is no bandwidth charge between EC2 and S3 so go ahead, pile it into S3! At $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used, you cannot afford not to.



• Amazon provides very complete instructions on how to create an image. When you are "developing" an AMI, by iteratively modifying a running instance, and re-bundling and re-uploading, you can skip the step of uploading your keys. However, you will need to delete /mnt/image before you can re-run the "ec2-bundle-vol" utility, or else you get an "the specified image file /mnt/image already exists" error.



• You can get DRY with your AMIs. You can use a single AMI, and pass in launch parameters to set various configuration settings. For example, when I launch a processor instance, I use my main AMI and just pass in the required launch parameters to tell it if is staging or production, and which pool of processors to join itself to. And how do you retrieve this individual instance data at runtime? You use a REST call to get it. Neat!



• At some point, I did something wrong with the code that generated keys for each file I was saving to S3, which in S3 corresponds to the path and file name. For whatever reason, it messed up, and I could not even delete the S3 objects using the S3 Firefox Organizer! Fortunately, the somewhat ugly, but much more functional Bucket Explorer was able to get rid of the offending files.



• To really take advantage of the distributed nature of the solution, I decided to use a client-side load balancing scheme like that described by Lei Zhu in this article.
  
  The solution described does load balancing without a separate load balancer. It accomplishes this as follows: when a new processing node comes online, it registers itself by saving its name into a special bucket. Any server listed in this special bucket is available to serve requests. Add in regular peer to peer checking to verify that a node has not gone offline, and the peer removes it from the bucket. If that node, or a replacement, comes online, it will register itself. And so on... Zhu's solution is both effective and minimalist.
  
  As I said, the solution proposed at the end of the article was really cool, but no actual code was provided, since it is part of what appears to be the codebase for the author's startup company. So, I decided to implement it myself, which proved to be really fun and easy. A fully Ruby-based client side load balancer for EC2 is a pretty useful thing to have around. If anyone else is interested, I will publish as a gem or something.

We are not quite finished with our video processing farm, but it is almost there, and the results are a surprisingly small amount of code. I am been extremely impressed by the relative ease with which we have put together a pretty sophisticated solution.

Grid computing... it's not just the future, it's the present.

Making S3 Folders In Ruby

Amazon's S3 storage service is a really cool way to store and serve up massive quantities of data. Interestingly, it is more like a database than like a file system. Despite the convenience of referring to an object like "/path/to/thing.jpg" S3 really does not have any separate objects for "/path" or "/path/to". In fact, neither "/path" nor "/path/to" even exist.

This is why, when you store an S3 object, the name it is given is called "key" instead of "filename". It functions like a database key, returning a file. However, as very "ultra hipster Web 2.0" as this may be, it is still convenient to browse a large collection of files by using a familiar directory/sub-directory/etc.

In fact, all of the S3 utilities that I use allow you to create a folder inside of a bucket, and sub-folders inside of that etc. But I did not see any programmatic facility for creating a folder independent of any object inside of S3. If you have been paying attention, you remember that in S3 there is no such thing as a directory! So how do these nice GUI browsers do it?

I did some Googling, but no luck, beyond "it couldn't be done". Since I had two different programs that already did it, I knew THAT wasn't the case. It took a little old-fashioned investigation... I looked directly at the output from a query to a bucket that had the little folders in them already.

Lo and behold, it turns out, they cheat, by creating a specially named object for each "directory". For a directory named "/path", you would create an object with the key "path_$folder$", and for a directory named "/path/to", you create an object with the key "path/to_$folder$". Then to get a directory listing for "/path" you just do a query on S3 for all object whose key starts with "/path". Ignore any objects that end with "_$folder$" and there you have it: S3 folders.

I decided that it would be nice if the aws/s3 gem would support this foldering the same way that copying a file within a file system does: if the enclosing directories do not exist, they are created before the file copy.

Thanks to the beauty of modern dynamic languages, I was easily able to put together a little monkeypatch for aws/S3 to the S3Object class, that handles this.

# This is an extension to S3Object that supports the emerging 'standard' for virtual folders on S3.
# For example:
#   S3Object.store('/folder/to/greeting.txt', 'hello world!', 'ron', :use_virtual_directories => true)
#
# This will create an object in S3 that mimics a folder, as far as the S3 GUI browsers like
# the S3 Firefox Extension or Bucket Explorer are concerned.
module AWS
  module S3
    class S3Object
       class << self
         
        alias :original_store :store
        def store(key, data, bucket = nil, options = {})
          store_folders(key, bucket, options) if options[:use_virtual_directories]
          original_store(key, data, bucket, options)
        end
  
        def store_folders(key, bucket = nil, options = {})
          folders = key.split("/")
          folders.slice!(0)
          folders.pop
          current_folder = "/"
          folders.each {|folder|
            current_folder += folder
            store_folder(current_folder, bucket, options)
            current_folder += "/"
          }
        end
  
        def store_folder(key, bucket = nil, options = {})
          original_store(key + "_$folder$", "", bucket, options) # store the magic entry that emulates a folder
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

Sure, you can have the best of both worlds: massive virtual storage, and a convenient directory-like structure. And now you can have it with your favorite Ruby S3 library.

Happy storage!

And Here Comes The Money...

I read with great excitement that Engine Yard, my favorite of the Ruby-centric hosting companies, was taking in a round of $3.5 million from Benchmark Capital. I am a big fan of Ezra, and the rest of the crew, and the whole waiting list thing for getting a new slice setup has been a big inhibitor of their growth.

Funny, however, the press coverage has called EY a "Ruby on Rails hosting company". Yeah, sure, they are expert in RoR, no question. But the REAL stories there are Merb and Rubinius, and the press has not even caught a clue yet. Obviously Benchmark got it.

Congratulations, guys!

Money In The Ghetto

I keep thinking about Zed Shaw's vitriolic (and newly updated) posting, and one particular aspect about it that seems to bother me. One way of looking at a ghetto is that is keeps people in. Another, is that is keeps outsiders away. In either case, it is an economy, like most any other. And like any economy, there are winners and losers.

What exactly is Zed complaining about? That the overall level of technical competence is very low, even among many self-proclaimed developers? That the industry has lots of hustlers and scammers? That the MAN is keeping us down and holding back our progress? I am just curious, what was the ideal environment that Zed was waxing sentimentally about? Oh yeah, developing software for the NYC Department of Corrections. Hmmm, time for a gratuitous link about the prison-industrial complex.

Ahem, back to whatever point I was trying to make. Some people look at the folks who are collecting recyclables out of the trash as disgusting. Myself, I see them as micro-entrepreneurs. It is a desirable occupation? Of course not. But it is an alternative to the corporate/governmental control structures.

I can certainly understand Zed's frustration with the relatively small amount of influence developers have in most development projects, and how many shysters are looking to exploit someone. But this is not something unique to any particular industry. It has to do with human nature, and let's not think for a minute that anyone is immune.

The "ghetto startup" mentality has certain advantages than the entrenched corporate interests, because in the creative chaos there is opportunity for the individual entrepreneur to do something independently from the established control systems. Is the Ruby on Rails community a ghetto? A shantytown? Or is it a successfully growing colony of ingenious social anarchists, and the inevitable hangers-on, sycophants, and moochers that follow success?

So, let me complete this metaphor. I, for one, am not going to complain too much about the stupid A & R execs and greedy managers that are hanging around the clubs signing anyone in sight. Nor am I going to complain about how so many artists are stealing my sound. Instead, I am going to sell mix tapes out of the trunk of my car, and just try to get paid.

Zed Is Mad

Zed Shaw has always been a rather curmudgeonly figure. I find him smart and hilarious, but of course many are rather insulted by his "tell it like he $%#@! well sees it" style. To me, Zed is like the Hunter S. Thompson of our community. The more your believe your own BS, the more he pisses you off.

Like Hunter S., Zed is a put up or shut up kind of person. Admit it, if you are reading this blog, you probably are running your vast empire on top of his code, while gleefully taking all credit yourself. But hey, Zed is just that kind of guy.

He also reminds me of a guy I used to work with long ago, who among other things had a masterfully inventive style of invective that could, like Zed, "blister the paint off of a bulkhead". They both have sharp minds, with a very low tolerance for mental laxity. They also both play guitar.

But one would be greatly mistaken to ignore the rant of such a mind, too easy to dismiss it as mere ravings. Zed chose to end his year with a wide-ranging assault against the "Rails Ghetto". It is a pretty interesting read... Are you afraid now to look? Perhaps you should be. But look anyhow. Then decide what you think.

Rubinius Maximus

I got a little excited when I read of the team assembled right now working on Rubinius up at Engine Yard in San Francisco.

After following the Ruby VM coopitition for while, and then seeing the Rubinius crew in full effect at RubyConf 2007, I am more convinced than ever that we are going to see some SERIOUS code coming out of these guys.... and assembling them all in one place is the best way to do it. Props to Engine Yard for making it happen. Get the throne ready, because the inheritors of the Ruby Imperium cometh.

Hail, Rubinius!

The Eyes Have It

Software usability has really benefited from the latest and greatest digital technology for eye tracking. If you are not familiar with eye tracking, it is exactly what it sounds like: a camera watching where the user's eyes are focused, and matching that to the screen to identify what the user is REALLY looking at, for how long, and in what order.

Here is a really great summary called "Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies" that collects information from several different studies, and packages it up into something pretty, dare I say it, usable.

It is really worth it to read the whole thing, and it is pretty short. Here are a few highlights that got my attention:

• Text attracts attention before graphics


• Fancy formatting and fonts are ignored


• Type size influences viewing behavior


• One-column formats perform better in eye-fixation than multi-column formats


• Lists hold reader attention longer


• Navigation tools work better when placed at the top of the page

There is so much more to UI than drawing a pretty picture. Applying some science to the art of user interface design can result in something truly beautiful.

Werewolf vs. Vampyre

I had read with mild amusement the minor dustup over the craze of Werewolf players at RubyConf 2007. If you don't know what it is, you can read about it here.

Some people just really enjoy playing social games. Let's call them the Werewolves... you know who you are, even if the rest of us do not.

Other people, however, view RubyConf as a place to get together with the other commiters on their beloved project, stay up all night, and crank out a new release before their presentation the next day. Let's call these people the Vampyres... subsisting on mysterious red liquids, and notable for the pallor of their skin.

So what is the problem? Can't we all just get along? Not really, cause these two sub-species have very different priorities and modus operandi. Werewolves come out in droves when the time is right (full moon). They operate as a pack, sniffing out things and then chasing after them collectively.

The Vampyre is by nature a bit more cliquish. You simply cannot have a pack of wild creatures committing patches without *some* kind of arcane ritual involved. You can call it merging branches if you want. There is usually a coven of Vampyres, with a charismatic leader surrounded by younger creatures.

I go to a conference to hang out, drink a few beers, and then go to bed to rest from the inevitable time zone changes. If I want to get into a big social hoopla, I just go to soccer practice. On the other hand, if I want to stay up all night programming in a group, I can certainly go do that whenever I want. Personally, I do not find group programming at all efficient, but if someone else does, go for it.

I feel like a covert human thinking he is hidden among these undead creatures. If the Werewolves and Vampyres want to get together in order to get down, by all means they should. Just don't get stuck in the middle!

RubyConf 2007 - Day 3

As day 3 of RubyConf 2007 began, the breakfast buffet had to remind us of its presence. This time, it was the main sound system that was taken out by the ultra-powerful toasters. When Dr. Nic was asked if he wanted to get started anyhow, he had to give two of his charmingly nasal "No" rhymes with "Pow" before MC David Black caught his meaning. This gave some of us a moment to try to catch up on the flurry of RubyConf blogging. Not that you could tell that from the extreme lateness of this post. But enough of my feeble excuses.

Finally, Dr. Nic took the stage, and gave an entertaining if kitschy presentation of his new RubiGen generator to make generators. The whole "A-team" gimmick was over the top enough that Dr. Nic himself admitted by the end how he looked forward to retiring it. All I can say is "curse you for planting that theme song in my head for over an hour". On a better note (ouch!) this is for sure some useful stuff, and I will no doubt be doing some "generatin'" of my own coming up soon.

Next up was "Behavior Driven Development in Ruby with RSpec". Although the presentation was not as flashy as the first, it was full of great information presented by smart guys who really know their stuff. I did not know Dave Astels, and although I have spent some time hanging out with David Chelimsky, I don't know him half as well as I would like to. Watching their live demo of ping-pong programming on stage made me wish that I had someone really, really good to pair with these days. It looked fun!

For a former Fitnesse junkie like myself, the syntactical sugar applied to testing of requirements that is Behavior Driven Development using RSpec is really appealing. I really don't know why some really smart people like Chad Fowler and Ryan Davis are not into it. I suppose that I have spent a lot of time with trying to sync up a customer's need with some custom software that was being written, and so the merger of domain specific languages and executable specifications is just particularly compelling.

The last of the three main sessions was Jay Phillips presenting "Adhearsion - Sane VoIP Development". Way back when, I did some telephony stuff on ancient evil AT&T System V boxes, so I have followed from afar the wild and craziness of VoIP with the jaundiced eye of one who has gone there before, and came back having lost half of the party. Poor Vonage... ahem. That said, the Adhearsion project taking a Rails-like approach to the stinking morass that is anything related to telephony is rather ingenious. I think much of the crowd will never use any of this stuff, but it was really neat. I wish Jay luck in his quest!

After the main presentations, I decided to keep close to the cutting edge, and see what the Google Summer of Code hath wrought. Amusingly, I must not have been the only one to lack major interest in the other sessions, cause the Goog room was full up on the "everyone who is anyone in Ruby" crowd. Can you say "time to catch up on feeds"?

Of the Google SOC projects, I cannot remember much. I was most impressed by one student's charming honesty. It would seem that the project hadn't really gone all that well, and the work produced didn't seem like anything usable. But he had learned quite a lot. I think we often forget the value in so-called "failure", cause we of course only extol the virtues of success. But Edison's remarks on failure are instructive, and I took from this kid that he was going to be a lot more ready for real-life programming challenges as a result of his experience. I was a lot more impressed by that than some well-crafted but uninteresting code library that I will probably never use.

The last session of the day for me was Aaron Bedra's extremely cool "Sploitin' With Ruby". It you do not know about Metasploit, it is a security research nee hacking tool, that is written almost entirely in Ruby. Taking an open-source, very plugin-oriented approach allows security professionals and outgunned system administrators to try to keep up with the R & D budgets of black hats, who these days have major economic incentives to hack your systems. Anyone who knows anything about security knows that these is no such thing as a secure operating system. That said, it was pitiful how easily you could probe for these exploits using Metasploit, without even knowing a fraction of what would be required before the invention of such tools.

I just hope a bunch of the people who were making dumb comments in the room understand that breaking into your own computers to test them is smart, and a great way to harden your defenses against various nasty people. Breaking into OTHER people's computers is a recipe for a stay in federal prison.

After the fun and games, I had to join the throng of taxi-seekers and head for the airport. RubyConf 2007 had been great, but now it was time to get back to the enormous piles of work that had only grown in my absence. RubyConf is a fantastic fun time, and a real inspiration to many of us. I will most certainly be back again next year, assuming that my finger is quick enough on the mouse to grab a seat.

RubyConf 2007 - Day 2 - "The Ruby VM Smackdown Begins"

As the sun rose over the hills of North Carolina, the quiet betrayed a seething fire blazing in the hearts of three development teams. "Three teams enter, one team leaves!" Yes, I am talking about the main event, people, the one, the only, Ruby VM Smackdown! The room was jam packed, the anticipation was high.

As good fortune would have it, I was sitting right next to the head of the team who was my personal favorite to win the day. Yes, I am referring to Evan Phoenix, leader of Team Rubinius along with co-conspirator Ryan Davis. You should have seen the look at their faces when the JRuby team showed the Rubinius RSpec test suite as part of their demo! But I am getting ahead of myself...

I like the underdog in a fight, when the underdog is tough, and under-estimated by their opponents. On one side, the resources of Microsoft, on the other, the full power of Sun. And then, THE LADS. If you don't want to see that one go down, you have no passion for the cutting edge of innovation. And if you do not know about the history of innovation in the software industry, you might miscalculate the odds. Gentlemen, to your corners... I want a clean fight!

MC Chad Fowler got up, and gave a brief intro to the show. "We are about to see what Matz called 'wonderous' last night," he said. And it was true.

First up, was John Lam of Microsoft with IronRuby armed with "State of IronRuby".

Next, Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo of Sun with JRuby using "Ruby for the JVM" style.

Last, the challenger, Evan Phoenix with Rubinius wielding "Rubinius 1.0".

Wow. Bread and circuses, indeed!

I will be posting individually about each of the Ruby VM contestants, and will update the above links when I am done...

After all that excitement, the crowd was starved. We shuffled out to eat our lunches, and converse on all we had seen. From everyone I spoke with, the mood in the crowd was firmly in the Rubinius corner, with a close second to JRuby, with third place probably going to YARV. Hardly anyone I spoke with at RubyConf had any interest in using IronRuby at all!

That is to be expected from a conference like RubyConf, well known for its strong ABM (Anything But Microsoft) attitude, which is pretty unfair. That said, I think the uptake in the .NET community will be the measure of the success of IronRuby, not whether they can get the typical RubyConf attendee to switch back to Windows.

In the afternoon, I got to see some great sessions, from:

"Refactotum: Ruby" - Stuart Halloway
"Maximizing Productivity" - Eric Hodel
"Mac OS X Loves Ruby" - Laurent Sansonetti

I will be posting individually for each session when I get a chance, and will update the links here.

Once the afternoon's sessions had wrapped up, a large group of us overran a local BBQ joint named Mac's, with tasty BBQ, a great beer selection, and a bunch of Harleys in the parking lot. Despite our somewhat atypical appearance (nerd chic) for NC, we were welcomed warmly by the locals. There must've been 30+ people from RubyConf there, it was great!

We then returned at the perfect moment to hear Matz's keynote speech. And it was good. Really good. Matz is charming, and quite funny. His wit was so much better able to emerge in a forum where he was simply presenting, rather than the somewhat less successful "town hall" format that had been attempted the evening before. I have a separate posting with his remarks which will be up later:

RubyConf 2007 - Keynote by Matz

Once the keynote had ended, I just had to go up and shake the man's hand. I know it may be corny, but I really did suddenly appreciate what he really does, which is to inspire the community. People keep looking to Matz for all the answers, but the answers are up to us, my friends. No superheros, remember?

Afterwards, I want to the legendary RejectConf, held right next door. Don't ask me how I wedged my way in, but I did it. To everyone who's toes I stepped on: sorry! There was a fun series of lightning talk (5-10 min) presentations of pretty much brand-new stuff. The beauty of RejectConf is its appeal to the ADD'd-out techno-junkie: every few minutes something else. I will be posting a rundown of RejectConf when I get a chance here:

RubyConf 2007 - RejectConf

RejectConf was really a great highlight of RubyConf. Once they kicked us out, the entire crowd immediately migrated directly next door to the hotel bar where we drank beers and chatted loudly about techno-babble to our great enjoyment. I staggered up to my room, to rest up and prepare myself for Day 3.