Recent blog entries for fxn

Unicomp Customizer

I've always been a fan of IBM model M keyboards. I worked with one for some time and additionally had the luck of having very forgiving coworkers with plenty of patience (eh Noyda??? :-), because, you know, they are certainly noisy.

The one I have doesn't work very well with my Mac and IBM stopped building them a long time ago. But fortunately a company called Unicomp purchased the license to build keyboards with the same technology, I knew about Unicomp and their Customizer from this positive review and ordered one right away.

Bingo, an excellent keyboard with those lovely mechanics and feedback. The PACK! of the return key is exactly the same, it sounds unique! It has been a few days since it arrived and man I love typing with this keyboard.

brian d foy in Barcelona

Tomorrow Thursday Perl guru brian d foy will give a talk to Barcelona.pm. That's in the Faculty of Mathematics of the University of Barcelona, classroom B6, 7:30 PM (map). The talk is open, feel free to join us!

brian d foy in Barcelona

brian d foy is going to come to Barcelona next week. He will give a talk about Perl 6 to Barcelona.pm next Thursday 29 in the afternoon at the University of Barcelona. I'll post more details next week. Feel free to attend!

Euruko 2009 will be held in Barcelona

Barcelona is going to host the next European Ruby Conference 2009 (Euruko 2009), hoooray!

Spanish Ruby Users Group

The Spanish Ruby Users Group has been born as a byproduct of the effort to prepare the candidature of Barcelona for the Euruko 2009. There's a strong group of proactive people as founders of the group all over Spain, I am sure this will be an active and efficient association. I am honoured to have been elected president of the group.

Interview in Rails TakeFive

FiveRuns has published an interview with me which is part of their Rails TakeFive series.

Goodbye signature

Some years ago I started to systematically skip "Hello"s and "Regards"s in mails. Most of my mails are written to just say something and courtesy formulas like those add nothing but length. There are times where you feel you need to use them, but nowadays for me those are just a few.

I still use my signature in most of my mails:

  -- fxn

and I am getting tired of that. My name goes already in the From header, and since the mail is so direct that signature sometimes may look even assertive. It brings no information, it is inertia from previous standards. So I think I'll systematically cut that one as well.

doc-rails

It's been a few weeks working in doc-rails.

The Rails API lacks writing conventions because that's the aggregate work of a lot of people. You know, different tenses, lack of consistent typography, etc. The purpose of this project is not necessarily to fix that, though I'd say that's within scope, but when you revise and write new documentation you need to make choices. So one of the first things we did was to write a few guidelines.

Now, there's a lot of work to do and by now there are systematic revisions going on (that is going file by file in some Rails module), new documentation chunks here and there, tweaks, and transversal revisions (me myself grepped the source tree to find symbols in regular font for example). We monitor and fix doc patches in Rails Trac as well.

Once a week Rails core member Pratik merges the changes into Rails edge.

Being able to contribute to this project is great because you know, if you find something to fix you have the mean to do it right away. A few days ago for instance I wanted to understand a patch to ActiveRecord::Associations::AssociationProxy, and that class lacked documentation. I needed to figure everything from the source code. Not the following guy! I sat down, wrote it, and git pushed. That's fantastic!

Barcelona.pm

After Tim and Joel, I am honoured to have been elected as president of Barcelona.pm.

MacBook Stolen

Precisely after the votation I realized my backpack had disappeared! There was my MacBook inside. Fortunately my private data is safe at Google, and Time Machine will prevent any data loss, so in the end it wasn't as bad as it could have been. I leave the serial here in case someone does a web search: 4H62911WVMN.

doc-rails

Patches in Rails Trac need +1s to get the verified status and eventually be committed. Fine small doc patches sometimes just don't bring enough attention and they don't get applied.

Rails committer Pratik Naik has setup a git repository aimed at easing contributions to the docs. I think this is going to be very good. If you are qualified and have a github account you can get committer rights, just follow the instructions in the announcement.

Picture

Me and my little daughter on the Segway coming from her school.

1000 km in the Segway

I've already done 1000 km in my Segway i2, in about four months and a half.

So far I've used and enjoyed the Segway even more than I expected. It's become my default mean of transportation in the city.

It amazes me as much as it did when I first tried it. Next step is to actually levitate, haha.