Older blog entries for fxn (starting at number 515)

16 May 2009 (updated 16 May 2009 at 23:19 UTC) »

EuRuKo 2009

EuRuKo 2009 is over!

SRUG is very very happy about the outcome, we put effort and organised the conference with illusion, and people felt it and had a really great time. Talks were interesting, and most important people had the chance to chat, sit in the grass, go to the beach at night....

We were honoured Matz came to the conference to give the opening keynote, he made a 22-hours flight from Japan! We tried to make him feel at home. Matz actually attended the conference, I mean, you know those stars that give their keynote and then go to do sightseeing. Not Matz, he stayed at the conference and talked with everytbody, we was at the conference and if you took a perspective of the hall he was mixed with the audience as any other attendee. Hat tip at him.

Next year EuRuKo goes to Kraków, our best wishes to the organisers. We met them in Barcelona and we are sure they are going to run an extraordinary conference.

/me waves from Scotland on Rails.

14 Mar 2009 (updated 14 Mar 2009 at 10:15 UTC) »

Why Did I Write Acme::Pythonic

Acme::Pythonic is a Perl module of mine that allows the user to write Pythonic code as valid Perl code. I mean, you feed this code to perl:


    use Acme::Pythonic; # this semicolon yet needed
    
     sub delete_edges:
         my $G = shift
         while my ($u, $v) = splice(@_, 0, 2):
             if defined $v:
                 $G->delete_edge($u, $v)
             else:
                 my @e = $G->edges($u)
                 while ($u, $v) = splice(@e, 0, 2):
                     $G->delete_edge($u, $v)

and perl executes it right away, directly. There's no intermediate file being generated or anything. Sounds like magic unless you know what's a source filter.

But some people don't get that even with the work behind this module, the test suite, etc. this module is just a fucking joke! That's why it belongs to the Acme:: namespace in the first place.

It is a joke about taking programming languages too seriously, to the hell with that, there you have Python and Perl mixed together. Sublimation. Climax. You can put that code against a wall and do vipassana contemplating it, release your attachments to this mundane world!

Rails Documentation Team

Rails has now an official documentation team! That's Pratik, Mike, and me. I am very happy this converged this way, there has been a great deal of work in docrails and Rails Guides that finally takes shape.

12 Feb 2009 (updated 12 Feb 2009 at 01:16 UTC) »

Busy. Organizing two conferences: EuRuKo 2009 and RailsDevConf. I am also seen armed with a red pen in Rails Guides. The first semester at the University of Barcelona is over.

7 Jan 2009 (updated 7 Jan 2009 at 12:47 UTC) »

unmac

I have some stuff in the buffer to blog about. One of the entries will be about my brand new ebook reader iRex DR 1000S, which motivated my new year's pet project: unmac.

From a Mac you just pass documents to the ereader by drag and drop, and that clutters the file system with ghost "._*" files, Spotlight stuff, FSEvents stuff, etc. You don't see them because the interface hides dot files, but wanted to have a clean SD card anyway.

In addition, Mac archivers like zip(1) or tar(1) and utilities like cp(1) and friends put resource forks and other stuff in hidden files as well. So, for instance, if you untar one of those on Windows/Linux/whatever you'll get that HFS baggage. Ever saw a directory "__MACOSX" out of nowhere? I learnt this the hard-way.

Solution: I wrote unmac, a portable command-line cleaner of those Mac-related spurious files.

Pictures of the conference are starting to appear in Flickr. Svet Ivantchev has uploaded a picture of the moment when I received the award.

15 Nov 2008 (updated 6 Jun 2009 at 06:15 UTC) »

Conferencia Rails 2008

Back from Conferencia Rails 2008. Had a great time, met a lot of online friends and learnt stuff.

I gave the opening keynoye. This keynote was challenging for me because I am used to give tech talks but here I had to talk about something on-topic for an audience where you could find core contributors, curious people, business people, and even politicians.

There were some technical issues and I had to export my carefully animated Keynote presentation to a flat PDF file. But in the end it went quite well, the feedback from people has been awesome.

In this conference there were two tracks, one for tech talks, and one for success stories. There has been more testing-related talks than in any past edition of the conference if I remember correctly, I like that trend.

Obie Fernandez gave the closing keynote. He explained how they work at Hashrocket. He went through their premises and how they implement them. The result is an innovative and first-rate Rails company with high standards, they are no doubt a model to follow.

This year the conference gave a couple of awards. Tog received the "Proyecto del Año" award, and I was honoured to get the "Perso naje Rails del Año" award.

Working on my keynote for the Conferencia Rails 2008, to be held in Madrid this week.

~1350 Rails core contributors

As part of the work I am doing for my opening keynote for the forthcoming Conferencia Rails 2008 I've written a script to approximate the number of people that has contibuted to Rails so far.

This is not a trivial count because when the Rails repo was under Subversion there were just some conventions to give credit to people in changelogs or commit messages. In addition people were given credit by their name, nickname, email, whatever. There were typos... it was all manual. Now under Git this is more systematic.

So the script tries to extract names from those places, and uses a hand-maintained mapping that normalizes names which has received a great deal of input from the Rails community.

After some days the figure has stabilized around 1350 people, which I think is really impressive and says a lot about the agility of Rails as an open-source project. This is the current listing.

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