Older blog entries for fxn (starting at number 517)

What is a browser?

Have a look at this video of a Google guy asking what is a browser in Times Square. People have basically no idea.

I don't know whether the interviews in this video can really be extrapolated, but my instict says there's something into it. When you are into technology you need to look ahead and construct the future, but a corner in your head has to keep you balanced and take into account the man in the street is very very far from your view. Just a reality check, your duty is to be ahead, as is the duty of any specialist in any field.

PS: I saw this video in a post of Seth Godin, which uses it to depict an unrelated point.

Rails Contributors

Almost a year ago I started to work on a script to count the number of people that have contributed to Ruby on Rails, the aim was to be able to give a good approximation in my keynote at Conferencia Rails 2008.

That's not a direct count because since Subversion does not track authors credit was given by hand following a few conventions. The committer typically put your name/email/nick whatever at the end of the commit message for example. Even nowadays with Git the author of a commit to Rails is not always the Git author, some munging is still needed for fine tracking.

So the script identified authors where day appear, and normalized the names to identify every handler, typo, etc. and map them to a "canonical" name.

I am very happy that effort took shape in the official Rails Contributors index, with design by José Espinal. It has been online for a while but didn't blog about it yet.

$WORK

After three years from its foundation I left ASPgems at the beginning of June. I have no plan B, it was simply something I felt I had to do.

I have done some contract work for the rest of June but I am currently taking a break with my family in the seaside. I am gonna have fun with my daughter in the beach, read, sleep, walk, ride our bikes, open source, and take perspective to think what's next.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.