September 28, 2007 @ 01:31 PM by nap · 0 comments
I'm going to be at Ruby East on -- oh wow, I'm already here. Hrmm, well nevermind then. Obviously things have been much too busy for pro-active blog entries lately. Sorry about that.
In any case, if you're here, make sure to hang around until the end to see my Rails Rumble talk, which will include announcing the winners. We'll also be showing some of the team screencasts, in order to demonstrate just how much you can accomplish with Ruby in a very short amount of time. Should be a fun way to close out the event.
If you're not lucky enough to be attending this great little regional conference, the winning teams will also be announced on the Rumble Blog sometime later today. Great work everyone.
September 19, 2007 @ 09:56 AM by nap · 0 comments
NetBeans 6.0 Beta 1 is out and ready for download, including a slimmed-down Ruby-only version for those of you who don't want all the extras. Personally I like having one IDE for both Java and Ruby but hey, I'm special. As I've written about before, I'm quite smitten with NetBeans and this latest release is the best yet. If you're curious about why I'm gushing over it, read here, here, and here.
So yeah, it's nice. Go download 6.0 Beta 1 and give it a try. It's packaged with JRuby 1.0.1 and Glassfish v2, which is starting to look more and more attractive as a serious deployment option for Rails.
PS: those of you who are frustrated with Goldspike may want to take a look at Nick Sieger's Warbler, an alternative for packaging up your WAR files.
PPS: you don't have to use JRuby as your interpreter of course. Just go to preferences -> Ruby and point it at MRI (/usr/bin/ruby or whatever) if you don't want / need / like JRuby. And then you can use the fast debugger too. Inline Ruby debugging rocks.
September 15, 2007 @ 12:27 PM by nap · 0 comments
We launched the Voting portion of the Rails Rumble on Thursday evening, and so far it's been a tremendous hit. Almost 4000 unique votes have been recorded in less than two days. If you check out vote.railsrumble.com you can view the current top 10 ranked applications as well as a smattering of random entries.
I want to reiterate once again that I've been overwhelmed with the creativity and polish that are reflected in a lot of these entries. Many of them look like the teams spent two months instead of two days. I'm not going to name any names, but I definitely have my list of favorites.
So anyway, get off your butt, register to vote, and help the community choose the best 48-hour app! You don't even have to go down to the local high school or anything. Woot! The voting period lasts two weeks, and wraps up on the 27th, after which winners will be announced at the Ruby East conference. Maybe I'll see you there?
September 14, 2007 @ 09:23 AM by nap · 0 comments
Sometimes we overlook the obvious. This had me scratching my head for a good 15 minutes yesterday. I'll blame it on the plague (aka nasty cold) that I seem to have contracted.
>> format = "%A, %B %d %Y"
=> "%A, %B %d %Y"
>> monday = Time.now.beginning_of_week
=> Mon Sep 10 00:00:00 -0400 2007
>> monday.strftime(format)
=> "Monday, September 10 2007"
>> (monday+6.weeks).strftime(format)
=> "Monday, October 22 2007"
>> (monday+12.weeks).strftime(format)
=> "Sunday, December 02 2007"
Huh? Exactly 12 weeks from Monday is Sunday? WTF?
>> monday + 12.weeks
=> Sun Dec 02 23:00:00 -0500 2007
>> (monday + 12.weeks).dst?
=> false
>> monday.dst?
=> true
Three letters: D S T. Heh.
September 08, 2007 @ 01:22 AM by nap · 0 comments
So the Rails Rumble is on! We've worked pretty hard to hook this up and it's great to see it alive and breathing, and #railsrumble buzzing with activity. There were some capacity issues at first (ouch!) but things seem to be going pretty smoothly now.
Greets to Carter Parks, Rodrigo Kochenburger, and Erin & Tommy Shine, who all poured a lot of precious blood into this beastie. And our friends Chris Aker and Tom Asaro at Linode. And our other sponsors too, of course. Oh, and best of luck to all the Rumblers. Launch some cool-ass web properties and win some swag, guys! Hope you've got plenty of Red Bull to keep you caffeinated.
Me? I'm going to bed. See you tomorrow in IRC.
