Posted by Ken
OVERVIEW
Adams Morgan Mainstreet Office, Sunday, 17 December 2006
Chris S., Lou, Andrew, Vince, Matthew, Ken
Lou takes five members through the details of Rubinius. Vince mentions the importance of a knowledgeable GUI expert on a project team.
SUMMARY
Rubinius is a next-generation virtual machine and compiler for Ruby.
DETAILS
- A Virtual Machine is an interpreter built in software, rather than constructed of hardware.
- Hardware is run by machine language. Simple Machine Language is often called bytecode because instructions are often just one byte long.
- Rubinius is based loosely on the Smalltalk-80 'Blue Book' design. The compiler, assembler, and bytecode generators are all written in Ruby, Rubinius currently uses C to bootstrap the system.
- Rubinius may supercede YARV.
- YARV is Yet Another Ruby Virtualmachine. SASADA Koichi is developing YARV with Matz making substantial contributions. YARV reportedly contains similar problems as the current Ruby interpreter. YARV and the current Ruby interpreter contain complicated, undocumented structures, making work on the YARV project onerous. Rubinius' mission is to create a VM that is simpler, documented, and accessible for future major work on a Ruby interpreter.
- It is also alleged about YARV that it may not reach a stable version for another two years.
- However, Koichi's progress on YARV allowed him to run Rails during a demonstration. This is regarded as a major step forward with YARV. This implementation of YARV was a simple scaffolded application, and much of Ruby's internals are still the same code under YARV.
- It is reported online that Koichi recently announced that he has a fulltime job that tasks him to work on YARV. He hopes to implement a YARV machine in JRuby.
- Last two big critiques of current Ruby interpreters are that there are inherent memory leaks that are too difficult to plug, and that the interpreter is too slow.
- Matz has asked for what application is the current interpreter too slow. The implication here may be that the need for speed is not warranted at this time.
- Rubinius is a NON Ruby/C-language VM. Other similar VMs are JRuby and Ruby.NET.
- Rubinius is under the direction of Evan Phoenix, who recently received a $1000 bounty from Geoffrey Grosenbach (Mr. TopFunky) to push forward on the project. Evan was between jobs and Geoffrey, having substantional success selling Peepcode shows, decided to award a bounty to the Rubinius project.
- Evan, having done substantial work on the project is eager to have volunteer helpers. From the Rubinius repository: The Rubinius team welcomes contributions, bug reports, test cases, and monetary support. One possible way to help is: 1. Add a test for a Ruby core method; 2. Go to the appropriately-named file in the 'kernel' directory; 3. Implement that method in Ruby; 4. Type 'rake build:kernel' to make your change take effect; 5. Run the tests until they pass. :) ; 6. Create a patch with 'svn diff' and send it to the mailing list; The 'ri' command is a rich source of examples and test cases.
- Rubinius uses a microkernel that provides memory management and Input/Output control. All of the code is implemented in a customized subset of Ruby. The VM can then load-in full-featured Ruby code, and execute it like the existing interpreters do today.
- Recent additions include "continuations". Other added components are regular expressions, Miniunit, Bignums, and numerous control structures like ‘retry’, ‘redo’, ‘break’.
- Matz plans to remove continuations from Ruby 2.0.
- Besides speed, another point of contention between the current Ruby interpretr and Rubinius are memory leaks. Rubinius uses Valgrind to reduce, identify and remove potential memory leaks, while there are complaints that Ruby 1.8 has a few leaks that will not be plugged because there are no tools to easily plug those leaks.
- A major hurdle for YARV and goal for Rubinius is to be thread safe. Rubinius intends to be thread-safe and embeddable. Evan states that it does not currently meet this goal due to some components borrowed from the mainline Ruby interpreter.
RESOURCES
Posted by Ken
OVERVIEW
22 October 2006, Sunday, Affinity Lab, 3-5pm, Open Discussion Until 05:00p.
Matthew, Nathan, Brian C., Andrew, Carter, Ken
Guest Andy Miscuk
SUMMARY
First time meeting at Affinity Lab's conference room on 18th Street in the heart of Adams Morgan. Six persons and one guest speaker reviewed the business opportunities related to campaigning and politics in DC. Brian C. donated coffee and doughnuts. Wifi connection was solid.
DETAILS
- Donations: Food-$18.50 Brian C., Conference Room-$30.00 Ken
- Carter--37signals.com new gig job board
Special Guest Andy Miscuk
- Ken introducs Andy.. --4th term as an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner; --U.S. Army Paratrooper, U.S. Army Special Forces and commissioned as an Army Military Intelligence Officer; --Taught Computer Science as an adjunct professor at The American University and Northern Virginia Community College; --Worked in the Information Technology Industry for about 15 years; --Andy's experience spans the industry, programming, networking, project management and support; --MBA, University of Pittsburgh; --Ran against 16-year DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, first opposition ever in the DC Democratic runoff.
- Ken suggested maybe Andy could discuss why he chose ngpsoftware.com for his campaign website. In it there is a webform using a service that calls on Active Server Pages.
- Andy Miscuk begins his presentation which covered a good case study of why they chose ngpsoftware (for federally required filings), and the difficulties in getting personal information in the age of third party caretakers of people's email. Andy also talked about his experience in teaching.
- Andy says there's little money for coders in politics. Be sure to get all or most of your money in a guaranteed fashion or at least up-front.
- Andy talks about the generation gap in politics as represented in technology usage. He breaks the group at about the 40 year old mark. Above 40 years and that person doesn't understand Instant Messaging, Friendster, Myspace, etc. The nonprofit and political world fits neatly into the over 40 crowd. Moreover 18 year olds generally don't vote. Andy talks about NGPSoftware.com, which is a Democratic only provider of web and email tech. Andy is quick to point out that there are also Republican-only tech providers. A campaign needs a contact management system on the web similar Outlook. A campaign site needs to trap personal info, trap donation info, and volunteer info, and must get payments up-front. Andy mentions Peoplesoft ("seevil") which is 100% modifiable (?). NGPSoftware is excellent for producing Federal Election Commission (FEC) reports that are compliant with law. Talks about 3rd party Plakso that complicates getting people's email. Talked about Roboform, all passwords encompassed in one source. Similar to Gator but without security and selling of privacy issues. Roboform has a good toolbar. Mentions the value of taking opendomain dbfs like Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) data and correlating it with other data. Such as car owners and car registered owners, with voting public. DC DMV will sell you the database. Talked about rates and strategy--Ken offered info on his rates, which started a discussion about rates, and rights to code. Andy offered the suggestion of encapsulating code, in Windows--using dlls, creating a repository and selling from that depository back to yourself the encapsulated code in order to protect your rights to the code.
- Nathan mentions briefly his website coding and design gig with an Old Town clothing store. Nathan mentions Cake, a php rapid development framework similar in scope and design like rails. Nobody else in the room has heard of it.
- Andy returns to government work driving demand for leading technologies. 6 Ruby coders vs. 6k dot net coders. The dot net will get the contract. Talked about how Wordperfect locked in legal firms with their ability to easily keep legal docs updated. Andy talked about packaging code into dlls (maybe gems) and selling the packages to yourself in order to protect the code.
- Andrew talks about Ryan Tomayko's online article entitled, "How I Explained REST to My Wife" when CArter asks about the upcoming REST-ful version of Rails.
- Ken asks about Rails group in Dupont Circle--does anyone know about them. They had their first official meeting last month. It is suggested that they may be the related to the Revolution Health group. Ken suggests that they join forces once in a while if anyone is a member or knows one of the organizers.
- Ken passed around a list of upcoming OReilly books and several members put in requests for copies of the books. Ken made it clear that he would require a review of the publication, perhaps a few paragraphs of opinion about the publication to be published online.
RESOURCES
- 37 Signals New Rails Gig Postings. Postings cost $100 for 30 days.
- Cake. , PHP framework that gives similar concepts and usability as RoR. Cake is a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC.
- National Geographical and Political Software NGP Software, Inc.. , seeks to passionately deliver technology and support to Democrats and their allies. Founded in 1997, NGP operates according to our core principles: Take good care of our clients; operate with honesty and integrity; and charge reasonable fees for the products and services we provide.
- Ryan Tomayko's explanation of REST (12/12/2004).
- Roboform password manager .
Posted by Ken
OVERVIEW
Matthew, Ken
Javahouse 3pm - 4pm
SUMMARY
Matthew and Ken talked about the core group of members and delved into CSS once again. ANC Representative Joe Martin popped in to talk about urban problems and their possible solutions.
DETAILS
- Matthew presented a short update on www.rubydc.org web work and how he and another member plan to augment their training by studying blogging code. Ken said that for all intensive purposes, he considers the rubydc.rog website is finished for the moment and has told the webteam leader this by email.
- Ken talked about preparing to visit the Supreme Court during the KSR v. Teleflex argument. There are two lines, one is for people who can only stay a few minutes, the other line is for people who intend to stay for hours. It is important to come to the front of the US Supreme Court building early. Date of the argument is Tuesday, 28 November 2006. Ken said is reading up on opensource case law.
- Ken elaborate on why he thinks it's important to keep tabs on Ruby in the Enterprise. This is where the big money is spent. Currently, server farms are starting up like engineyard.com that are catering to the Enterprise. Enterprise level projects will set the standard of practice for small projects, so it's important to see how teams are working--are they using SVN, Capistrano and Rails? Are they using Apache2 and Rails, or something else? How are they planning to use Ruby to access legacy databases? Are they catering equally to Macs, Windows and Linux systems? What companies are aware of Ruby and make it a part of their toolkit of scripting languages? It is for these reasons that it is important to have a report on Ruby in the Enterprise. If anyone wants to be an Enterprise Reporter then please let Ken know.
- Ken mentioned the CSS Book from OReilly.
- Matthew said he is working on boosting his CSS, Javascript skills. He talked briefly about the history of javascript.
- Ken said he will change the AMRUG venue to Affinity Lab in Adams Morgan for the next meeting.
- ANC Representative from Petworth neighborhood, Joseph Martin stopped in and spoke to Matthew and Ken about violence, health problems, the school system, the library system in the city and how it might be possible to get people who live in the city to come together.
RESOURCES
Posted by Ken
OVERVIEW
Javahouse, Sunday 24 September 2006, 3pm
Brian C, Matthew, Tiffani, Jason, Paweo
SUMMARY
Today was an informal meeting with two new members.
DETAILS
- Jason and Paweo, are IT guys but not programmers per se. They have a site called openposting.com which is (primarily) a site that mirrors craigslist but is geared towards university students. Currently they have ~2500 users, the site is in Php, they are looking to re-write in Rails. They were hoping to use our group as a way to learn more about Rails and as a support group for their future development efforts.
- Matthew and Brian spoke about some of the resources they have used to learn Rails (Pragmatic books, etc...). I explained a little bit about how Rails makes AJAX dead simple through it's use of built-in helper functions in ActiveView and integrated JS libraries (Prototype, scriptaculous, etc...).
- Paweo, (who's background is mostly Python, Perl, Php), asked an interesting question that none of us could answer. He was curious as to how the Ruby interpreter runs on servers with multiple processor servers. He wondered if it was similar to how Python runs, which is one instance per proc, it cannot be distributed across multiple procs. Maybe someone in the group can shed some light on this? I would imagine that it would work similarly to Python considering they are both interpreted languages.
- Tiffani, who was scheduled to talk about enterprise Ruby, decided to postpone it to next meeting.
- Matthew and Brian agreed that it would be a good idea "tutorialize" our progress on all things related to RubyDC.org development. We are in the process of building our own blog system from scratch, we intend to document this as we go, and release the tutorial in parallel with the actual blog system.
- After about 45 minutes of ruby focused discussion somehow the conversation drifted into a review of trendy DC hangouts. Then on to a one-upsmanship contest of who had heard of and/or tried the most bizarre ethnic foods. We covered everything from sheep's brain (head cheese), to haggis, to coagulated chicken blood soup. No animal part was was too sacred. I believe Paweo won the grand prize with his description of fire-roasted horse testicles wrapped in feces.
RESOURCES
Posted by Ken
SUMMARY
AMRUG Meeting 10 September 2006
Javahouse Sunday 3pm
Ken, Pius, Vince, Andrew L, Tiffani Bell, Matthew
OVERVIEW
Six AMRUG members cover a broad range of topics including ReST, CSS, and the current biggest recruiter of Rails developers, Revolution Health.
DISCUSSION
- Andrew outlines his knowledge of ReST (Representational State Transfer) and Rails while waiting for other members to appear.
- Matthew presents his experience with Revolution Health and the IT support needs of that new corporate initiative which is located in the city.
- Tiffani Bell introduces herself to the group.
- Vince brings up the notion of what not to do in Rails, and mentions the deprecate plugin. After further review it felt the deprecate plugin may be insufficient.
- A quick discussion of how Prototype inheritance in Ruby is similar to JS.
- Another quick stab was made at comparing MySQL to Postgresql.
- Vince mentions that Firefox css change is quick (CSSEdit), check it out.
- More talk about good CSS books comes up, Friends of Ed's Emerald/Green book and the Advanced CSS, CSS Basics are mentioned again by Matthew. Professional CSS by Wrox Press was also mentioned as was Dave Shaves (2nd) CSS Book.
- Short discussion about Microsoft's IE 7.0 update ensued.
- After discussing DC, and IT issues that may center in DC because of the federal agencies that work here, Matthew recalled a local columnist who writes about such IT issues in DC.
RESOURCES
Posted by Ken
OVERVIEW
Javahouse, Sunday 27 August 2006
Matthew, Vince, Pius, Andrew, Ken
SUMMARY
A group of five attendees talked about the larger issue of coming together as a group.
DETAILS
- Ken and Vince discussed rubydc.org website work. Ken wondered if there was a way to improve communication on meetings and work done. Vince emphasized that the website work is volunteer.
- Ken mentioned his follow up work with loading Mephisto on a shared server. He also mentioned Apache2's efforts to improve FastCGI. Apache2 is used on the rubydc.org webserver at railsplayground.net.
- The group discussed dropping Mephisto and using Typo on RubyDC.org since Mephisto is not fully functional. A decision was made to install Typo and drop Mephisto. [Addendum: After this meeting, a new release of Mephisto called Immortus v.0.6 was released. This version was able to be installed on RubyDC.org. So Mephisto is still on RubyDC.org, not Typo. -Ken]
- The group quickly reviewed a printout of the requirements list from the grouphub.
- Vince and the group discussed a points system for rewarding members for group action.
- Several members talked about worth of the group to the individuals. Pius mentioned that having like-minded people to talk to for an hour or more is invaluable to him.
- Ken made a quick presentation on a Supreme Court case (KSR International Co. v. Teleflex, Inc) that will be reviewed this fall . A Supreme Court ruling on this case could make it difficult for Opensource software to defend itself against patent infringement claims as presented by an EFF amicus brief. One of the arguments in the amicus brief indicates that a new standard called the "Suggestion Test" as proposed by Federal Circuit court allows patents to be easily awarded for commonplace opensource fixtures. Patent Trolls, or those that have successfully claimed to be the inventors of commonly used opensource conventions, can then make time and money-consuming claims against lucrative opensource software projects. EFF proposes a return to the Graham Test, which would remove such a tactic from the arsenal of patent trolls.
- The group talked about EFF, and the location of EFF, and how they had a DC office at one time. [Addendum: EFF had a DC office before moving to San Francisco during a managerial split. EFF will be opening a small office again in DC. See link below. -Ken]
- Talked about AMRUG in DC and making use of AMRUG's unique proximity to the Supreme Court. No concrete proposals were made. [Addendum: All oral arguments are open to the public, but seating is limited and on a first-come, first-seated basis. Before a session begins, two lines form on the plaza in front of the building. One is for those who wish to attend an entire argument, and the other, a three-minute line, is for those who wish to observe the Court in session only briefly. -Ken]
RESOURCES
Posted by Ken
SUMMARY
Another meeting in JavaHouse, Java House, Sunday 3pm, 8/13/2006.
Attendees were Matthew, Vince, Pius, Nathan, Bryan L, Ken. One new attendee this Sunday appeared.
OVERVIEW
Passed around minutes, Ken asked Brian C to make a short presentation on web development of www.rubydc.org. Short announcement made regarding Vince's project--and a need for some help on that project. Group was queried about other suggested meeting places.
DETAILS
- Nathan makes a pitch for Simplelog for rubydc.org.
- Discussion between using Typo or Mephisto. Typo hasn't gotten good reviews lately at AMRUG.
- Question about using Cyberstop as backup meeting place, since they have multiple floors.
- Vince and his beta www.IndieProject.net may be featured on CNN, in a story about promoting small independent business.
- Vince talks about usability study in trying to improve indieproject.net. It consisted of beer and pizza with friends who developed a punchlist of changes to be made to the beta site.
- New Google API looks good. Note the entry on the resources list below.
- Tech Developers Group--brokering bandwidth. (?)
- Mention of Flyspray, a bug tracker, Vince indicates ARCH Linux uses this.
- Carson Systems mentioned, see resources entry about workshops.
- Pius, mentions Caboose, amidst the discussion of blogs.
- Mephisto/radian, using template engines on the side. (?)
- Brian C, mentions LuLu.com as a means of self-publishing, but someone cautions that they may take a large proportion of your asking price for the publication.
- Vince, Professional CSS is a good book.
- Advanced CSS, friends of Ed book, Matthew mentions this again. See resource entry below.
- Brian C's discussion about rubydc website. Perhaps meeting with web developers regarding website work, will be someday between Tuesday and Friday.
- Settled on Mephisto, logo created by Nathan, and background layout created by Brian C, will be using right navigation.
- Bryan L will post Mephisto sample and email access point to the group.
- Talked about SVG and IE, CSS issues.
- Talked about Mozilla. (?)
- Nathan made $2 donation to domain costs.
RESOURCES
- CSS Mastery. Friends of Ed. February 2006. 280p. $17.50 for ebook. $35 for softcover.
- Simplelog, Developed by Garret Murray, Simplelog cannot be used for commercial applications. Simplelog doesn't have a comments feature.
- Alex Iskold, 23 August 2006, article on new Google API, he says it's Amazon API on steroids, emphasizing RSS, and a powerful query language.
- Flyspray, simple, web-based bug tracking, also used in ARCH Linux.
- Carson Systems Workshops, based in London, highly rated, now occuring in major US cities, recently held (March 30,2006) Rails intro in Chicago.
- Caboose Rails Documentation Project that is trying to improve Rails documentation through dollar donations.
Posted by Ken
SUMMARY
Attendees were Nathan, Ken, Jeff, Matthew, Vince, Brian C.
OVERVIEW
Since members tend to trickle in, materials such as minutes and announcements were passed out while waiting for expected members to show up. Ken's presentation on top Ruby learning resources transmogrified into members making their own suggestions of favorites. Movement towards a dedicated Washington DC Ruby User Group website was made.
DETAILS
- Ken passed out minutes from the last two meetings while members trickled into Java House.
- Also passed out was a description of engineyard.com business model.
- Lastly, there was a printout about www.quizdom.com's learning tools which Jeff mentioned in the last meeting.
- Nathan asks about the comment regarding Scriptaculous in last month's minutes. Jeff responded, indicating that drag and drop shopping carts seemed to be overkill.
- Ken talks about New York City RUG. NYCRUG met after working hours in a broadband providing company on Broadway in Manhattan. There were 28 attendees, discussion began with 1 minute lightning talks. Ken gave a 45 second talk about the principles of AMRUG (sharing resources and urban barnraising). He also passed out a few AMRUG business cards that has his email on them and the AMRUG name, and Washington, DC. He spoke to Francis Hwang about working on a joint RUG project in the future. One member talked about another RUG in the area that was out in the suburbs which Ken believes is NovaRUG.
- Discussion about increasing the scope of the RUG name. Generally, members felt that DC should be in the name of the RUG somewhere.
- At Ken's request for everyone to suggest their favorite newsfeed, Nathan suggest that the list of newsfeeds be posted as an OPML file--feed readers usually export/import lists as OPML files. Nathan is using Newsfire newsreader.
- Vince mentions Version Tracker for OS/X.
- Matthew suggests Rojo.com feedreader, and Delicious tags for Ruby.
- Has_Many_Groups, from the Rails core team, is a worthy website. [Can't find this reference online -Ken]
- Another suggested resource--Ruby On Rails Podcast
- Jeff votes for the Agile Book as one of the better Rails learning resources. He also suggests that the book version of Learn to Program by Chris Pine which uses Ruby, is much better than the free online version.
- Discussion turns to RUG names for DC.
- Nathan offers server space if needed. Ken indicates that this was a path taken before, but that he would prefer to purchase space.
- AMRUG members floated ideas for a new domain name and some members made one dollar donations to the funding of securing the domain (Vince=$1; Matthew=$1; Brian C.=$1; Ken paid the balance for domain registration with GoDaddy. It was noted that all 3 or 4 letter domain names are gone in the world of domain names. Names suggested were DCRUG.ORG, DCRAILYARD.ORG, DCRUBY.ORG. In the end RUBYDC.ORG was chosen as suggested by Matthew.
- Some discussion on migrations occurs and schema.db.
- Jeff indicates that Migrations folders can be named 001, 002, etc. so they are not just in one folder. Nathan indicates that this practice is helpful in team environments.
- Nathan comments that the $10 OReilly book on RJS is a great investment, and may be a better investment than some of the recently published Rails books.
- Jeff suggests looking at OReilly's AJAX book.
- Regarding feeds, Nathan suggests the idea of paying for full articles as a profit making venture. At the same time truncated RSS feeds are free. Nathan suggests Daring Fireball and Nine Rules as some of the better blogs out there.
- Matthew suggests looking into InfoQ, which tracks enterprise-level innovation.
- Discussion turns to information overload such as Why's Poignant Guide, other members agree that there is an overload of info there at this point.
- Nathan asks about conquering a problem at work where he has a port block to using IRC. Vince indicates that IRC may be overrated now as a resource for learning or getting answers. Suggested solution is IRC Noteport.
RESOURCES
Posted by Ken
OVERVIEW
AMRUG Minutes Sunday 6/25/2006 3pm Java House. Attendees were Brian, Andrew, Vince, Jeff, Pius, Matthew, Ken. A few new members showed up this time, and discussion was less centered on one or two members. No guest speaker this time around.
SUMMARY
RailsDay2006 and RailsConf2006 transpired before this meeting and were touched upon briefly by members. Jeff gives a good summary of his Rails "Workshop for Good". Keeping up with Ruby developments, or learning tools pops up as a topic and as a result there is some talk about which books are better.
DISCUSSION
- Ken asks for help installing fxruby via a gem install. Some suggestions are to try file://, try fresh install, try gemserver:8088 check. Later Vince offers some help, deleting older directory entries in the gemspace. Ken eventually just uninstalls and reinstalls an earlier version to get the dependencies to work properly.
- Brian C. talks about RailsDay2006. Brian C. said he got 50% done. Ken mentions that some of the announced projects after completion of the contest period were a wedding planner website. [Later, as of July 5, it seems the SVN dumps are available and as of 29 July there are no new announcements about winners. -Ken]
- Question whether Drag and Drop Scriptaculous is really necessary?
- Ken mentions that there are switches for SVN commands in Rails. Brian C says he will check out Subversion comments.
Subversion and Rails Tips Reprinted here from 12 March 2006
- What are the alternatives to Subversion?Zed Shaw is working on a Linux-only version, but there have been no updates in a few months.
- Is there subversion on Windows? Yes, and it's best to use the separately developed Tortoise client which works from right click menu.
- Note that Rails generator scripts can now take option --svn or --c which automatically adds files to svn.
- Understand the increasing importance of using /lib/tasks folder, put a rakefile in there to quickly create your repository for new apps.
- As Rails enthusiasts we could use some tests to be sure Subversion is setup properly.
Easy backups of your repository to a third location may stave off disaster:
svnadmin dump /home/user/svn | gzip -9 > FireProofPlace/svndump.gz
Restore it with:
gunzip -c FireProofPlace/svndump.gz | svnadmin load /home/user/svn
- Jeff relates his thoughts about organizing his Workshop for Good. Publicity moved slowly at first. On May 20 opened registration. By April 7, about 1-month out, one workshop teacher blogged and several others blogged. And then instantaneously, there were 25 people on the waiting list. Then the schedule changed a bit. Jeff says he had good soloists on the team. By May 18 still planning for the May 20-21 event. Physical setup took much longer than expected. 2 teachers of the three had an organic lesson plan while Jeff was opting for a concrete plan. One teacher did an Intro to Rails which may have been a bit long. Some attendees had 5 commercial Rails projects in play already. The first day was challenging. Another teacher, an expert in Ruby, saved the day. Out of many participants, one guy said it was boring. So Jeff moved the Rails topics to more advanced topics, and then about 6-8 people had trouble keeping up. On the second day they broke into 3 groups: Server Advanced Development / Visual Styling / Beginners. Jeff took beginners group, and the other two teachers took the other groups. The advanced group discussed SVN internals, load balancing Mongrel. Workshop gave out free stuff. Adapted Path submitted a $2k conference ticket to Rails Playground. O'Reilly sent stacks of books. People stayed afterwords. It was fun and hard. The Goal was to raise funds for the school and they reached almost 90% of their goal. Next time Jeff may raise the admission to $450. As a result of running this first workshop, Jeff received a project management offer for running a workshop at another location.
- Jeff talked about using Network for Good which is a Paypal-like service that charges 2-8% transaction cost fee. Payments through the school were handled by the school's CFO which simplified the payment process. The plan for the funds is to purchase equipment such as Smart Boards, Qwizdom learning equipment, 2 more overheads, and get small lab additions for the charter high school.
- Matthew asks about learning resources, and mentions a bit about his workplace, Council for Institutional Investors. Jeff shows off some books that he brought and touts the book he uses to teach programming, LEARN TO PROGRAM. Ken says that there is a great need for coders in the DC nonprofit world, especially in regards to fundraising.
- Talk turned to books and CSS again: Wrox Professionals has site built based book which Jeff says is inspirational for CSS Stuff. http://www.wrox.com/ Wrox often has free sample chapters as PDF immediately available online. Friends of Ed CSS Books, Check website They list sites of the week. http://www.friendsofed.com/ CSS ZEN GARDEN is a good resource. http://www.csszengarden.com/ NIFTY CORNERS via Brian C. Is this it, http://www.html.it/articoli/nifty/index.html ? LEARN TO PROGRAM the book via Jeff, is better than the online version. http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/ PRACTICES OF AN AGILE DEVELOPER, http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/pad/
- Vince is moving his Rails app from testing to production.
RESOURCES
- http://script.aculo.us/ Scriptaculous--wiki, examples, of using Javscript and DHTML, Scriptaculous and Ruby
- http://Qwizdom.com calculator 802.15.4 RF International standard, Audience response systems, also sell response software to interact with Powerpoint for PCs and Mac. Was focused on K-12 schools, but now also focusing on corporate learning environments.
- http://alistapart.com/ A List Apart -- manhousrs dedicate? For people who make websites, fresh every Friday.
- http://www.cii.org/ Council for Institutional Investors Founded in 1985 in response to controversial takeover activities that threatened the financial interests of pension fund beneficiaries, the group began with 21 member funds. Today the Council has over 140 pension fund members whose assets exceed $3 trillion, and more than 130 educational sustainers. It is recognized as a significant voice for institutional shareholder interests. Annual dues are $1.30 per $1 million in fund assets, but no less than $3,000 and no more than $30,000.
- http://dabbledb.com/utr/ 7-min video, with verve and energy, that shows how to create database with Graphical User Interface (GUI).
- http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/Mongrel is a fast HTTP library and server for Ruby. Instead of using FastCGI, SCGI Mongrel hosts Ruby web applications using plain HTTP.
Posted by Ken
OVERVIEW
AMRUG Minutes Sunday 6/4/2006 3pm Java House
Attendees were Vince, Brian, Ken.
SUMMARY
This AMRUG meeting, was shorter, smaller, and yet still edifying. Ken reviewed his mission statement for AMRUG. Vince and Brian offer suggestions on using blogs to help educate AMRUG as well as gave updates on their projects. Brian brought in a typography book to show. Ken showed off a few learning tools.
DETAILS
- Ken used Google calendar this time to call AMRUG together. And though all members responded, it did not work as efficiently as planned. Ken believes that the anonymity factor of an automated calendar may be encouraging member attrition. Sending private email seems to ensure attendance.
- Ken reviewed the AMRUG two-fold mission. Ken hoped that AMRUG was working towards urban barn-raising of IT projects--that is, producing a small Ruby project for AMRUGers as a group, that one person would find daunting. And, boosting our Ruby powers by sharing resources.
- At the end of the meeting, Ken showed off a flashcard program called Supermemo that he uses on his PDA. This program is very popular with medical interns who are trying to memorize lots of terms. Ken sketched out the use of Mindmaps (usually attributed to Tony Buzan) to get a handle on Ruby and Rails. Brian and Vince politely listened, but thought the tools would be of little use to them.
- Ken suggested that AMRUG develop one page documentation on Rails and Ruby documents to share with the group. Vince and Brian thought Blogs could fill this role. Blogging could allow members to vet the 'one-pagers' before releasing the document, to ensure accuracy. Brian seconded this idea. The notion would be to Blog, then Vet, then Feed (RSS) the one-pager. Ken encouraged members to explore the Blog functions available at the AMRUG webpage.
- Brian is looking for some sort of chat engine. Ken suggested running a Jabber server, which is a snap to set up. Vince provided some Jabber details from his experiences. There was some question whether there was a Jabber plugin for Rails. [See Jabber Library for Ruby mentioned below.]
- Brian brought in a typography book, explaining that he is always looking to improve his design skills: White, Alex W. The Elements of Graphic Design. Allworth Press. 2002.
- In response to CSS tools, Ken suggested looking into TopStyle, by Bradsoft. Brian is using the Tidy plugin for Firefox to evaluate his CSS code.
- Vince talked a bit about the status of Railfood, which helps people find locomotive and railroad parts using Ruby on Rails.
- Brian indicated that his Rails Website for his father is almost done. The site is geared towards art galleries, and the showing of art in those art galleries. He is on his third iteration, and finds the user stories becoming complicated as galleries are asking for more functions.
RESOURCES
Posted by Ken
OVERVIEW
- AMRUG Minutes Sunday 5/14/2006 3pm Java House
- Attendees were Brian, Carter, Jacob, Jeff, Ken, Nic
SUMMARY
Two new members join us for this meeting. Ken talks about consulting jobs and commercial interest in Rails from monitoring user group buzz. Jeff does some show and tell with programming books. AMRUG members discuss ruby and javascript developments.
DETAILS
- AMRUG is beginning to use Google Groups. Ken hopes that AMRUG members will continue to use AMRUG as a means to share resources, and consider urban barn raising projects. Also, Ken suggested that AMRUG be a conduit for news about the Net Neutrality issue in Congress. Ken also indicated that one request for a local blogger to come as a guest speaker yielded no reply, while a second guest speaker who could talk about the Net Neutrality issue declined.
- Ken spoke about NYC Rails based startups looking for coders who can telecommute. Also Ken said there are more Rails workshops popping up all over the nation.
- Ken confirmed that JavaHouse is a good spot for the moment. Crumbs & Coffee is too confining.
- Ken spoke about his idea of the AMRUG mission which was urban barn-raising (helping improve city living through small IT projects) and boosting our Ruby powers by sharing resources among AMRUG members.
- Ken Asked for Predictions about Rails that AMRUG could revisit in a year: Ken: 3 startups in DC area that are based on Rails will fail in the next year. Carter: A Significant number of people will remark that Rails is controlled by too few people in the next year. Nic - 80% of programmers migrating to Rails will be coming from PHP. Jeff - Postgresql will not advance much in the next year, but it's still his favored database for Rails.
- Jeff talks about his upcoming workshop. Only 5 people will need desktops out of 25, as it turns out. But too late to move to the cafeteria, instead of using the computer lab. EFF helped with advertising workshop.
- Jeff brings his book on color swatches which he mentioned in a previous meeting (Carterause, Jim. Color Index. How Design Books. 2002. $24). Ken mentions www.behr.com website as tip for website color selection.
- Returned to discussion of the merits between MySQL and Postgresql. There have been some code changes in Postgresql that make an improvement.
- Returned to a discussion about Typo--too big and not too useful. There has been no upgrade for a year.
- Discussion turned to Google calendar--apparently it uses Java, DotNet, but no php. AMRUG Is using Google calendars now. Jeff says it is a big timesaver for him.
- Nic jumps in and says Google went the wrong way with Webservices. Yahoo's API is a better model--easier to hook up to.
- Carter asks about good webtools. MINT comes up, but Jeff is underwhelmed. Nic mentions Dreamhost which logs referers, browser usage, unique hits, unique visitors, and has an apache tool.
- Jeff talks about AH article on javascript files dropped by server.
- Jacob needs help and asks group about using events model.
- Carter poses a question about user object in session with Salted Hash. Jeff remarks that we spoke about the limitations of Salted Hash in a previous AMRUG meeting. Jeff recommends Acts as Authenticated (plugin). New Agile book just uses an id, not objectid, then passes a private key for user.
- Jeff remarks that the Agile book when he read it a 2nd time, it really started to sink in.
- RJS Templates in Rails (Ruby-Javascript) comes up, there is not much documentation. It's easier than Javascript, and is more robust than Rails helpers on views. Perhaps it is more advantageous than DJANGO.
- Nic -- maybe this is just another thing to learn. RJS Templates in Rails may not be that much more concise than Javascript. Someone makes a good endorsement of Scriptaculous. Jeff remarks that Javascript was the red-headed stepchild of webdev. Javascript can return functions, Scriptaculous may provide good prototyping--maybe a book is in there somewhere, if someone wants to write one.
- Jeff says the community will build on RJS, Nic says domain clashing is not likely because of unique id. Updating two things with one
- at once--Nic agrees it is a neat idea. AMRUG asks about Nic's www.dcrails.com site. Nic is working on a Yahoo geocoder which is failsafe. Nic mentions a web-based form builder which uses drag and drop to build forms, called RuFu.
RESOURCES
Posted by Ken
SUMMARY
- April 16, 2006, Sunday, JavaHouse, 3-4:30pm
- Attendees were Jeff, Jacob, Vince, Ken
OVERVIEW
Today's meeting was more of a freewheeling exchange of ideas and news. Jeff is hosting a two-day workshop. Jacob and Vince are preparing for an overseas business trip. Ken took minutes. One probono request was made of the AMRUG group to assist in developing a website.
DETAILS
- Jeff reminisced for a moment about South by Southwest. Vince tells Ken that Jeff is having a 2-Day Rails Workshop which functions also as a fundraiser for the high school for which Jeff teaches. Rails instructors will be internationally known Amy Hoy from Columbia, MD, and Ezra Zygmuntowicz who has helped Vince out with Lighty configurations. Vince asked who is the target audience for workshop and Jeff replied he is trying to reach a diverse audience.
- Jeff's Rail's workshop will be 20, 21 May 2006 at Cesar Chavez school. JC says there are 25 open seats. He hopes that attendees will make good use of the new computer lab and understand that he's leveraging the lab to help raise badly needed operating funds. For those of you outside of DC, you may be unaware that the nation's capitol's public school system is in shambles. Charter schools are highly sought after educational havens, such as Jeff's school.
- Jeff talks about Ruby and C and windows bindings for ZedShaw.com fcgi replacement. He says it allows over 400 requests/second. Jeff remarks that Zed Shaw is almost a genius and well worth watching.
- Jeff said he spent money on $200/month dedicated surver with no Linux software, and it has absolutely no operating system on it, just like he was promised. Jeff is a big supporter of postgresql, so he wanted to have a server that would supply postgresql, and one way he could get it was to load everything himself.
- Vince talked about the ease of setting up Debian server with Jabber. Vince offered Jeff help in discussing a good Linux distribution. Vince pointed out that GoogleTalk uses Jabber server.
- Both Jacob and Vince remarked that Rails is changing so fast it is very hard to keep up with additions and the compatibility factors. Reference was made to the blackout of Blog sites when Ruby on Rails moved to version 1.1. Even the books seem to be out of date by the time they come out, let alone the documentation online.
- Jeff spoke about using $15 printed color swatch layouts which enable him to quickly pick a color scheme for a webpage. Then he mocks up the HTML and starts hitting the ruby code via rails.
- Vince mentioned again the login/authentication issue. And a discussion about Website authentication ensued. Vince continues, "Login Engine" does email response but it seems difficult to get SMTP coordinated with Rails. The Logon Engine wiki provides limited documentation. Perhaps one must consult StickyWiki. Also there was a brief assault upon the craftsmanship of one of the authentication recipies in the Rails Recipe book.
- Jeff talked about Salted Hash Login Engine which now seems to have too many features which are not quite ripe for easy implementation.
- Jeff says Typo appears to be needlessly complicated now--almost 'AJAX-ed out'. Vince concurs saying it is hard to remove components, but easy to add new stuff. There was some growling about Typo's Theme Contest, and inertial dampening of Planet Argon's webpresence.
- Talk switched to Rails helpers now. What is a helper? See Resource list below.
- Jeff talks about his approach to Rails coding, he lays out a webpage in pure HTML then breaks out repeating code into ruby view code.
- Ken made a short presentation about a Probono request for a website that promotes business accountability, distributes economic power, educates consumers about better ideas of biz models and promotes a cooperative type business model. Vince was interested and will be in contact with the client.
RESOURCES
Posted by Ken
OVERVIEW
- April 2, 2006, Sunday, 3:00 - 4:30pm
- Vince, Ken and Guest Speaker Jacob Patton
SUMMARY
Some time was spent introducing one to another and about other AMRUG members' interests.
DETAILS
- Vince talks a bit about Mint and Seaside--CMS with AJAX features. He also provided a quick overview of his http://www.buyindie.net/ project.
- Ken postponed his findings on using CSS hacks, as well as using the XML builder in Rails.
- The group decided to move the next AMRUG meeting to Dupont Circle's JavaHouse.
Guest Speaker Jacob Patton
Jacob Patton, Director of Outreach and Technology, is the sole provider of IT solutions at Free The Slaves. Free The Slaves' mission is to end slavery worldwide, of which you may be aware if you saw the ABC Nightline story in September 2004 about slavery in the United States, or know about bonded child labor in cocoa-growing West Africa. Jacob is looking to Ruby on Rails to solve some of his IT needs at Free The Slaves. Unfortunately, he is also busy traveling for the nonprofit to farflung IT challenged locations. He likes Rails because it allows him to present a good semblence of his IT solution with minimum investment in development time. Provided that a Rails prototype meets his needs, it is likely that Jacob will find help to bolster his IT department of one.
Resources
Posted by Ken
OVERVIEW
- March 12, 2006, Sunday, 3pm - 4pm, Crumbs & Coffee
- Ken, Guest Speaker Carter Rabasa.
- Vince and Jeff both were called out of town.
SUMMARY
Ken and guest speaker Carter Rabasa met for about 40 minutes.
DETAILS
- Ken passed out a handy Rails tips sheet recreated in PDF format by Carlos Ardila.
- Ken also passed out notes on using Subversion. Here are some of the highlights of those notes:
- What are the alternatives to Subversion? Zed Shaw is working on a Linux-only version, no updates in a few months.
- Is there subversion on Windows? Yes, and it's best to use the separately developed Tortoise client which works from right click menu.
- Note that Rails generator scripts can now take option --svn or --c which automatically adds files to svn.
- Understand the increasing importance of using /lib/tasks folder, put a rakefile in there to quickly create your repository for new apps.
- As Rails enthusiasts we could use some tests to be sure Subversion is setup properly.
- Easy backups of your repository to a third location may stave off disaster: svnadmin dump /home/user/svn | gzip -9 > FireProofPlace/svndump.gz Restore it with gunzip -c FireProofPlace/svndump.gz | svnadmin load /home/user/svn
Guest Speaker Carter Rabasa
Carter uses a Rails application to run a kickball league in the DC metropolitan area. After some initial organizational complications he now is serving a large community of kickball practitioners. Members fill out a form online, then logon to keep track of past and future team efforts. Members can have different roles, ranging from kicking team member, to captain, to board member. Having different seasons in different regions in and around the city has presented complications but Carter feels that Rails enabled him to quickly overcome those issues. Carter comes from a Java programming background. Carter has quickly created a high value Web-based product that is adaptable to changing needs. Check out http://dcksports.com/ for a quick overview of what Carter is offering.
RESOURCES
Posted by Ken
OVERVIEW
February 26, 2006, 15:00 - 16:00, Crumbs & Coffee
SUMMARY
Vince, Ken started the meeting and ran through some printouts. Included in the handouts was code that pop ups a browser window that helps format information from the rails debug output, making it easier to decipher. Also, Ken mentioned two Rails Recipes from Chad Fowler's PDF book that help create test data in a quick fashion. Ken suggested that the learning the facile use of breakpoints in debugging rails apps would pay off in saved development time. Guest speaker Jeff Casimir showed up, spoke about use of Rails at his high school where he works. Jeff and Vince stayed after the meeing, working on Vince's Rails shopping cart.
Guest Speaker Jeff Casimir
- Jeff Casimir, www.eff.org supporter, teaches AP computer science using Java at a DC charter school. Jeff is building rails apps at his workplace, pitching in, volunteering and producing working solutions in record time.
- It is not unusual for 9th graders in DC to be reading at a 4th grade level. Jeff discussed his first rails project which took WIRED articles and made them into lesson plans to improve reading skills. Wanting the lesson plans to to be web-based caused him to consider using Ruby on Rails. In six weeks, he and a volunteer made 25 articles into lesson plans. At which point Jeff got jammed up on server problems with his Rails app. The app took 8 days to put together. This project is on hold, but available to everyone as more pressing projects require Jeff's attention. It is interesting to note that Jeff created a TinyURL- or RubyURL-like system, which took 2-3 hours to develop, which helps students avoid frustrating obstacles to learning such as using zero for the letter 'o' or the number '1' for the letter 'l' in typing out URLs.
- When school started this year the report card system broke down, and all the students report cards had to be written by hand. This was an onerous task. As the second quarter approached, Jeff decided to automate the task and volunteered to write a rails application. He started the app by keeping the model simple -- he wrote schema for just one grade for one class. It was paramount that the data be secure at all times. Having used Rails already he was confident that the data would not be corrupted. It took a weekend to create the app. When the model was working he was able to create courses, sections, teachers, students by reading in a textfile. An initial failed attempt at using Salted Hash set him back, but he later found a more viable authentication scheme on a Rails blog. Naturally, teachers input grades only after authentication.
- This second rails app allowed him to start using Rails plugins. Jeff noted that Rails plugin documentation is momentarily thin, and has security concerns. A favorite plugin of his is one called 'Calculate' which is more convenient than writing SQL statements.
- Jeff used a CSS 3.0 page break attribute to printout the report cards. During testing the webbrick server worked fine, but when moving to lighttpd the database queries timed out. Vince provided a tip on how to tweak max and min timeout values in the lighttpd config file. Currently, Jeff recommends hanging out at the #rubyonrails IRC channel and prefers using warn statements to show what is going on in his code.
RESOURCES
- Plugins for Rails, there is a question about the security of plugins, and documentation is thin. Plugins are hosted on the authors site.
- The calculate plugin for rails which makes sql queries a breeze is much favored.
- RubyURL came up in the discussion about removing potential typos from the grasp of new typists (like 9th graders).
- Use version control even if working alone.
- Check out www.zedshaw.com, scgi developer, look into his new webserver just for rails, and be sure to checkout FastCST, a fast and easy versioning system.
- Mention was made of TextDrive, an official ruby on rails host, and open source promoter where 50% of fees goes back into open source support.
- lightbox.js was a recommended javascript thumbnail tool which floats the full image above the html page, thus avoiding the departure/return sequence when clicking on a thumbnail image. It will reside in your html header, or in your Cascading Style Sheet.
- Hang out at Ruby on Rails IRC, to help/learn.
- Vince suggest Steam or Pasha as a Dupont Circle meeting place, as soon as the non-smoking ban in DC takes effect.
- Vince is a lighttpd expert now. Ask him if you have questions. He says most problems can be solved by fixing the config file.
Posted by Ken
OVERVIEW
- February 12, 2006, 3:00 - 4:00pm, Crumbs & Coffee, Adams Morgan
- Vince, Ken, Guest Rich Layman
SUMMARY
Two members and one guest speaker showed at Crumbs and Coffee. Crumbs and Coffee seats 20 people. With a power strip under the left counter, and free wifi available, most hot beverage sippers tapped keyboards quietly. AMRUG members discussed Rails in hushed whispers as the February snowstorm came to a close.
DETAILS
- Ken provided a quick overview of building a multilingual rails app at phpwebhosting.com. Current roadblocks for Ken are understanding errors in the dump screen. Ken also whipped together a 2-page compendium of the table of contents of the latest, greatest rails books. He intends to use the document as a road map for study.
- Vince is busy with his paying job and hasn't got the kinks out of his rails shopping cart just yet, but he is sure he knows where the problem lies.
Guest speaker Richard Layman
Rich stopped by and discussed hindrances and assets of blogs, and webspace in general. Ken and Richard discussed an idea to boost public service announcements among DC blogs, as well as mapserving websites.
RESOURCES
Rich Layman's Urban Planning, Historic Preservation Blog
Posted by Ken
OVERVIEW
Vince and Ken met at Open City cafe in the Woodley Park Neighborhood for a few hours.
SUMMARY
Two members meet for 30 minutes to discuss PHP and Rails.
DETAILS
- December 17, 2005. Two members, thirty minutes.
- After 3pm, Open City on a Saturday is much less crowded. Vince made a pitch for Soho cafe in Dupont Circle as a meeting place, and warns us of the second hand smoke.
- Discussion revolved around other DC rubyists and ruby usage in the metro region. We reviewed a shopping cart Ruby on Rails application on Vince's laptop. Vince handed off a Breezey Badger Ubuntu distribution CD to Ken.
- Vince spoke about his travails in running PHP and Ruby with Ruby on Rails--the solution involved Lighttpd, a small http daemon. Ken and Vince made a few stabs at solving some shopping cart problems on a Rails Shopping Cart app while in the cafe. The problem centered around how to update the checkout page when customer buys more than one item.
- Vince highlighted Graham Glass' blog. Graham discusses his experiences in porting a PHP web app (nonJava) to Rails. Ken will cold-call email Graham, in an effort to peak Graham's interest in AMRUG. Graham appears to be typing his blog within a mile of Open City cafe.
RESOURCES
Graham Glass Blog, porting PHP to Rails.
Posted by Ken
SUMMARY
Two members discussed how to reach more people interested in Ruby.
DETAILS
- On this Friday afternoon, Steve and Ken talked about the San Francisco Bay Ruby Users Group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ba-rb/)and the content of their minutes. They are a relatively active RUG, which recently acquired http://www.ba-rb.org/.
- In an effort to reach out to the DC community AMRUG created small business cards and posted them on numerous bulletin boards in the Adams Morgan business community. The cards had different Yahoo addresses and had words on them promoting AMRUG, using scripting language software for nonprofits and schools. This effort was looked upon as an experiment in trying to reach out to the community. Here's a list of the shops with bulletin boards that were visited: Fleet Feet; So's Your Mom; Used Bookstore; Franklyn's; Jolt N Bolt; 18th Street Hardware; Tryst; Natural Foodstore.
- The business card on bulletin boards did not yield any new contacts or interest.
