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 Even the books seem to be out of date by the time they come out, let alone the documentation online.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
