the power of 0ne

Sitting in the lobby of the hotel watching what looks like the entire Rails core group hacking away at what I hope is Rails 1.0

Some super detailed notes on the Rubyconf presentations from Kevin Clark.

Just found the link to the audio files of Rubyconf 2005, haven't listned to them yet.

The battery in the my Acer Travelmate 800 has been slowly losing it's charge over the past year or so, being down from ~5 hours to < 1 hour.

Not knowing the wether we would have access to power outlets at Rubyconf I decided to replace it. To my great consternation I discovered that it is quite difficult to get your hands on a replacement battery within a reasonable amount of time.

As a result some research in to alternative battery solutions for laptops. Most were very expensive ($500 and up), bulky and offered no performance increase over the internal battery.

The I discovered batterygeek, they offered a free battery audit and their prices were very reasonable (~$200 about the same as my internal battery). Even more impressive they were touting 5-10 hours of charge time!

After two days of almost continuous use I must say that my new battery is all I hoped for and more.

The charge time is absolutely amazing (everyone glared at me jealously at the conference). And the unit is relatively compact and lightweight.

So if your current laptop battery is losing it's charge, I would strongly encourage you to take a look at some of the solutions offered by Battery Geek.

First day of presentations are done, all in all I must say their is a lot of very cool things going on in the Ruby world.

Learned that a couple more people are here, among them: Jamis Buck and a couple of the guys from the Robot co-op. The former are working on a very interesting project called Metaruby where the goal is to write Ruby in Ruby!

I have some reservations about the project, mostly will it be fast enough to actually use? Would be interested to see any benchmarks they've done so far.

Next presentation is starting up, it's on JRuby.

Don't know much about it, looks like they want to be the bridge between Java and Ruby for companies that want some of the advantages offered by Ruby without giving up on Java.

Interesting, but doesn't really apply to me. Also, looks like a ton of work.

Best part of this presentation for me personally, I learned a new word: Rubification.

Radio is having problems updating my RSS feed, hopefully the pings are still getting through... stay tuned.

UPDATE: Manual publish worked, thanks Marc.

UPDATE: Everything seems to be working ok again, think it was my fault the date on my box got set to August which seems to have caused some problems with Radio.

The open-uri presentation is turning out to be much more interesting that I had expected. First the library looks incredibly slick, and to boot the author has some very intesting general ideas on API design.

He's talking about Huffman coding now, going to have to read up on that. Looks very cool.

Lots of emphasis on short code.

I also really like the sound of 'reuse user knowledge'.

Here is one I really like, a change to the API that results in incompatibility is bad, but not fixing a bad API is worse ;)

Very good presentation. But the post presentation discussion is even more interesting, lots of good stuff from David. I sure hope someone is recording this.

First talk is beginning, Top-to-bottom testing in Rails by Frank Wang.

I've got a pretty good subscription list going for the conference. Besides the obvious: Loud Thinking, Signal vs Noise I've got: Riding Rails, David Rupp, Deirdre Saoirse Moen, James Britt, Jason Wong, Obie, Funworks, Redhanded, Stone Cold Weblog as well as a Feedster search subscription and a Technorati watchlist.

If you're in the above list feel free to drop me a comment, or just attending the conference feel free to drop me a comment.

Woohoo, I made it, things look like they are just about to get rolling here. Yup, someone just said 'Welcome to Rubyconf 2005'. More later!