onidle(…)

The temperatures were hovering around zero last night but we still had 28 (by my count) hearty Ruby enthusiasts descend upon the Loring Park Dunn Bros to discuss all things red and glittery.

Here’s a summary:

Nate Yourchuck gave a very nice overview of the use of irb (the Ruby console). He demonstrated many cool features that were new to me. And he did most of it “live” with very few slides (yay). Nate: let us know were the slides are.

Tony Collen gave a talk about GIS on Ruby. The information about shapefiles was pretty interesting. I’ve done a little bit with the YM4R he used for his Rails demo. Go check out that code it’s amazing how easy it it to do cool stuff with Google Maps. The library and plugin are nicely implemented.

Finally, I gave a cursory overview of the changes Rails 1.2 brings us. The biggies (which have been covered in detail elsewhere) are RESTful routing and Multibyte support . Charles Nutter was able to explain the multibyte features to the rest of us. He pointed out that, until Ruby itself supports Unicode, you can simply require activesupport to leverage the work done on this in a plain Ruby application. I didn’t think of that. More discussion ensued. Here are a few choice links(re: Rails 1.2) that I have found useful:

• RC1 overviews from “Riding Rails”
  • New in ActiveRecord
  • New in ActionPack
• New in ActiveSupport
• CHANGELOG
• actionmailer 1.3.1
• actionpack 1.13.1
• activerecord 1.15.1
• activesupport 1.4.0
• railties 1.2.1
• Bob Silva’s overview of lesser known features
• Deprecations in 1.2

• My favorite overview of rails 1.2

Well, it seems that Ruby on Rails is just not designed for shared hosting, at least for me, on Textdrive. I have grand plans of actually posting stuff here. Having to bump the rails process each time is no fun so… I’m gonna try Wordpress on plain ol’ Apache/PHP. I’ll try to migrate my old posts for kicks. It’ll be a good exercise to write a Ruby script to do something (semi) useful.