David Black on Ruby and Rails, in Malmo: a post-game

I will try to summarize my Malmo experience in the company of 20 new and old Railsers and presenter David Black. Our kind host Polar Rose had got a very central location for the event, a short hike from the train station. David did a good job of telling an understandable story about Ruby on Rails development. The theme for the session was about getting a fly-over of Rails, and to get one’s hands dirty, making a Rails application. In the later part of the day, a couple of advanced techniques, like AJAX with RJS templates were also touched on.

He began his talk by showing how Ruby works: what parts are syntactic sugar, and what really happens in the background. How methods are found in mix-ins, and how to open classes and modules.

With that out of the way, he could begin making a Rails app. I suggested that he use for his example an app that I later built, “Our House”. (List info about the neighbours you have.) David took that up, and used that example for a couple of things, but in the pair programming part of the workshop, me and the guy next to me made that app.

He was a cool guy from Oslo, Norway. A Schemer. And I promptly forgot his name.

We were given sandwich lunch, which was great. I had to be the pragmatic vegan, and eat the lacto-vegetarian sandwich, but at that point I was so hungry I could eat sawdust. Great food, and I got to hear some Norwegian war stories. Big Norwegian telco Telenor is run by a Lisp application!

Our pairing experience was made more intense (and Open Source-like) by using a Subversion repository, and working on different parts of the app in parallel.

I got stuck on an update action, and I stumbled around for a while. Got it fixed on the train home.

During the first hour, I got a back-channel set up, #davidblackmalmo at irc.freenode.net. But alas, not all participants were able to use the wifi, so I wasn’t able to tell everyone about it. The activity mainly consisted of me yakking about parallels to the Io programming language. I’ll be in that channel today, if someone would like to exchange pleasantries.

When we quit our session at 1800 hours (after 8 hours of concentration!) we were all pretty beat. So I forgot to get names and contact information of the great folks I met there. Like “Mr. blonde longhair with the deep bass voice” who was a sharp-eyed syntax man and well-versed Railser. And my Schemer friend from Oslo. And those that were from Copenhagen, who should show up at Copenhagen.rb meetings.

A great starter for the beginner. Our crowd was mixed, though, with fragments of the group being Ruby and Rails geeks, steeped in the dark arts, while others had other developments backgrounds. This meant that dwelling on an interesting detail, such as “how Ruby finds methods” was not the order of the day. (The Rails Edge, that would be the right venue. Got to get them over to Scandinavia.)

I guess we’ll have to have shorter, more focussed workshoppy stuff in Copenhagen Ruby Brigade, another day. I love the format.

Calling an XML-RPC method (PHP, Ruby)

Calling web services. Great fun when it works. Thanks to XML-RPC’s simplicity, it’s quite easy to cobble together a working client. Here is me using the Technorati “ping” service, which tells them about the Copenhagen Ruby Brigade’s weblog being updated. And then, prints the result.

My PHP take on this looks klutzy. But the request gets encoded smartly. cURL takes a lot parameters to get running. I write the appropriate headers myself, there.

Simple XML-RPC in PHP

In Ruby’s standard library, there is a library to do these things. Exciting.

Even simpler XML-RPC in Ruby

[tags]technorati,xmlrpc,ruby,php,curl[/tags]

List of local geek communities (work-in-progress)

I talked with a local PHP developer today, who’d seen my blog, and we talked some CakePHP, frameworks, servers, the general state of scripting languages, and so forth. And then we came to the subject of local communities, where developers meet up and talk shop.

And, as a Copenhagener, I don’t know very much about that. There are these two that I know of:

Is there a PHP club? A Perl club? What other communities for developers have meetings in the Copenhagen area? Are you a member? Are these communities active? Please tell about it here.

How to support the Danish National Homeless Soccer Team

These guys need a 125 000 DKK to go to South Africa and represent Denmark. This is how to support the National Homeless Soccer Team:

  • SMS the word BOLD to 1277, and you send them 50 DKK (exception: Tele2 customers)
  • Send their Danish bank an amount: 9541-101 61 908
  • Buy a sponsorship at 20 000 DKK and get an original drawing with the players’ signatures

The collection closes September 23. The team leaves for South Africa September 19.

Also: If you know how to put an interesting street paper on homeless issues on the streets of Copenhagen, there is an editorial job opening at Hus Forbi. See Hus Forbi, under the heading “Job”. (In Danish.)

LiveHTTPHeaders Firefox extension alive again

For those of you who did not get the memo: the excellent LiveHTTPHeaders Firefox extension is up and running again, on Firefox 1.5.

It is an extension that monitors what goes in and out of your browser. Helpful, helpful.

Mr Savard, maker of the thing, says on the site “I hope this will be useful for you.” You bet, mister.

I for one, welcome our new HTTP monitoring software!

I hasten to add, this was alerted to me at the Mongrel mailing list, by Zed Shaw.

My buddy Dennis releasing new novel

All ye readers who yearn to learn Danish, here is the novel you could read: Brøndjætten by Dennis Gade Kofod. I’ll hook you up with a copy, if needed.

Danish paper Politiken’s book section is happy about Dennis’ new book — his second novel — and the text concludes:

Dennis Gade Kofod er født i 1976. Hvis han bliver endnu bedre med årene, har vi læsere sandelig meget at glæde os til.

And in International, worldwide English, for you Danish learners out there:

Dennis Gade Kofod was born in 1976. If he gets even better with the years, us readers truly have a lot to look forward to.

Cheers, Dennis.

Update: Images of the artist as a young man.

Dave Clarke quote

Computer scientist/bikeist Dave Clarke (05 Sep 2006) says (about Ruby on Rails being taught in colleges:

I think there are many important computer science concepts to be learned from studying RoR. Typically, one should consider the language, be it Java, Ruby or C, to be the vehicle which helps one to learn concepts, rather than being an end in itself. If the courses achieve this, then they are making good steps towards training computer scientists. Otherwise, I fear, they are just will just produce under-educated programmers. Such programmers have their place too, as not everyone needs to know the details of AVL trees, formal languages, computational geometry and so forth.

Good, there is a place for us under-educateds. But, being under-educated’s a good starting point, I guess. My interest gets piqued by the above links.

Btw: Two languages I have smelled recently: Joy (works with source code files as a datatype; typically constructs and runs chunks of source, by “quoting” and unquoting it — see the Joy synopsis) and Forth (since a friend of mine is implementing it in Java).

Both of these are “stack-based”. I can’t help but wonder what that implies, what you can do with it, and whether stack-based is just for fun these days. Any Forth’ers (or over-Joy’eds) reading this?