fnokd!

I announced the TorqueBox project today.

It’s the coolest platform for your Ruby applications, ever.  Really.

I did the round-trip from the land of cows to Raleigh to attend the Raleigh RubyCamp over the weekend.
I think I heard about 80 folks showed up, but I’m not certain on that.
Mark (root@37s) and James did a very nice job of organizing it.  They provided good coffee and donuts to start the morning right.  [...]

Thanks to the typical demo demons, I’ve been unable to get everything functioning perfect for instantaneous clustering on EC2 by tomorrow.
Oh well.
But here’s the first draft of some slides I’m taking with me to the Raleigh RubyCamp.

It’s a BarCamp style event, so I anticipate the slides probably changing throughout the day. I’ll published updates [...]

Don’t forget, in a few weeks at the Red Hat offices in Raleigh, there will be an unconference-style Ruby BarCamp on October 18th.

My plan is to put together a few clumps of slides, prepare a cluster on EC2, and see if anyone wants to hear about JBoss Rails.  I’ll of course put them online sometimes [...]

Tomorrow is my first real status update call with my boss, Sacha Labourey.  I’ve been anxious to deliver something, to prove I hadn’t gone completely pudding-brained during my tenure as management.
This morning, it all finally came together in a pleasing fashion, causing me to hoot and holler loud enough to scare the cats and probably [...]

Back in May, I was a manager.
I feebly attempted to direct 8 great guys and gals to further the goals of JBoss.org.  After the Codehaus, you’d think I’d be able to help build an opensource community with fun and flair.  But I came to realize that it’s hard to build a community as an active [...]

Oh, fortuna!
I’m rejoining the Red Hat/JBoss mothership, doing rubyish things, and what do you know, but there’s a RubyCamp at the RHT HQ in Raleigh on October 18th.
37signals and Ruby Row are sponsoring the event.

Space is limited to 200, but at the time of this posting only 57 have signed up.  It’s an unconference, so [...]

A project I’m working on requires some hard-core monkey-patching of Rails internals.
Monkey-patching is a dangerous occupation, and liable to cause new and intriguing bugs into previously-tested sane code.
I’ve been working on a smarter patch-monkey, known as Lemur.
The goal is to allow monkey-patched methods (currently only instance methods are supported) to be written in modules that [...]

When we moved from C to C++, we were overjoyed that we no longer had to declare all of our variables at the top of the function.

do_something() {
int num = 0;
int another_num = 0;
num = get_a_num();
another_num = get_a_num();
}
We could instead declare them near the point of use, [...]

At the Codehaus and at JBoss.org, I’ve continually come across Subversion repositories that needed to be split apart or merged, perhaps after converting from CVS. One problem you continually hit, particularly if you’re merging repositories, is the “date order of revisions” bug. Simply stated, if you create a new repository loaded from two [...]