Posted by Doug Thu, 05 Apr 2007 13:37:00 GMT
A while back I posted I was Officially Cable TV Free. We’re getting our TV content pretty much only from bittorrent. I personally think it’s going pretty well. My wife has one complaint: the time it takes me to get new shows loaded into iTunes so she can watch them through FrontRow. The solution involves some nitty-gritty details of ffmpeg and some fun use of Hpricot to automatically parse TV.com.
Read more...Posted by Doug Thu, 29 Jun 2006 14:55:20 GMT
I and seven others from Rosetta Stone attended RailsConf 2006 last weekend. Somewhat surprisingly, after 12 years in the software business this was my first conference! I had a great time.
My favorite parts of the conference were the “softer” presentations. I liked Scott Laird Scott Raymond’s presentation on working with http://blinksale.com and http://iconbuffet.com. It’s a success story of a single developer working with a company to deliver fantastic results. I also like Nathaniel Talbott’s presentation on “Homesteading” as I mentioned earlier.
There were a couple of strong themes for the conference though. First, FastCGI is out or on its way out. Mongrel is the darling for deployment. In fact, it was during the conference that patches got applied to rails core so that script/server will use mongrel. More good news is that deployment is a hot topic getting a lot of attention. I fully expect deployment to become significantly easier soon. Towards that end, Rails Machine got some praise and keep an eye on Ezra Zygmuntowicz’s Engine Yard.
Seoncd, testing was a theme repeated over and over again. I’m definitely “test infected” and it was good to hear so much encouragement in that respect. Mike Clark did an excellent presentation on the basics of testing. Even for an old hand like me though there were still some good tips in there. Clearly Mike is a professional. Both of his presentations were top notch.
Dave Hoover also gave a presentation on acceptance testing using Selenium. It was very good to see where selenium testing is and what’s being done to improve it. I think the best solution right now is SeleniumRC
There were other topics as well I found interesting: meta-programming/DSLs, usability, accessibility, globalization, optimization…. It was all good stuff. I’d like to give a thanks to all the speakers and the work they put into their presentations and also the the Ruby Central guys for organizing it.
Oh, yes, it was ridiculous how many Apple laptops were there. I think you’d be hard pressed to find higher mac:pc ratios in Cupertino.
And finally, here are my notes from RailsConf I took with OmniOutliner. After reading this post from 43Folders I decided to really give OmniOutliner a go this weekend. It turned out to be an excellent note taking tool!
Posted by Doug Thu, 08 Jun 2006 13:37:08 GMT
My oldest son, Josh, can go to Apple Summer Camp this year. I’ve signed him up for the Movie Workshop and iWeb Workshop.
“Summer Camp” is a bit of a misnomer. Each “camp” is 3 hours on one day. Since Josh is under 13, I’ll need to take off work to be there with him. It should be fun! The idea is to actually finish a project and take it home burned on DVD. Plus he gets a T-Shirt for each “camp” he goes to.
Oh, and Josh has been asking me about teaching him to write games. I’m not sure which direction do go here. I have so much respect for The Pragmatic Programmers I’m tempted to get Learn to Program. On the other hand, I’m also tempted to do something like Beginning Flash Game Programming for Dummies. I’ve heard good things about Learn to Program. I’d expect that it would give a good foundation in programming. But Flash is… well flashy. If you have any input on the subject of teaching pre-teens to program I’d love to hear it.
My name is Doug Alcorn. I'm a 30-something husband, dad, Christian, and hacker living in Cincinnati, OH. When I'm not on my computer or being a dad, I'm usually shooting photos or out in the woods.
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