Dead Programmer Society

We just had a fun time at the latest LA Ruby Meetup, once again at UCLA.

I love robots.

As yet another part of the be-all, end-all media upload processing solution, my client wanted to provide a nice progress bar for tracking the status of file uploads.

I have just begun a new blog called Net Grommit.

It is with great excitement that I want to tell all of you about the first annual Los Angeles Ruby Conference.

Everyone wants it all.

For the last week or so, I have been serving on a jury in Department 45 of the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.

I was taking my morning constitutional with my youngest son, when I noticed my neighbor who programs at JPL had added a new placard to the artistic decor attached to his fence.

I really wanted to be all cool and retro by going back to EMACS, but my usual workload has kept me from figuring out the right environment for my Mac.

There is a new release of the Sinatra gem, version 0.9.1.

The sessions for RubyConf 2008 day one were nearly over, when I attending this highly entertaining and informative one.

I had previously blogged a bit about Rush, the Ruby shell.

The Ruby VM wonkiness continued at RubyConf 2008 - Day 1.

The first session I attended at RubyConf 2008 was called “Future of RubyVM”, and it began my ascent into “VM Wonkiness” as I started to call it.

The crowd of over 400 was happily awaiting the kickoff in Orlando of RubyConf 2008.

Despite a massive line of people waiting for the polls to open this morning, when I went to vote just now I discovered… no line whatsoever.

This last weekend, I upgraded a pretty complex application to the latest Ruby on Rails, and consequently had to upgrade a bunch of the plugins.

I was forwarded a link to the original, left on the cutting room floor ending of the Roger Corman classic horror film “Little Shop of Horrors” and not only was it a timely tidbit for Halloween, but it was also strangely appropriate for the election.

I have been using git for a while, not quite as long as the really cool kids, but long enough to have become a git snob.

Ever since I discovered Fitnesse a few years back, I have been increasingly obsessed with the idea of executable specifications and testable requirements.

Yes, it has been quite a while since I last posted.

Day 2 of RailsConf 2008 began with a keynote from Jeremy Kemper, uber-committer and now main man behind Ruby on Rails.

As RailsConf 2008 - Day 1 began, there was no avoiding a sense of just how large the community was growing.

With the high cost (and carbon!)

A non-scientific, but clearly well thought-out back-of-envelope calculation by MIT CS professor Philip Greenspun is food for thought: the cost of replacing the entire fleet of U.S. passenger cars with electric ones would be zero.

I just read a fascinating academic paper co-authored by Dan Ariely, author of new book Predicably Irrational, a book I have heard about, but have not yet read.

RailsConf 2008 is later this week, as if you all did not know that.

Earthlings, we have successfully landed another probe on the red planet.

Read this piece from Rolling Stone magazine on 24-7 surveillance coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

My client was having troubles.

According to a recent eWeek article, there will be four times more Ruby programmers within five years.

This one pie chart says it all… From ChangeTheThought.com

Once upon a time, there were three icons.

Last night was the always fun Los Angeles web application developer Meetup, this time at AOL in Beverly Hills.

Archimedes was a very cool dude.

UPDATED 4/12/2008: Now compatible with Sinatra 0.2.0 So you want to create a small Facebook application… seems like it should be a small thing, right?

The demo that Microsoft showed at TED of Robert Scoble crying, ahem, I mean their future Microsoft Worldwide Telescope or whatever, looks really neat.

That unwitting center of global innovation known as the United States Navy has made a bold announcement: from now on, they are only going to accept open source.

I just saw an amazing demo of communication without speaking.

Merb, the mighty challenger to the current Rails domination of the Ruby web framework conversation, races towards “getting very close to being stable api wise”.

This last week has brought some very nice and favorable attention to the Dead Programmer Society.

I just read the latest posting from Adam Wiggins, very cool dude, hard-core Rubyist, and friend.

A few weeks back, I indulged my current obsession with grid computing, and Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services in particular, with a lengthy post.

I read a great posting last night from Matt Rogers, founder of startup Aroxo, on a strategy for usability testing.

The French press may be reeling in financial scandal, but the cool kids there are still concentrating on what is really important: drinking wine and controlling an open source robot with a heavily modded Nintendo DS.

It comes as not entirely surprising that the Wayne Kelly of the Ruby.NET project from down under has finally given up the ship.

UPDATED Oct. 15, 2009 with most current info I hate implementing captchas.

Get ready, get set, go!!

Software patents… as, Obi-Wan warned, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

I just ran into a really great resource for open source API documentation.