BusinessRx Community

There are more and more one-day local events every year, and each time people come into town, go to the event, then meander home sometime on Sunday. A couple months ago I had the idea to run a separate unaffiliated event on the Sunday morning after one of these local events. We will be having the first ShadowCamp this weekend on Sunday ...

I am a little late in posting this but I wanted to post my thoughts on the last day and the overall conference. I was a little ''talked out'' by the third day so I only ended up only going to a couple of talks Advanced DSLs in Ruby Neal Ford did an excellent job talking about how to build DSLs in Ruby and true to the name of the talk he ...

I decided to take a different approach for Day 2 and write a single post instead of writing an entry for every talk. Last year when I had power in the room it was much easier to write the post during the talk, but this year without power I have to try and save my batter power for those boring talks where I want to work on something ...

John walked through some of the cool stuff they are doing with IronRuby. He started out showing how you can host the ruby engine in a C# application, in just a couple lines of code he wrote a WPF irb clone. He also showed how with C# 4.0 you can run the ruby engine, send it code, then reach in and get specific variables and pull them back out ...

The main idea of this talk was that working in the enterprise gets you used to certain solutions and its easy to try and apply those solutions in Ruby where they might not apply. Jamis worked in Java and when he came to Ruby he wanted to bring dependency injection to Ruby and wrote two different frameworks for Ruby to enable dependency injection. ...

About this time my battery died on my laptop and this year there is no power available in the rooms (which is a major bummer) so my notes on this talk aren't as good as my other notes. Basically this talk was about a number of libraries available to make working with distributed ruby very easy. The first is Drb with is the base library need to ...

For this talk Evan went through some of the challenges and choices they made in re-writing the VM from C to C++. It was interesting to see some of the internals but for the most part I was more interested in hearing about the progress of the project and when it might be ready for use... unfortunately all we found out is that it is going well, they ...

For the first of the split-out sessions I decided on Gregg Pollack's Scaling Ruby talk. I am getting ready to do some work on optimizing the sds-rest library so I was hoping to get some good information from this talk on how to approach that optimization. Gregg started out covering the Ruby basics of performance. He talked about threading and ...

Matz opened up RubyConf with an enjoyable keynote where he touched on the reasons behind using Ruby and why the language and community continues to grow. He walked us through is own programming history and talked about the different language extremes, languages like BASIC (what he got started with) are too restrictive, but languages like LISP are ...

Last year was my first RubyConf, it was just down the interstate in Charlotte and I couldn't pass it up. Well, now I am hooked and I have my hotel and flight booked for RubyConf 2009. I am leaving today around 4:50 and get into Orlando at 6:40. If anyone else is getting in around the same time let me know and we can split a cab to the ...

One of the last minute changes I had to make on the sds-rest library was to change it from using HTTP to HTTPS, I thought this would be straight-forward but it turned out to be slightly tricky. Thankfully I found this post that outlines the basics of setting up HTTPS in Ruby. Most people probably take the first method of not verifying the ...

I was chatting with Mark Imbriaco the other day and he mentioned that there were reports that the older MacBook Pro's could handle 6GB of RAM, and since I recently had one of my 2GB chips go bad so I figured why not and ordered a 4GB chip. I bought my MBP about 15 months ago, the Model Identifier is MacBookPro3,1.  I was going to order from ...

A couple of months ago my good buddy Ryan Dunn contacted me about writing some Ruby samples for the new SQL Data Services that is part of the recently announced Windows Azure. (at the time it was called SSDS). I completed the samples about a month or so ago but we had to wait to announce them until PDC. I wanted to create more than just a sample, ...

Time for another meeting of the new Raleigh Alt.Net Beer Users Group, or Alt.bug for short. We will be meeting tonight (10/20) at O'Malleys Tavern (Guinness and Red Oak on tap) and start around 6:00 PM and go till whenever, hope to see you there. -James

I am happy to announce that this Thursday (9/25) will be the first meeting of the new Raleigh Alt.Net Beer Users Group, or Alt.bug for short. The basic idea is just to go hang out and discuss whatever comes up. We might consider setting topics for future meetings, but for this first meeting we are just going to see what happens. I have already ...