http://americancensorship.org/

Here’s my slides.

Links

• mirah.org
• github.com/mirah
• github.com/baroquebobcat/shatner – my aspirational sinatra clone

It’s registered on plancast at http://plancast.com/p/4yvw

You can read more about how bug mashes have been done in the past at RailsBridge’s Wiki page on them. Rails’ own contrib guide is also a fairly good resource for getting started.

Zounds!

See everybody tomorrow.

Mountain West Ruby Conf last week rocked. It was well organized as always–props to Mike Moore(@blowmage) for putting it together and Confreaks for recording it and all the other people who made it the awesome conf that I like coming to every year(e.g. Jeremy Nicoll-Smashing Photographer).

CHE-UP my friends.

More seriously, Zed’s talk made me think more carefully about my open source contributions in terms of who benefits from my work. Am I just a sucker for working on stuff like Dubious or am I just doing it because I find it interesting and engaging. I think he crafted a really good talk and a good meme(CHE-UP) and made a good point about being aware of the motivations behind projects you contribute to. Now I just need to find some suckers/contributors to help me with my plans for world domination .

Mind Monkey Patching

David Brady’s talk about head hacking reminded me that I need to finish Pragmatic Thinking & Learning, a good book I’ve been reading off and on for more than 6 months now. I need to try using that crazy cat picture (the one with too many eyes) to trigger hardware interrupts at interesting times. Might be fun.

“Web” Development

Wayne Seguin’s talk was very topical as MWRC is my favorite conference to meet new and interesting Rubyists. I feel like I did some definite “web” development while I was there. I met new people and spent more time getting to know better some of the people in the community I’d met at other conferences.

I came away from the talk feeling inspired to do more looking at teaching and mentoring, something I looked at a little at RubyConf.

Concurrency

Concurrency was a big theme at the conference with Ilya Grigorick talking about more advanced concurrency models, and Preston Lee presenting about using the GPU and CUDA to solve embarrassingly parallel problems.

Ilya talked about the Actor model, which Erlang uses as well as Pi-Calculus/CSP which is what Go uses. Both deal with concurrency by providing constraints on what you can do within them. Interestingly, their constraints are very similar, but have different abstractions with regard to what is named.

In the Actor model,

1. Name every process
2. Every process has a mailbox
3. Communicate via messages

In the CSP,

1. Processes are anonymous
2. Every channel has a name
3. Processes communicate over channels

He wrote a gem that acts like CSP called agent

5K

I ran in the 5k. I slept through it last year and decided that I had to do it this year. There were 13 of us. It was very dramatic.

Rounding the last corner (pic by smashingshots.com)

I think I was last.

Mirah & Dubious

Mirah and Dubious were represented. I did a lightning talk on Dubious Thursday and Joe O’Brien showed off what is going on with Pindah as part of his Ruby on Android talk. I got to introduce a few people to Mirah and Dubious which was pretty cool. It seems like people are getting more interested in Mirah and projects written in it, which I think is pretty awesome.

Some other thoughts

Redis is a pretty cool project that I’d like to look at more than I have.

Wood cuts make for nifty slides.

Figs are killer.

Thanks again everybody for a great conference.

Sara made these a while back and they turned out so good, we had to
make a second batch. I took it to work. Sorry, I don’t have any pics
of the bounty there–the morsels were eaten too quickly. Here’s the
best I can do:

I roasted some venison, which turned out a bit bloody and was too gamey
for Sara. But me and the dog liked it a lot. I really like roasting
things; I’m a little obsessive about it(ask anybody whose had my chicken). And, my favorite roasting
author is Barbara Kafka. If you stick large hunks of meat into ovens
from time to time, you should really check out her philosophy. I’m a
convert.

Also, I did some stir fry from frozen veggies + bacon, because bacon makes everything better. Sara cooked some gyoza to go along with it. It was really easy.

The next morning I made fried rice with the leftover rice, I think it turned out rather well. And, the smily face out of sriracha hot sauce, gives it that extra oomph.

Mostly it arose out of a need to automate things and my desire to make something pretty clean.

I didn’t like the API’s of the existing libraries much, so I wrote my own.

It is fairly bare bones at this point, but I have been using it for a few months and it works for me.

Check it out:

github.com/baroquebobcat/right-scale-api

Further reading/References(Others’ Right Scale API gems & libraries):

github.com/robertcarr/RightAPI — not a gem yet

github.com/moneypools/right_api — little in the way of docs, feels pretty raw

github.com/joshuabates/rightscaler – pretty neat, activeresource based, have not tested though

github.com/dmichael/rightscale-api — uses httparty, missing most of the objects available

github.com/ktheory/rightscale_api_wrapper — not gemified, not great

github.com/stewartmckee/Rightscale-API-Gem — fuller implementation, but since it doesn’t use httparty, restclient, or activeresource, the source is really verbose

First up today is Jim Weirich doing a talk called To Infinity and Beyond. It should be fairly epic.

In other news I got a smart phone finally. It’s R2D2.

I needed to be able to look at query params in the URL for the _method parameter Rails uses to fake different types of POST-like requests. Rails currently doesn’t do this for you as it uses Rack::MethodOverride, and that doesn’t look at GET parameters. It only looks at the X-Http-Method-Override header and POST form params. Some Rails users filed a ticket awhile ago about it, and it is an ongoing concern(see #2289).

Scratch:

Being a go getter, active, knows his way around a gemspec sort of person, I whipped up a library so if you run into this problem, you can fix it easily. Rack::MethodOverrideWithParams is the result. It is a drop-in replacement for Rack::MethodOverride, so all you have to do is replace Rack::MethodOverride in your stack with it and you’ll be rocking query param method overriding goodness.

“How easily”, you might ask. Let me show you. It’s just a couple of code additions:
Gemfile
gem "rack-methodoverride-with-params", "~> 1"
config/environment.rb
config.middleware.swap Rack::MethodOverride, Rack::MethodOverrideWithParams

Done.

What do you think?

Links

github.com/baroquebobcat/rack-methodoverride-with-params

rubygems.org/gems/rack-methodoverride-with-params

Rails ticket #2289