Ruby in Munich

It’s time for a new Ruby (and Rails) meeting in Munich. We’ll meet on Wednesday 9th of April starting at 19:00 (CEST) in the Pizzeria Michelangelo.

If youre’ coming, please answer via e-mail or comment by Tuesday (08.04.200 12:00 CEST (in order to make a reservation for enough tables). 

Possible topics are: A short report from Euruko2008 which happened in Prague in late March, actually any other Ruby related topics.

Euruko 2008 - Favourite Quotes

My favourite quotes of the conference: “…the nasty snake language…” (Matz about Python) and “I don’t know how to use Ruby” (Koichi on Ruby). 

Euruko 2008

Euruko 2008 is in Prague this year. Here’s the Euruko 2008 website where you can register, submit a proposal for a talk etc. Matz will be there. And of course a few other guys. Including me ;-) 

Ruby and Rails in Munich, Germany

There’s a “Ruby and Rails” meeting in Munich on Monday 26th November, starting at 19:30. The location is the “Augustiner am Dom”.
In case you’re coming for a beer or two, some Bavarian food etc. please drop me an e-mail at phvalue ät mac point com, so we can arrange a reservation.

EURUKO 2007 is over…

So the European Ruby Conference is over for 2007 — a big “Thank you!” to everyone involved: Organisers, the Universitiy of Vienna for the great lecture hall and network we were allowed to use, the Viennese who did a great job getting it done, the speakers — keynote or not — and of course all the attendees.

I was not very surprised to see that Testing, Quality and Beauty of code was a topic again, as was meta programming and really interesting new applications. For more on that including links to the available slides please see the Euruko 2007 Wiki.

If you like to stay connected and watch the photos we shot in Vienna sign up at Facebook and join the “Eurukobackweb” group. There we’ll also try to get “Euruko 2008″ organised. Up to know it’s all open: If you’d like to see it happen in your city or country: Join the group. If you prefer a more sunny season: Join the group. Should you think it should be more organised: Join the group. Or is you “only” like to get in touch with Ruby programmers: Join the group.

Hope to see as many of you as possible again next year. And a few more new Eurukoristas. It’s fun, interesting and the coffee was excellent (remember? We were in Vienna).

TextMate, Ruby & String Interpolation

While preparing some code example for the Euruko 2007 I noticed a somewhat strange behaviour of TextMate while editing Ruby code. With the Ruby bundle being active, I expect CMD-R (”Apple-R”) to execute the Ruby code a hand. Which it does, unless the text cursor is inside a string interpolation expression.

An example: The first screen shot shows the example code, the cursor being positioned outside the #{ … }.

After CMD-R is hit, the output is the expected Ruby output as shown below.

However, if the cursor is inside the string interpolation expression as below

the result of hitting CMD-R doesn’t meet my expectation:

I wonder why this happens. Apparently the behaviour has to do the the scope the cursor is in. A hint about how to avoid this is greatly appreciated.

Pre Conference Dinner for Euruko 2007

The pre conference dinner for the European Ruby Conference 2007 will be on Friday the 9^th November 2007 at 20:00.
The location is called Das Lederer.

The address is: A-1080 Wien, Skodagasse 28 / Ecke Lederergasse

One week with Leopard

The (at the time of this writing) new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is now installed on my MacBook for a week. Time enough to find the way through a few of the new features. Time Machine is of course an easy way for backing up the system.

Anyway, to me Spaces (virtual desktops) are a lot more important, since I missed this feature before. Of course there was VirtueDesktops (which even featured desktop switching via the motion sensors). However with Spaces you can assign an application to a certain Space.

Terminal now comes with tabs instead of many windows, which also helps keeping the desktops clean. And last but not least Mac OS X now also includes Subversion, Ruby and of course Ruby on Rails, including – but not limited to – gems and Rake.

Only issue: The background image of the login screen needs to be replaced. In case you also like another picture, LoginWindow Manager might be useful for you.

Euruko 2007 in Vienna, Austria

Wow, there are already 46 registrations for the European Ruby Conference, and 9 people who “might come”. That’s great, as we were already at the capacity for the room with that number last year. Obviously Ruby gained quite a bit of interest within the last year. Apparently it was a Good Thing to have a larger room this year: The room can take 100 people “easily” and 170 “squeezed in” (hope I got the translation right).

Currently there are already 19 people willing to give at least one talk, some even offered giving two. So there’s no problem filing to full days with interesting stuff about what’s going on in the Ruby world. I really looking forward to this, especially the Koichi’s talk about YARV and Ruby 1.9.1. How exciting is that? And then there’s something about Ragel, a state machine compiler. And, doing test automation myself, of course I’m interested in the talks about automation. These are going to be exciting days.

All that for a conference fee of just about 20 Euro.

RejectConf in Berlin 2007

During the RejectConf 2007 in Berlin yesterday evening I talked about testing, contraints and the relationship between testers and developers. The talk is available as a PDF file at “Test, Test, Test”.

Thank you to all the other presenters and the Berlin Ruby User Group for providing the location etc.

Berlin - Day 3 / RailsConf Europe part 1 - Tutorials

The morning started with me finding out that breakfast at my hotel is served from 8 to 11 — while I had to leave before 8. Anyway there’s so many places in Berlin to get a great breakfast. So I had it on the way to the conference.

The 1^st tutorial I atended was Trotter Cashion’s “Refactoring”. that was a good introduction as well as a few great tips for tools to help refactoring:

• heckle: ‘Bebugs’ your code automatically and will tell you what you didn’t cover in you test cases in quite a few cases. It dynamically changes you code by turning ifs to unlesses, ‘==’ to ‘!=’ etc. You get the idea. It then checks whether you unit/tests are failing, i.e. wether they would allow you to find this particular fault. Which they likely won’t in so many cases.
• grep: Well, it’s grep.
• rcov: Another tool to tell you about test coverage. This one generates HMTL reports which show which code is and isn’t executed when running your test cases. Very useful a lot faster than heckle, at the price of being less rigousus.
• glark: A new way for grepping.

After than lunch time revealed that this time lunch is a lot better than at last year’s RailsConf in London. In fact is was excellent. Fresh fish, salads, lettuce, desserts. Options - more than one indeed - for vegetarians.
A minor issue is, just like in London last year, the wireless network: With about 300 attendees around, the network is really really slow.

Now, I’m attending the GIS tutorial (while typing this post). Anyway the accompanying script seems to be a good starting point.

And my RejectConf talk still isn’t done…

Berlin - Day 2 / Cute Knut and more

One of the sightseeing program was ‘cute Knut’ the young polar bear in the Berlin Zoo. And then today will also see ‘Bratwurst on Rails’. Meanwhile there’s still lunch, a boat trip and some more preparation for my RejectConf talk.So much to do and see — but so little time…

See you at the Bratwurst event.

PS: I remember an e-mail with proposed tag to use for blogging about RailsConf Europe — but can’t remember what exactly some suggestions where… Can someone please give a hint?

Berlin - Day 1 / pre RailsConf Europe 2007

A great city. Huge in fact. And the hotel is great too: Located in the centre of the city, just a few minutes walk away from the Kalkscheune, the location of Bratwurst on Rails (which unfortunately seem to be down at the time of this writing [2007-09-16T09:48:37+02:00]. And the RailsConf Europe 2007 hotel is just a little bit further down the street close to the train station Friedrichstraße. Another plus for the hotel: Wireless network is free.

Hmm, I received a letter from the RailsConf organisers with a suggestion of what tags to use, if only I printed that out at home.

Euruko - Location & Date

After a few weeks of struggling to find a location we finally found a place. In fact we also found a new date:

Euruko 2007 will be located in Vienna, Austria on Saturday & Sunday 10^th and 11^th November 2007.

This was also announced on ruby-talk as well as the Euruko wiki … and a few other places.
If you’re planning to attend or to give a presentation, please use the wiki to register.

EURUKO 2007 - Take 3

Thanks for everyone who replied to the previous postings. Unfortunately the amount of the feedback is, let’s say, not statistically significant enough to base further planning on it.

In addition to this we settled for the 4. and 5. November. Unfortunately, we then learned that this clashes with the RubyConf in Charlotte, North Carolina. Is that a problem for anyone (i.e. would you attend both conferences if they wouldn’t clash)? If so, please raise your exception voice. If we don’t know about it, we can’t fix it - so please tell us (well, tell me). Even though it’s still close to RubyConf, we could for example settle with the 10. and 11. November. What do you think/prefer?

Anyway, there’s the first lesson learned: For next year we’ll have to start planning earlier to avoid the date conflicts.

As the precise location isn’t fixed yet, we’re still open to adjust the location to the expected number of attendees - in only we’d know what to expect. Given year’s increase of interest in Ruby and Rail, it’s very hard to estimate this number. And a good estimation would help us a lot, since we wouldn’t like to prevent people from attending, just because there’s way to few places available.

European Ruby Conference - Another Step

We’ve now set up a Basecamp. Contact me with any requests for a login, if you’re interested to help getting the conference organised.
And if you couldn’t remember a single additional login, why not letting us know by commenting here or sending me an e-mail?  May be you have an idea about a talk you’d like to hear or, dare I mention it, a presentation you’d like to give.

The EURUKO is not a commercial conference, it’s meant to follow the Open Source spirit: If you like to contribute - well - do it.

EURUKO 2007 - Take two

Summary form the EURUKO 2007 planning meeting:

1. Location: Very very likely to be Munich, Germany
2. Date: Very likely to be the 10./11. or 17./18. November 2007
3. Improved organisation compared to last year.
4. Ideas for keynotes, precise location and more.

Stay tuned for more later.