Ugo Cei’s Weblog
On the second leg of my trip back home from Portland, we flew by a huge thunderstorm approaching Minneapolis from the north shortly after sunset. This allowed me to snatch some really great shots out the window.
I got the best results when I set the shutter speed to the maximum I could set on my camera, that is 8s. You can see some of them, together with some aerial shots taken on the PDX - MSP leg here.
OSCON 2006 was a blast! Lots of great speakers, flawless organization, nice location. As always, the best part of technical conferences is meeting people. I’ll briefly list the ones I had the opportunity of exchanging some words with: James Duncan Davidson, Ted Leung, Dave Thomas, Mike Clark, John Lam, Garrett Rooney, Jim Weirich, Sam Ruby, Tim Bray, J Aaron Farr, Justin Erenkrantz, Susan Wu, David Welton, Stuart Halloway, Matt Raible, Greg Wilkins, Matt Asay. It was my pleasure to meet you.
A special mention for an old friend: Alex Martelli, who I first met many years ago, completely lost contact with, and met again at OSCON. It’s been a pity I couldn’t attend any of his talks: one was scheduled at the same time as mine and another one was in the last slot on Friday, when I had to leave to board my plane. Maybe next time.
As for talks, of notable interests were the one by Stu Halloway on Streamlined—I think Streamlined is going to do much towards the acceptance of Ruby on Rails in the “enterprise”— and the presentation of Google’s Open Source project hosting service: Sourceforge, be alarmed. Both were packed with paople being refused entrance at the door when there wasn’t even standing room anymore.
During the last keynote session, we were treated to another show by Damian Conway. If “The Da Vinci Codebase” was dubbed the best presentation ever, this one could aspire to the title of “Best presentation ever, ever. No, seriously”. The guy should be given a show on Comedy Central, together with Jon Stewart. He’s that good.
Apple Support: “Apple has initiated a worldwide battery exchange program for certain rechargeable batteries that were sold for use with 15-inch MacBook Pro computer systems from February 2006 through May 2006.”
If your 15-inc MacBook Pro battery has model number A1175 and a 12-digit serial number that ends with U7SA, U7SB or U7SC, then it is eligible for replacement. Mine is, so I ordered the replacement. Nice to know I’ll soon have a brand new battery, those suckers never seem to last too much before starting to lose performance.
This post is just to provide a pointer to my slides: they are here if you’d like to have a look at them. I’m not going to write anything more about the OSCON today: my head is exploding with all the things I listened to. Plus I need to decompress after the tension that always goes with speaking in front of an audience, especially in a tongue that is not your own. I’m just looking forward to the exhibit hall reception that is going to kick off at 6. Hope they have lots of beer.
The first two days at OSCON 2006, filled with tutorials and some keynotes, have gone by. Here’s my wrap-up.
In the evening we had a plenary session with three keynotes that would have been worth the ticket price alone.
First, Larry Wall delivered hist tenth “State of the Onion” talk. It was the second time I heard it—I think I my first one was at the 2002 ApacheCon— and sorry, but Larry isn’t my kind of speaker. It could be because I don’t care about Perl much anymore, but the parallel between language design and raising kids was just, hmmm… lame. Anyway, it had some good moments and I have heard much more boring stuff in the past. Plus, Larry is very human and likable.
Then it was Kathy Sierra and her “Cognitive Seduction” talk. Kathy is one terrific speaker. I found her speech funny and thought-provoking. What more can you ask?
The evening closed with Damian Conway delivering not a keynote, but an incredibly funny parody of “The Da Vinci Code”. You have to be a real geek in order to appreciate that kind of humor, but then that’s what the audience was made of, and we sure got lots of laughing out of it. He got a standing ovation at the end.
Today I get to present my talk, which is making me a bit nervous. I have the feeling I have too few material to cover 45 minutes, but that is something you always feel and it usually turns out not to be true. Luckily I have some demo material that I can choose to present or not, depending on the remaining time.
Technorati Tags: oscon06, oscon, larry wall, kathy sierra, damian conway, doc searls.
Looking at the map where OSCON 2006 attendees can (literally) pinpoint their origin, it looks like there are at least four other Italians here. I wonder who they are. If you are one of those and are reading this, please get in touch. We might have a beer together and stop talking and listening to English only for a while.
Just installed the latest Skype (beta) version for the Mac, which they say features video calling. But I couldn’t find anything in the preferences regarding video, nor any “start video call” button in the UI. I guess it’s maybe not detecting the built-in iSight camera in my MacBook Pro, who knows?
Update: Oh, I got it now: The version with video is actually a separate download!
OSCON actually started today, but yesterday evening a bunch of geeks with a penchant for photography met for a walkabout around Portland. If you were in the vicinity of Portland’s Steel Bridge at that time you could have spotted this group of people pointing cameras around, shooting at the weirdest objects and taking pictures of someone taking pictures of someone taking pictures of someone … ad infinitum.
One of the most interesting aspects of it all was that you could have seen the whole gamut of equipment, ranging from very professional cameras, lenses and tripods, down to compact point-and-shoot models. But I bet that, by looking at the results here, you’d be surprised to learn that some of the most intriguing shots were taken with the least expensive equipment.
Earlier on the same day, I did lots of walking around Portland, mostly in downtown and across Washington Park, which I walked through from the MAX station up north to the Japanese Garden and the International Rose Garden, then back down to Pioneer Courthouse Square. I stopped only when the heat really started to be intolerable (I spotted 95F on a display in downtown) and my feet started developing blisters. Then I jumped on the MAX and got back at the hotel for a few hours of rest and refreshment.
My sightseeing is chronicled by a bunch of Flickr sets that you can find here, here and here. Now, what I would like some digital photography guru to explain me is why my shots of red flowers—roses in particular—come out with the reds completely saturated, giving them a very “flat” and unnatural look. What can I do to avoid this defect, besides changing my camera?
I managed to snap some good shots on my trip to Portland and am just now uploading them to Flickr. It’s 5 o’clock in the morning here, but due to jet lag I cannot sleep anymore, so I’m abusing of the free Internet connection offered by the hotel.
I guess having so many free hotspots in the city encourages hotels to offer free Internet service. This way people will maybe stay in the hotel and consume some drinks instead of going out to find the nearest free hotspot. I always thought that having guests pay for Internet at hotels is a total rip-off, given the costs of a wide-band DSL connection nowadays in most of the civilized world.
Anyway, you might want to have a look at this photoset. All the photos are from the AMS-MSP leg, since I managed to get some sleep on the MSP-PDX one, but the scenery must have been spectacular as well. We got a great view of Mt. Hood on approach to PDX, but the flight assistant had already asked that all electronic equipment be shut off and I didn’t want to risk being reprimanded. Maybe I’ll get some shots of this part of the voyage on the way back.
It’s almost sunrise now, so I think I’ll bide my time a little more, then see if I can get some breakfast and head out for a tour of Portland in the early morning, when the sun is not that hot yet. Forecast for today is a respectable 98F (about 37C), whew!
I’ll get some more pictures today and possibly more this evening, together with the other OSCON folks at the Sunday Photography Walkabout.
Technorati Tags: portland, oscon06, oscon, greenland, labrador, free wifi hotspots, traveling, nwa45.
Great advice from cavemonkey50.com on how to make your Firefox more Mac-like:
Who doesn’t love Firefox? I’ll tell you who, Mac users. While Firefox has always been great on Windows and Linux, it seems that the Mac version of the browser has always lagged behind in terms of performance and visual appeal. Since version 1.5, the Firefox development team has been paying more attention to the Mac version of the browser, slowly increasing its speed. The upcoming Firefox 2.0 continues those tweaks, finally making Firefox fast enough to be considered usable. That leaves just one problem with Firefox for Mac, the appearance. Luckily thanks to some third-party developers, Firefox can easily be tweaked to fit in with the operating system.
Apart from the theme, which is a matter of taste after all—but using less vertical pixels is better as a matter of fact—having close buttons on the tabs themselves is a must, especially considering that it will be the default on Firefox 2. And using the location box as a progress bar is useful when you have lots of extensions taking up space in the status bar, like me. Pictured below: Google PageRank Status, Firebug, AdSense Notifier, Blogger Web Comments, GreaseMonkey.
Technorati Tags: firefox, extensions, look & feel.
… is going to be hot hot hot when I land there next Saturday:
The tooltip says: “Sunny with the temperature approaching the record of 103 set in 2004.” And I thought that Portland was a cold and damp place! Actually it’s not all that bad, as I arrive at night, when the heat has mostly dissipated and Sunday doesn’t look so scorching. Still, 37° is hot as hell, but I plan to attend the photography walkabout anyhow.
After going to Portland next week to speak at OSCON, it looks like I’ll be crossing the ocean once more in October to speak at ApacheCon US 2006, where my proposals for two talks titled:
were accepted. Many thanks to the ApacheCon organizers for giving me this wonderful opportunity!
I’m curious to know who else will be speaking. The only other one I know of at this time is Andrew.
The talk about Atom reflects my recent interest in the format, the publishing protocol and its applications. I can’t say much about that since most of what I’ve been doing around it is covered by NDA, but Atom rocks. Looks like Tim Bray shares the same feeling, to the point of being horrified to see nothing about the Atom Publishing Protocol on the OSCON schedule. Luckily he has enough clout to convince Nat to include him in the program. That’s one talk I’m not going to miss!
Is Joanne Colan still ad interim host for Rocketboom? If it is so, I would like to suggest that Andrew hire Mélissa Theuriau instead. For Joanne can be pretty and have a nice British accent, but Mélissa is about a hundred times hotter and her French accent would be magnifique.
Be careful when you choose a domain for your company website, particularly if you’re justaxposing words. You might end up with results like:
1. A site called ‘Who Represents‘ where you can find the name of the agent that represents a celebrity. Their domain name… wait for it… is
www.whorepresents.com
2. Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views at
www.expertsexchange.com
3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at
www.penisland.net
4. Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at
www.therapistfinder.com
5. Then of course, there’s the Italian Power Generator company…
www.powergenitalia.com
6. And now, we have the Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales:
www.molestationnursery.com
7. If you’re looking for computer software, there’s always
www.ipanywhere.com
8. Welcome to the First Cumming Methodist Church. Their website is
www.cummingfirst.com
9. Then, of course, there’s these brainless art designers, and their whacky website:
www.speedofart.com
10. Want to holiday in Lake Tahoe? Try their brochure website at
www.gotahoe.com
(Via Blue Sky On Mars, originally found at Independent Sources.)
Today I set out to develop a simple proof of concept: a Wiki developed in Ruby on Rails using Subversion as a repository.
Doing a very basic Wiki using RoR is a piece of cake, given the availability of RedCloth and BlueCloth. However, having it use Subversion instead of a relational database is something that needs more work.
Luckily, the latest Subversion release (1.3.2 at the time of this writing) includes full Ruby bindings using SWIG. Unluckily, the precompiled package for OS X that I was using (from the fine folks at Metissian) doesn’t come with the bindings, so I had to reinstall Subversion from the source: nothing really complicated here, but the options for getting it to work over HTTPS should be documented better.
Speaking of documentation, there is apparently none for the SVN Ruby bindings… which is a shame. I could only find something regarding installation thanks to PJ Hyett, why the lucky stiff and Garrett Rooney, but armed with the source, using BountySource’s bsSvnBrowser as a sample (read-only code though, while I need to read and write) and especially Garrett’s book Practical Subversion1, I managed to conjure up some code that, on the surface of it, seems to work.
Here’s a snippet that saves an ActiveRecord instance to the SVN repository:
def save(validate = true)
return false if (validate && ! valid?)
repo = Svn::Repos.open(REPO_PATH)
repo.fs.transaction { | txn |
txn.root.make_file(title)
stream = txn.root.apply_text(title)
stream.write(text)
stream.close
}
return true
end
I’m not sure this the correct way to implement save, but it works.
1. When I reviewed Garrett’s book, I wrote: “It’s written largely from the perspective of a repository administrator or a power user wanting to extend the system and develop new applications on top of it, as the long (73 pages) chapter on Subversion APIs demonstrates.” Finally that long chapter has been useful to me!
I’m currently stranded at Schiphol airport, Amsterdam, after my flight has been delayed by 4 hours and 20 minutes (hoping it doesn’t get any worse than that), so I figured I could kill time taking pictures and uploading them to Flickr. Thanks god for Airport WiFi, though I wish it were free.
To make the long wait a little more bearable, I also bought a book: The Long Tail. An appropriate title, it seems. I wonder if I can manage to finish it before I get home. Probably yes, since it’s not very thick.
I cannot even watch the latest Rocketboom episode. Where art thou, Joanne Colan?
Update: Let’s just hope my fate is not as bad as Matt’s!
Technorati Tags: airport, schiphol, joanne colan, rocketboom, the long tail, chris anderson
.
A quick IQ test. What is the next symbol in the following sequence?
LOSE, DNQ, DNQ, WIN, DNQ, DNQ, LOSE, DNQ, DNQ
It should be pretty obvious to anyone that the next symbol is WIN, if logic applies. Unfortunately, logic does not apply to football. So, even if the above sequence faithfully describes Italy’s score in the World Cup finals since 1970, there is no guarantee that the next one, tonight against France, is going to be a WIN.
I am a bit saddened, by the way, from being able to remember each one of the finals Italy played, starting from the 1970 one. I remember it only barely, as I was very young at the time, but still I remember the circumstances around it. This means I’m really getting old.
Technorati Tags: worldcup, world cup, fifa, italy, france, football, berlin.
Dave Winer: “Google reports 16,200 hits for ‘Joanne Colan.’ Let’s measure that again in a week and a month.”
That’s not completely true: in order to correctly compute the so-called “Google Number” for a person, you should put her name in quotes, otherwise all sorts of spurious results will come up, like for instance:
Peter lives with his wife Joanne and their family in Lyme, New Hampshire. … Neil Colan is a psychologist with over 20 years of experience providing …
If you search for “Joanne Colan” (in quotes), Google gives you just 513 hits as of today, many of which are related to the recent news about her, so they were probably even less a few days ago. Quite strange for someone who is, after all, already a public figure.
Even curiouser, for one who has such pretty looks, is the small amount of pictures of her you can find online. I guess this also is going to change a lot from tomorrow.
Technorati Tags: joanne colan, rocketboom.
Uh-oh, it looks like someone appreciated one of the photos I posted on Flickr and asked for permission to use it on the eventi.parma portal, a website dedicated to upcoming cultural events in the Parma province.
What can I say? I’m flattered, and here of course is the obligatory backlink.
Yes, I was dumb. The second step should have been:
jruby bin/rails myapp
With that in mind, Rails is able to generate an application and run Webrick, without any apparent glitches, apart from a warning from the Oracle adapter, as is demonstrated by the screenshot below:
Moreover, in order to avoid waiting a lot of time while it is processing docs, it is advisable to install Rails as:
gem install rails --include-dependencies --no-rdoc --no-ri
