I had the opportunity to travel up to Oklahoma City to go to the Red Dirt Ruby Conference - organized by JEG2. The format was a 2 day conference with the first day being talks and the second day being training. The food was great, and the talk format also worked really well. JEG2 had a block of talks split out in chunks of 30/15/15/15/15 minutes. You could post questions via Twitter or IRC, and JEG2 would fire them off to the panel at the end of the block. Things moved well.

I’m a ruby guy. I TATFT. I love writing tests, and I love having tests when I need to make changes in the code.

The Old and Busted Nasty Project

I haven’t posted a technical entry in a while. I’ve been busy, and have been working on cool stuff. I just haven’t had anything ready to post.

I’ve been working off and on with a buddy (classmate) from The Big Nerd Ranch. We attended the Ruby on Rails class over a year ago together, and have been in communication through the mailing list and email. His business is growing, which is great.

I spent the last week playing with Mephisto (a Rails blogging engine turned CMS). I thought it would be a good platform for a site that I may be about to work on.

I spent the last week fighting with Mephisto trying to get it to behave the way I want it to work in production on my host.

I am poking around a little with a second framework for ruby. I’ve spent the last year working in Ruby on Rails, and I really enjoy it. A couple of my classmates from the Big Nerd Ranch have been playing with a new framework called Merb. It looks interesting, and I think it will help me be a better programmer all around - better at Rails, too.

This past week marked an anniversary for me. We are in the midst of launching a massive project at work, and on October 22, 2007 I made a binder to help with testing this big system. Around that same time my coworker convinced (tricked?) me to learn ruby.

I learned something else at the Lone Star Ruby Conference that I was just able to put to use.

First, some background…

I am using the built-in object serialization that Rails provides to marshal a whole bunch of objects while the app waits for the user’s confirmation to proceed. The objects are then read back and reconstituted. It’s really slick how it works. The objects are serialized in YAML format in the database. The database that I am using in this app is Sybase, and the data row cannot exceed 32k, so I was looking to make sure the yamilfied objects didn’t get over that size threshold.

UPDATE (20080729): AT&T put a captcha on the order status page, so the script below no longer works. It was fun while it lasted.

Lots of people ordered iPhones at AT&T locations under the Direct Fulfillment method, and we are getting anxious. They are shipping out, but in more of a trickle than a flood. I found a forum of other people who are just as neurotic about it as I am, which makes me feel a little better. This time last week was the Day Of The iPhone Launch, and I was like a kid on Christmas morning. I could Not Sit Still.