Jesse says...

• Good terms that need to be used more often: neen and telic
• Flock is now my official browser on Linux
• Rails + Pair Programming = wicked fast development

First of all, props again go to Ben Edwards for getting this thing up and running. The event was amazing, and had a great turnout. I saw a lot of great sessions.

The best discussion I was involved in emerged out of the session by Charles Gimon from the Minneapolis Public Library. His session was about Disintermediation — how information technology affects knowledge workers such as librarians and journalists. In the days before Google, a scarcity of access to information made those jobs critical, as they were the researchers and distribution channel for information. Now, workers in that space need to either look for new work, or redefine their job to become filterers of information, rather than gatekeepers. It was a good talk with lots of participants and a strong focus — exactly how a good un-conference session should work.

Overheard at MinneBar

Software is not technical. It’s social.

You can’t be late if the name of your company is Clockwork.

How can you ask us factual questions when we don’t have access to Google?

What size shirt? Extra large. Oh, you mean Programmer’s Small.

My pics from MinneBar

MinneBar pics on Flickr

Now that I have my laptop, and I have working installations of GNUstep and Etoile, I feel ready to start making apps. But where to start…

I once read that one should “scratch their own itch” — make software that you personally need; chances are others need it too. Since Etoile is just starting out, I need pretty much everything. Most of what I need is outside the scope of my abilities, however: a web browser, an image editor, a Flash replacement. I could maybe see if I could steal some pre-existing code and flesh out the chat client and the file format/bundle for the Contact file type. Yeah, the Contact file type would be good — maybe a wizard for creating a new Contact.

Good work, Jesse. Let’s start there.

Introducing MinneBar…

MinnēBar is based on BarCamp and is an ad-hoc open-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees. All attendees must either give a demo, host a discussion, actively participate in a session, or help with one.

We were in dire need of a good, geek-oriented technology conference here — I am all over this. Congrats and good work to Ben Edwards at AltText for getting the ball rolling on this.

I hope to see many of you Saturday, May 6th!

Yes, I’m a fricken geek. We already know this. For fun and pleasure I enjoy talking to computers and trying to convince them to do things. Lately I’ve been looking into Ruby, a very clean programming language that’s getting a lot of hype in the web dev community for it’s “killer app”, Ruby on Rails. Since Tanya has been doing a lot of yelling at me lately, trying to prompt me to get out of the house and interact with people more, I decided to go to the local Ruby Users Group meeting last Tuesday.

I have to say, I was quite surprised at the number of people there. There were probably close to twenty people, but I guess part of that is due to the good PR Ruby has been getting. About half of the people were really new to Ruby, some of them hadn’t even installed it yet. The other half seemed to consist of Java developers, and system and database admins.

There were two lectures/presentations. The first one was on JRuby, an implementation of Ruby in Java (similar to Jython, a project I was following for a while and even did a logo for). The second was about Watir, the Web Application Testing In Ruby framework. Very, very cool, I must say. Unfortunately, since it only currently works with IE on Windows, it doesn’t help me much. But, if you’re a Windows monkey and you work on web sites, this is definitely something to look into.

So, needless to say, I think I’ll try to hit the next one, the last Tuesday of February. They’re going to be building a site for a non-profit in the Twin Cities, which is really awesome… maybe I’ll try to contribute. I’m also thinking about making a presentation of my own about building Jabber bots with Ruby. What better way to learn something than force yourself to give a presentation on it. :)

UPDATE: The new Ruby Users of Minnesota site is at Ruby.MN

Well, I just woke up. It was nice to be able to sleep in on a weekend. It doesn’t happen often, so when it does I really cherish it. But I have a lot of catch up to do here, so here we go:

First, yesterday was the day. Another birthday come and gone. I’m officially at 25 now. There are only a couple of really significant things behind being 25: I can now rent cars without crazy additional fees, my car insurance rates will drop considerably, and I will never be able to join Fabrica or be on The Real World (I don’t need the drama of The Real World anyway). The party went well. It wasn’t tons and tons of people, but it was enough, and the people who were there made for a great time. I laughed a lot, I played some great video games, I ate some awesome cake and ice cream, and I got a lot of much-needed human contact and conversation.

Second, I’ve been meaning to write about the whirlwind trip to New York. Jamey and I flew out last Saturday morning, shot tons of photos for a freelance project we’re doing, and flew back that evening. We spent something like 6 1/2 hours in the city, and about 13 hours in planes or at an airport. It was quite fun though, and even more fun since I got to hook up with Aline to hang out during that time. It was great to see her: she looks awesome and seems really happy and at ease there (most of the time!). Thank you for the birthday presents, Aliney!

Third, I finally got an iPod. It makes me happy. My FM adapter just died though, so I need to kick some ass about that one: the damn thing didn’t even survive a month, and at $40 a pop, that’s not a “subscription model” I want to be a part of.

Fourth, I’m really digging on Ruby on Rails (and Ruby in general). Plus, the awesome friend that is Jen hooked me up with some space on her server that already has Rails installed, so I’ll be crushing on that for a while, I’m sure. Even though Flash 8 has some fricken sweet features, I think there may be fewer and fewer reasons for me to build SWFs when Rails has some beautiful Ajax support.

Fifth, another of my recent crushes is del.icio.us. I’ve known about it for a while, and always thought it sounded neat, but only recently have I witnessed the true power of that which is del.icio.us. If you have not checked it out, do yourself a favor.

Sixth and last, I’m building… something. It’s not art, it’s not software. But it’s cool, and I hope you’re going to want it. Stay tuned to our irregularly scheduled program…

I’ve been making cool stuff in Flash, PHP and MySQL, like this:

It may not look like much, but it lets me very easily create a sketch blog. It uses one SWF, which checks a database to see whether an entry exists or not (it gets the entry name from the FlashVars variable — see the source code of this HTML page). If the entry doesn’t exist, it treats the file like a blank canvas. When I draw on the canvas, I can then hit enter and send the drawing I did to the database, where it creates the new entry. If the name does exist in the database, then it just loads the drawing.

Pretty slick, huh?

If you don’t think so, then just appreciate the pretty pictures. :)