Guus Bosman

Tonight I was at the March meeting of the Raleigh-area Ruby brigade. It was the first time I went and found it quite interesting. There were 'lightning talks': everybody was invited to give a short presentation on technical subjects. Most of them were only a few minutes, and a broad variety of topics was presented, very cool.

- Larry presented http://soundmanager2.rubyforge.org, a small library that makes embedding MP3 sounds on a website really easy and pretty
- Quick example of combining Ruby and Silverlight. Silverlight is "Microsoft's Flash" and is based on an ActiveX object. According to the presenter a runtime environment for the Mac and Linux is available also.
- Probably my favorite talk of the evening: http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com. A concise overview of where these three languages are different in how they deal with instance variables. Insightful and funny.
- Fixture Freedom. How to get rid of fixtures in test cases (and why that's useful). http://fixturebusters.com
- CTAGS and RTAGS. I had heard of CTAGS before but never really dug into it. It's a way to make an index of important symbols in your source code. Maybe I'm naive here, but if you want code insight wouldn't it be time to move to an IDE like Eclipse instead of using VIM? (/ducks...)
- Data tables for Ruby -- similar in purpose to Matt Raible's display tag library for Java
- A 'public service announcement' -- a plead to not use MySQL
- A comparison of Subversion with git. Git allows you to have the version history locally on your development machine. It also allows you to make local commits, and works together with Subversion nicely. This looks like a really interesting tool.

The order in which the topics were presented was based on their duration: the shorter the talk, the earlier you were scheduled. A fun and useful evening.