Dr Nic

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I took a video recorder to the RejectConf, like I did in Portland. Unfortunately, there were two reasons I didn’t record any of them.

Firstly, there didn’t seem to be any obvious place to position the camera.

Secondly, it was deemed critical that everyone does their talks in the dark. The conference isn’t run in the dark, local Ruby groups don’t run meetings in the dark but consecutive RejectConfs have been run by adminstrators with a dark fetish. Great for drinking beer and heckling presenters. Bad for video recording.

The makers of the JVC HDD camcorder - a nifty device with a 20G HDD in it - don’t make it possible to record in the dark. Not because it doesn’t have a “night time mode” - apparently it does - but when you are already in the dark, you can’t figure out how to turn it on.

Ok, fine, if I’d made an effort I could have figured it out. So, let’s use excuse #1 as the reason for not recording the presentations.

Its a valid excuse, the Pirate Cove was chock-a-block full of people. The local Berlin Ruby Group did an awesome job of finding a great “underground”-esque venue.

Fortunately a fellow Australian - Marcus Crafter - had a front row position, and a MacBook Pro. With said device, he captured my talk on RubiGen (and John Barton’s).

RejectConf video of RubiGen

In 5 minutes, I make a Merb generator, using RubiGen and NewGem. Nifty stuff indeed.

There were lots of other awesome presentations (that is perhaps a dubious inference that mine was awesome), but it was dark, I had beer in both hands, and I was too busy yelling “AUSTRALIA!!!” to write notes.

What a great night

Tonight only. Live in Berlin. One show only. RejectConf. Woohoo!

Who? What?

Well, it could be you. If you are in Berlin tonight, come to RejectConf.

Time: 9pm (get there early to ensure a seat or at least a space indoors)
Location: NOT NEAR THE VENUE

The remaining details are documented so you can figure out which U-Bahn lines to take and which stops to get off.

Web apps/services go down for maintenance (expected or erroneously) all the time.

What happens when your “sign on to all apps everywhere” OpenID server goes down for an hour? You might not be able to login to any site.

Your users may not be able to log into YOUR app.

MyOpenID is going down on the 12th of September (see below) for an hour.

Allowing them to login with multiple OpenIDs might alleviate any difficulty users have using/buying your stuff.

Even if they have clicked “Allow Forever”, and it appears that they never revisit their OpenID provider again when logging into your site, they actually still do via the wonders of HTTP redirection, and those zippy quick InterTubes we take for granted.

Supporting multiple OpenIDs in your app isn’t much more effort than supporting one OpenID. You just need an extra table and a form for creating them.

The Plaxo article on multiple OpenIDs per user kind of makes it all appear a bit daunting, IMO.

But with the sweet Ruby OpenID gem and starting points like Ben Curtis sample app or my multiple-openid sample app, it might take only a 1/2 day or a day to educate yourself about OpenID, and hack it in to one of your apps.

Say, like your blog. Please.

This is a notice that MyOpenID will be having a maintenance
outage starting at 08:00 on 2007/09/12, Pacific Time.
The outage may last as long as 60 minutes, but is expected
to be considerably shorter.

The reason for this outage is:

   Database upgrade

During the outage, the MyOpenID website may be unavailable or
unresponsive, and users will be unable log into OpenID-enabled
websites using their MyOpenID accounts. The latest information about
this and other MyOpenID events can always be found on
http://janrain.com/blog/

We apologize for the inconvenience. If you have any questions, please
contact us at support@myopenid.com.

There are 146 RailsRumble entrants.

%w[rubygems hpricot open-uri].each { |l| require l }
(Hpricot(open(”http://vote.railsrumble.com”))/”div.app_summary”).size # => 146

Voting starts Wednesday. I’ve viewed a dozen or so front pages, and they all look awesome. But to use any a lot of them (I think) you need to create an account.

Unfortunately there are only 10 that used OpenID. (see pastie for code)

So for the other 136, you must now create usernames and accounts. Type your email and password 136 times.

UPDATE: RubyBrigade (list of Ruby clubs), Sake Bar (warehouse of Sake recipes), Irksome (irc log), Open Comic Book Database, PubBud, relocatr and Simplebucket do not require any authentication (added below)

Bonus Update: Jour de fête is a Facebook app. So, in a manner of speaking, it qualifies - Facebook signon is its OpenID equivalent.

For your convenience, here are links to the 10 sites that you can easily log into and play around with, via OpenID:

(todo - Jour de fête, Sake Bar (warehouse of Sake recipes), Irksome (irc log), Open Comic Book Database, PubBud, relocatr and Simplebucket)

Note: if your site is using OpenID but my script didn’t pick it, let me know below and I’ll add it.

Having suggested that OpenID is the answer to the 146 signups that are required for 146 applications, I actually think I’d be even cooler for RailsRumble (or any other competition) to have a single-signon mechanism, that once you signup, it tells all 146 apps to create you an account and log you in. THAT would be useful.

There are 5 sessions on at 11:35am on Tuesday the 18th of September, 2007, at Rails Conf Europe.

If you are unlucky enough to be one of those speakers, then I have pity for you.

I should know, I’m one of them, and I have pity for me.

So, I thought I should give a completely unbiased opinion about which of the five sessions you should attend, and which you should avoid like the plague.

Rails Full Text Search with Ferret

By Jens Krämer.

Jens is a German, so this conference is a home game for him. The room will be filled with local Germans all wearing their home strip, and will all be chanting and cheering in German throughout. I watched World Cup 2006 on the telly - that’s what they did then, and Jens’ talk will be no different I’m sure. You can’t learn anything with other people chanting and carrying on like its a football/soccer match.

Screenscraping as a Tool for Changing the (Legacy) World

By Jesper Rønn-Jensen and Mads Buus Westmark.

Jesper and Mads are Danes, from Denmark. A small European country who’s royal crown price recently married an Australian girl. Her father, Dr Donaldson, was my Calculus lecture in 2nd year university. He yelled at me once for talking in class. Whilst not directly Jesper and Mads’ fault, its something to keep in mind.

ActiveRecord and Service Data Objects: Adding New Data Models Beneath Your Rails Apps

By Doug Tidwell from IBM.

IBM is a large country off the coast of all tax-paying countries. Most likely in the Pacific Ocean, as its probably big enough for IBM. Whilst the session talk description is enterprise gobble-de-gook, it probably would be interesting, but I’ll summarise it for you: write specs for your underlying data layer and how they map to the #find and #save methods of ActiveRecord, and bob’s yer uncle.

3rd Partying Issues and Solutions

By Ryan Garver, ELC “Diamond Sponsor” Technologies.

There are three diamond sponsors for RailsConf - ThoughtWorks, Sun Microsystems and ELC. Diamond sponsors are a good thing. Sponsoring things is a good thing. I hope Dr Nic Academy will sponsor things in the future. I’ll talk to the owner about it.

Meta-Magic in Rails: Become a Master Magician

By Dr Nic Williams.

Dr Nic is Australian, so he has a funny slang accent that can be quite awkward to understand, especially when he starts talking very fast. Australia was cheated in World Cup 2006 by Italy who, with 10 seconds left in their round 2 map, dived in the box, got a penalty kick, scored, won the game and went on to win the World Cup. So, logically, if Australia hadn’t been cheated, we’d have won the World Cup instead.

Thusly reenacted here on YouTube:

Summary

11.35am on Tuesday might be a good time to grab a coffee, and talk to Chad Fowler about the shame of putting 5 awesome speakers on at the same time as each other.