Last year's
ICFP Contest was so intense, I just had to agree to do it again. So from June 18th to 25th, I'll be in Oklahoma City, OK with
James Edward Gray II and his cronies. Should be a good time, though I expect it to be once again hotter than Satan's ballsack, and the contest (which runs the 20th-22nd) to be absolutely impossible.
If there are any Ruby folks or others who feel like driving to OKC that week, I'd be happy to see you.
In the unlikely event that any of you are working for the Associated Press, please stop talking about these whales that are taking an extremely long time to find their way back to sea. Yes, it's sad that they are in danger, and maybe the first couple days deserved coverage. But I'm tired of the news articles that say "The whales have moved 45 feet". No one cares, and I think these whales are probably embarrassed enough as it is. Let me know if they die, or when they get back to sea. In the mean time, stop talking about them, please.
Yesterday, I asked 24 people a simple question: "What are two things you're happy about?". I tried to catch them with the question by surprise, and didn't tell them what it was for until after they answered. I originally planned to ask 50 people, but realized that this was quite time consuming and wanted to get the answers out sooner than later.
I can't tell you how rewarding this little project was. Because of it, I spent nearly my whole day yesterday talking to folks about things I never expected I would, or at least saying hello to old friends who I've lost touch with.
I wonder what would happen if everyone I asked this question even asked 5 people to do the same, how much of a good effect it would have on things. We're conditioned complainers, and it seems like just thinking about a couple things that make you happy instantly make you a little more at ease.
Buried in the below are two of my things. I wonder if you can find them. :)
- rspec seems to be working on rubinius
- i had a bad headache that is now gone
- drawing
- I just finished a fine cup of coffee
- the light coming from the skylight
- Memorial Day
- i’ll be happy when you leave me alone
- i have time to hack this weekend
- you
- gorgeous weather
- it’s not raining in indianapolis
- God
- I’m happy Insun is with us.
- Ruby
- i make enough money to go on exotic vacations
- beach sand
- my strange mind is finally useful for something
- friends and family
- Vinny
- I’m taking seriously the study of the Dharma.
- the warm days, birds in the trees, and sunshine
- travelling
- my wife
- I’m joining an ultimate league
- my life
- the foot massage I’m giving myself
- I’m madly in love with my wife. We just celebrated our 11th anniversary and it has just been a wonderful time to be together.
- my kids
- my wife
- my adult life is infinitely better than my childhood
- I’m currently experiencing a nice synergy between my job, hobbies, and friends that is making it easy to enjoy what I do everyday.
- I’ve made lots of good friends over the last year or two
- my kids, they are my greatest happiness
- the temperature is really nice
- good health
- I’m happy we’ve[my husband and I have] been together 11 years.
- friends
- programming
- delicious food that’s good for me, too
- books that I’ve read
- languages
- I might be going back to school
- my job
- my son is learning how to work for things that are important to him
- I’m writing open source software
- my sister got remarried
- it’s a sunny day
- my daughter has her head on straight
- bike riding
- I’m graduating
I might try this project with 25 strangers, and see what the difference is. Maybe you'll see that in a couple weeks. For now, thank you to those who humored me and answered this question honestly.
Zed Shaw and I regularly break into each other's computers and copy configurations from each other (At least, that's how I ensure our obscure choices stay synchronized).
On a serious note though, he and I have near identical tastes in
'good software' so his suggestion to try out the
fish shell was spot on.
Yeah, folks have tried to pimp
zsh on me and I gave it five minutes without falling in love (granted I didn't try hard at all), but fish was different. In fish, I typed help and it fired up a page in Firefox with some pretty dang comprehensive documentation.
Here are a random smattering of favorite features so far :
- Syntax coloring. Red means bad command, green means good
- Tab completion that actually works. ssh sa[tab]@ru[tab] is all I need to fire up a session to rubyreports.org
- Tab completion that really rocks. rm -R[tab] gives me a contextual listing of all the extra flags I could be using and what they're used for. Screw searching manpages!
- No more typing cd, just type and tab complete directories as needed
- No need for ~/, it always knows your home dir's layout.
- Search history by typing part of a command, and hit the up arrow. It'll highly the part of the command you typed.
- nice clean config file syntax
Zed also reminded me that
ArchLinux Duke is out, after a quick
sudo pacman -Syu, I'm happily rocking with an improved system, especially liking the more sensible pacman output, and seemingly better mirror handling.
Get on with the new shell hotness. Bash is so 1987.
Because timezones suck...
Some folks thought this was funny, others depressing. Might as well post it here
Love is a basketball shoe.A nice, clean, expensive, endorsed by God-Athlete
strap of leatherand rubber.The sole becomes a soul.
The laces entwined around the rhythm of my heart.A whisper in my ear says:
"Gotta be like Mike".Oh sweet, merciful, wonderful shoe.
I like to pump you up.Nike Air, true bliss.
The
MountainWest RubyConf videos are done, including my talk on
Pragmatic Community Driven Development in Ruby.
This is the first time I've seen a recording of me talking. Aside from saying "umm" too much, I think this was one of my better talks.
Feedback is welcome here, and if you're a public speaker and have any tricks to avoid the overuse of "umm...", I'd be interested in hearing about it. It'd also be great to get the discussion going again about community driven development.
Errata / Notes:
- You might notice the slides are not synced with when I actually advance them. My laptop didn't give a good video feed, so Confreaks had to manually sync them. They did as best as they could, but sadly that'll cause you to miss a little of the Takahashi splendor. It's a shame, because this talk was one where I got the timings pretty good.
- The first part where I mention Boston RUG and 25 minutes was not about talk length, it was about 'getting my computer to work with the projector' time, which was probably 5+ minute at MWRC.
- When I asked who was involved with free software projects, better than half the room raised their hands
- The phantom question which got me talking about meta-docs was because James Britt said that he found you need to make it extremely easy for people to contribute to projects, and cited some examples from ruby-doc.org
- Ruport Mailing List was originally established in December 2005, not 2006
- The GPL/MIT comparison I quoted was from Eleanor McHugh
NOTE: If you only watch one other talk from MWRC, make it Michael Hewner's
RubyUSB. It was hilarious!
