Tonight I went to the first Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group (NOVARUG). Here are my semi-distilled notes and commentary on the evening:
camelCase instead of underscores
for method names in Alph because the methods are actually
RMI calls from Ruby to ActionScript. He noted that
underscores are generally the Ruby way, and that people outside
the US (especially Japanese people) have a lot of trouble reading
camelCase code because they don't recognize the case and, by
extension, can't distinguish the words. If you think about it, it
makes sense. Can you tell two similar Kanji glyphs apart?60.days and 24.hours.
He mentioned that that's an extension to Integer, but I hope he
misspoke, because that makes a whole lot more sense as an extension to
Numeric, because that way it gets picked up by Bignum, Fixnum,
and Float for free..app (they'd need
to statically compile stuff to make it truly portable).And that's all I've got for Rich Kilmer's presentation. Afterwards he gave the group an opportunity to talk about their projects. I didn't catch anyones' names, and Google failed me, so I couldn't find references to these projects online.
Someone else (again, no name, although he made a passing reference to the DC XP users group) talked briefly about a Rails-based social networking tool:
Finally, one person to the right of me (hiding in the back, along with all the other real introverts. Either that or he was late like me :D) mentioned an abstract Rails authentication plugin he was working on. No name, and no project name (he didn't provide either), so that's the most information I can give you.
After that, there was some miscellaneous conversation about future NOVARUG, specifically times and frequency. It sounds like they're going to be monthly, on Thursday evenings (because otherwise it conflicts with my poker night!), and start at 7:00 (or 6:30 if you want the free pizza). There was one comment about starting earlier, but the general consensus seems to be that 7:00 is just fine; any earlier and traffic becomes a serious problem. Personally, I'm hoping we can find a venue that's closer to the Fairfax area, mainly because I'm selfish and lazy, but also because that would make NOVARUG more DC and Maryland accessible. Also, the Metro doesn't run out to Reston, which means people have to drive or carpool.
(Of course, when I say "drive", I mean "sitting in stopped traffic on 495 for 30 minutes, staring at the silhouette mudflaps on the semi in front of you and hoping the drivers on both sides don't notice you picking the gunk out of your eyes or hear you jamming out to Madonna").
There was some talk about setting up a NOVARUG mailing list.
Apparently there are already a couple Yahoo groups, but both
are essentially dead, and the owner of one is MIA. Rich and
Tom are going to set something up on the novarug.org domain, and
provide the details on the NOVARUG blog.
Rich mentioned something about Paul Graham speaking at the upcoming RailsConf in Chicago. Personally, I have no real interest in Rails — I think it's a great, I just don't use it personally — so I can't justify the cost of the conference. I like Paul Graham's writing (although I'm only aware of one Ruby reference), so I'd love to hear him speak. Hopefully that'll go better than Brad Cox at RubyConf 2004 (which was actually really interesting, until he tried to talk about his new proprietary DRM system...to an all open source crowd).
Afterwards, a couple of 3-5 person groups coalesced and talked for about 30 minutes. I eavesdropped in on the group around Rich Kilmer and even offered a bit of commentary. Rich Kilmer said Fox is ugly on some platforms, and I said "no, Fox is ugly on every platform" (it is. I've seen stuff I've written on themed XP systems, and it basically looks like a Tk-based app does on every platform: teeth-gnashingly ugly). RubyGems and RubyForge both came up a couple of times in conversation, so I'll mention them here: RubyGems and RubyForge. And don't forget this amusing IRC quote about RubyGems.
On the way out I got a chance to talk to Tom Copeland, who I haven't
seen since he made me feel like a celebrity by recognizing me as "the
Pablotron guy!" at Baja Fresh. He liked the excessively
verbose description of my XHTML patch on ruby-core,
and also noticed how it's difficult to get patches through on
ruby-core. I realize that's mainly a language/cultural barrier and
not any sort of malice,, but it's still frustrating to be on the short
side of the stick. Rich suggested I send RDoc patches directly
to Dave Thomas (those particular patches have already been silently
accepted into 1.9, but not the XHTML ones).
That's it for my notes. You know the drill: let me know if you see any gratuitous errors. I'll definitely be at the next schindig; maybe I'll even have something to present!
Update: The colorful language about Fox isn't meant to downplay the usefulness of the library; I think the API is really straightforward, and that it looks and feels nicer than Tk and a slew of other non-native widget libraries. That said, non-native widget toolkits don't mimic the look and feel of the native system, and that almost always looks terrible to me. That goes for Mozilla under, well, pretty much everything, Gimp and Gaim in Windows and, of course, Fox. Firefox seems to look okay to me for some reason, except under MacOS. Go figure. Anyway, my comment above was intended less as an to insult the Fox developers, and more as a light-hearted jab from someone at 10,000 feet who hasn't taken the time and effort required to design, create, and maintain a cross-platform widget toolkit.
Even Later Update (2006-02-27): The "anonymous guy talking about an authorization plugin" was Bill Katz, and his Rails authorization plugin is available here.