ZenLinux Blog

If you’ve ever considered becoming a merbivore, tonight’s NHRuby.org meeting will help get you started. Merb, of course, is the upcoming Ruby-based web framework that in many ways is an iteration on Rails itself – more modular, faster, and extremely flexible. Jeremy Durham will be talking about the pros and cons of Merb, and discuss a project of his where he migrated a web application from Rails to Merb. Meeting location and details are on the NHRuby wiki.

The RailsConf 2008 presentation schedule has been posted. I’m really looking forward to it as my first RailsConf.

Also, the April NH Ruby and Rails User Group meeting will consist of a live hacking/help session, so bring any code you’ve having issues with or would like a code review on and we’ll work on it during the meeting. Directions and details on the wiki.

Do you need your monthly dose of hanging out with Ruby and Rails developers and learning cool stuff? Well lucky for you, the next NHRuby.org meeting is in just a couple of days. Nick and I will be giving “lightning talks” on a number of topics. One of mine will be on writing an AIM bot to send you instant messages from your web application. Meeting details and directions can be found on the wiki.

NetBeans 6.0 final (my Ruby/Rails/C/C++ IDE of choice) was released a couple of days ago. Pat Eyler posted on his blog an interview with Tor Norbye, which outlines many of the spiffy features of NetBeans 6 and some of the challenges in writing IDE tools for a dynamic language such as Ruby.

Because it’s an enjoyable language to program in. Thank you, Giles, for reminding us about the importance of this factor.

Don’t forget, the next meeting of the NH Ruby and Rails User Group is coming early this month. We’ll be meeting on Monday, November 12. Guest speaker and author David Berube will be discussing reporting using Ruport and various other tools. He knows a bit about this topic since he has a book forthcoming on the subject in early 2008.

I’ll also spend a few minutes discussing how to keep your mongrel processes under the watchful eye of monit. This is an outstanding utility that has many uses in systems administration.

Prepare for an electrifying event this coming Tuesday, as the NHRuby.org user group will be holding a series of Lightning Talks at the Portsmouth Public Library. I’ll be giving a demo of ProgpressPuppy, a Rails-based successor to my previous Thought2Action task manager. ProgressPuppy is still a scrappy side project that I haven’t done much on, but that makes it a perfect example to demonstrate how to do various things in Ruby on Rails.

For more details, see the NHRuby.org wiki.

Attention local Rubyists! The third meeting of the NHRuby.org user group is coming up soon. This month we’ll have Brian DeLacey speaking about using crypto algorithms in your Ruby code. He’ll be demonstrating the Crypt library, which is written entirely in Ruby.

The objective of this meeting is two-fold: to address some interesting Ruby techniques and also walk through the basic structure and operations of a Rails application. We’ll have some Ruby and Rails books to raffle off at the end of the meeting – special thanks to O’Reilly Media.

Brian is an excellent speaker and has been making the rounds giving talks at many user groups in the Boston area. Mark your calendars, you won’t want to miss this presentation!

WHEN: Tuesday, March 20, 2007. 7-9 PM.
WHERE: Portsmouth Public Library, Hilton Garden Inn Meeting Room (2nd floor), Portsmouth, NH.

For more details, including a map of the meeting location, see our upcoming meetings page on the wiki.