ZenLinux Blog

Thanks to everyone who came out for the NH Ruby and Rails User Group meeting last night. I think the three-topic format worked really well, and offered something for everyone.

As promised, I have added a page to our wiki with a command-by-command reference for setting up your Linode VPS quickly for the Rails Rumble programming competition. I hope it’s useful for people looking to spend more time during the Rumble working on your app rather than configuring your deployment server.

A huge congratulations are in order to Nick Plante for publishing his first book, Practical Rails Plugins. Nick is a local buddy and fellow co-chair of the NH Ruby and Rails User Group, and I’ve followed the tireless effort he’s put into this book over the last several months. Nick knows his stuff, and I can vouch for the effort and thoughtfulness he put into making this book a readable and practical resource for Rails developers.

Every so often I take a break from Instant Messaging (IM) to see how it impacts my productivity and concentration. This week I have chosen to take one of these “IM fasts.” Please use email to contact me.

Having completed my first century last September, I made it my goal for 2008 to ride two centuries this year. I was hoping to do one in June, but that never worked out. Fortunately, during the last Saturday in July the weather in NH was expected to be clear of thunderstorms and with reasonably low humidity, so I jumped at the opportunity to get my first century of 2008 in.

The thought of doing a solo century was pretty daunting to me, so I managed to set up the route in such a way that a middle leg of the ride could be done as a metric century (100km/62mi). Chris decided to join me, and thus here is a tale of two centuries: my imperial and Chris’ (first ever) metric.

I began the ride at 6 AM and completed about 25 miles in the early morning.

At one point I saw group of something crossing the road. It turned out to be a family of wild turkeys.

As I returned to the starting point, Chris was right on time and we promptly embarked on a journey out to the Nubble Lighthouse on the Maine seacoast.

The ride out the Maine seacoast was peaceful while we remained on back roads. Finally, we arrived at our destination: Nubble Light in York, ME.

When we returned to our starting point, Chris celebrated his new milestone, but I still had another 10 miles to go to round out my imperial century. Those 10 miles were pretty agonizing, but I completed them (with more stops that I’d care to admit). I ended up completing the ride in 7h11m on the bike. It was more than a half-hour slower than my first century (6:35), but as far as I’m concerned, just completing a century is a feat in itself, whether it takes 5 hours or 10.

For my second century, I will be riding in the Tri-State Seacoast Century again. I’m really looking forward to it.

Someone had to do it – a vim plugin for twitter. Now you can send your tweets in between config file edits or code checkins. I’m gonna have to try this one out.

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.

If you haven’t heard the news, the release of Firefox 3 is happening at 1 PM Eastern Time today, just minutes from when I’m writing this post. I’m really looking forward to this release because of its speed and memory management improvements. It’s also likely to be a key component of an embedded product I’m developing at work, so I’m thrilled they are releasing it this early – earlier rumors were that it wouldn’t be out until the late summer.

Make sure you download the release within the first 24 hours to help Mozilla set a new world record!

I’m really looking forward to this month’s NHRuby meeting, which will include an overview of Google’s new App Engine environment. Brian DeLacey will be giving this presentation, and will start things off with an intro to Python for Ruby developers. Brian also tells me that he’ll have some free books to offer as door prizes, courtesy of O’Reilly’s user group program. Don’t miss out.