I just had the weirdest experience. I'm sitting in the speaker's lounge at the conference. I happened to glance at the iBook next to me and saw the blog entry that I just wrote up on the screen.
That doesn't happen every day.
(Let's see if it happens again when I post this entry.)
I've been deleting more and more spam comments from my blog recently. I'm this close to hacking MT to call SpamAssassin before allowing a comment to actually post.
Am I the first? Has someone else already done the work? Google hasn't located anything relevant for me. And I figure it'll be a 5-10 minute hack once I get back into the MT codebase again.
Phil is talking about Ruby. Again, semi-realtime notes on Ruby.
Ruby is roughly 10 years old now. Matz liked Perl's text processing but didn't think that Python was OO enough. It's more of a Perl/SmallTalk blend. Classes, methods, objects, exceptions, message passing, iterators, closures, garbage collection, etc. And it's multi-platform, of course.
Back in 2000, Phil used a lot of Perl but found OO Perl tedious.
Why learn Ruby? It has a similar syntax but is different enough in some places to make you think differently. Strings, hashes, arrays, etc. Ruby can use any object as a key to a hash. Regexes, here-docs, etc.
@ means instance variable inside a class, not an array. The $ denotes global scope variable. @@ denotes a class variable. Semi-colons are optional at the end of line. Parens are optional in method calls.
False and nil are false. But 0 and '0' are true. Everything is an object.
Smaller community for Ruby, but that's okay.
Lots of interesting on-screen examples that I can't reproduce easily, so I'll just watch.
Bruce is discussing various replication schemes for PostgreSQL database servers. These are nearly real-time notes, so they're a bit sketchy.
Each use has slightly different requirements. Fast or slow line, on-line 24/7 or only part time, etc.
Given a particular usage, which method do you use?
Talk is half done, but I'm off to a Ruby talk now...